The Saudis are coming to realise there is no milutary victory possible in Yemen, while MBS remains now bogged down in his own murderus incompetence over the Khashoggi assassination, not nlamed on bin Salman even by the CIA (for their own vile reasons).
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RAMIN MAZAHERI—Both Shim and Ben Barka combine to disprove many unstated claims of the West: that they care about all journalists equally, that they care about Western journalists regardless of their political persuasion, that their presses are free, and that their leadership respects a free press more than in other nations.
Ben Barka was the son of a policeman and a math teacher before he got involved in politics. Serena Shim had chosen a career in journalism, but hardly a ladder-climbing one – working for Iranian government media would only land you a job in a top Western media if you then turned around and denounced Iran.
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DAVID PEAR—In a Houthi-led uprising the people of Yemen forced Hadi out of office. Hadi resigned as president and then fled from the capital city of Sana’a and went to the southern port city of Aden. In Aden Hadi rescinded his resignation and tried to reconstitute his moribund government. When that failed, he fled to Riyad, Saudi Arabia.
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PAUL JAY—It was reported in the U.K. newspaper the Express that the British intelligence service MI6 had known about the planned attack on Khashoggi in the Saudi embassy in Turkey, and pleaded, begged, according to the headline in the Express, begged the Saudi royals not to go ahead with this. There’s apparently in that report no direct link in British intelligence to Mohammed bin Salman, MBS, the Crown Prince. But clearly senior levels of the royal family, as it’s reported. Of course, it was earlier reported that American intelligence also knew about a planned attempt to kidnap, to interrogate Khashoggi, that turned into a killing. In fact, in the British report it specifically mentions that the British intelligence heard the Saudis planning a Plan B, which had to do with something more than just an abduction if it didn’t go well, which suggested a plan for a murder.
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WHITNEY WEBB—This is because the real reason the knives have come out for MBS is not a single extrajudicial killing – a practice the Saudis have long used with impunity – but instead the fact that, in the six weeks prior to Khashoggi’s sordid fate, MBS not only managed to anger the entire U.S. military-industrial complex, he also enraged the world’s most powerful financial institutions, including Goldman Sachs and CitiGroup.
