Attention to the Unseen

The New York Times reports: President Trump praised a Republican candidate’s assault last year on a reporter and fumed over his Democratic opponents here on Thursday night in a freewheeling rally meant to mobilize his base’s support in the coming midterm elections. In urging the crowd to vote for Representative Greg Gianforte, who is running for re-election and who was sentenced to anger management classes and community service for assaulting a reporter last spring, Mr. Trump jokingly warned the crowd…

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In the last column that Jamal Khashoggi submitted to the Washington Post, he wrote: I was recently online looking at the 2018 “Freedom in the World” report published by Freedom House and came to a grave realization. There is only one country in the Arab world that has been classified as “free.” That nation is Tunisia. Jordan, Morocco and Kuwait come second, with a classification of “partly free.” The rest of the countries in the Arab world are classified as…

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Madawi al-Rasheed writes: Thanks to the actions of the impetuous Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman — from the brutal war in Yemen to picking a fight with Canada to, most recently, the apparent murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi — Saudi Arabia is at risk of becoming a pariah state. The royal court in Riyadh — including King Salman bin Abdulaziz — surely realizes that this situation cannot continue. If they are smart they will take decisive action. First, King…

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Hugh Eakin writes: In the spring of 2012, I made an extended visit to Saudi Arabia to report on the effects of the Arab Spring there. The arch-conservative oil monarchy was pursuing a robust counter-revolution, but the uprisings had brought new energy to reformers across the region. I was curious to see how Saudis themselves saw their country’s future. Among the many people I spoke with was Jamal Khashoggi, at the time an unusually well-connected journalist with an irrepressibly optimistic…

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Kevin Baron writes: The world may be just waking up to the autocratic ways of the Saudi Arabian royal family, but the Pentagon certainly is not. Pentagon leaders’ silence this week on the reported murder of a U.S.-based journalist by Saudi officials could be taken as customary and proper deference to the formal poles of American foreign policy: the White House and the State Department. But the Pentagon has long supported a U.S.-Saudi relationship that largely turned a blind eye…

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Nabeel Khoury writes: From the abuses of the male guardianship in Saudi Arabia to arrest and torture of dissenters in Egypt and the jailing of environmentalists and journalists in Iran, the Middle East is rife with human rights abuses. Nor is this something new. Authoritarian regimes in the Arab world, both monarchical and republican, since their independence from colonial powers have routinely used repressive measures to keep their opposition at bay and their broader population quiescent. Saddam Hussein notoriously put…

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Dexter Filkins writes: It seems nearly certain now that Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi journalist, died a slow and agonizing death, the kind that none of us could dare imagine for ourselves. It seems equally clear that Khashoggi, a Virginia resident and a columnist for the Washington Post, was murdered, probably on orders of the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman. The latest evidence pointing to M.B.S.’s direct involvement is the identities of members of the team sent to Istanbul to…

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Douglas Bloomfield writes: Donald Trump has Jamal Khashoggi’s blood on his hands. It’s not just his initial indifference to the US-based Saudi journalist’s disappearance in Istanbul, nor the president’s indifference toward human rights abuses, not his obsequiousness toward the Saudis, nor a transactional approach to foreign policy that puts the “deal” ahead of any principle. And it’s not just because the Saudi king “vehemently” denied any role in the reporter’s disappearance or because the president offered him a possible “excuse,”…

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Still can’t believe this picture is *after* he ordered a journalist be chopped up. pic.twitter.com/wmaJvUudmT — Arash Karami (@thekarami) October 16, 2018 The New York Times reports: Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has cast himself as a tough, straight-talking former Army tank commander with the moral clarity necessary to confront the world’s bad guys. But on his quick trip to Saudi Arabia, where he sat smiling with royal leaders suspected of involvement in the disappearance of a dissident Saudi journalist,…

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The New York Times reports: One of the suspects identified by Turkey in the disappearance of the Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi was a frequent companion of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman — seen disembarking from airplanes with him in Paris and Madrid and photographed standing guard during his visits this year to Houston, Boston and the United Nations. Three others are linked by witnesses and other records to the Saudi crown prince’s security detail. A fifth is a forensic doctor…

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Shireen Al-Adeimi writes: Saudi Arabia has been a close U.S. ally for decades, but during that it has engaged in numerous violations of human rights including creating what is currently the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. For over three-and-a-half years, Saudi Arabia has been waging a brutal attack on its poorest neighbor, Yemen, causing the killings of as many as 50,000 people and the silent deaths of an estimated 113,000 children who have perished from malnutrition and preventable diseases like cholera….

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