Attention to the Unseen

Rula Jebreal writes: Jamal Khashoggi told me he feared for his life. I was reporting a cover story on Saudi Arabia for Newsweek and we were speaking confidentially: That’s one reason I haven’t allowed this transcript to be published until now. The other reason is I hoped against hope that he was still alive. Despite ample signs of the extreme brutality of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and his regime, I could never have imagined we would so soon be…

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I have long been troubled by the nature of the relationship between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia. It's time for us to thoroughly reevaluate that relationship. pic.twitter.com/IICYFQXVXq — Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) October 18, 2018

Susan Glasser writes: In an era when Trump’s tweets and constant commentary produce news cycles of shorter and shorter duration, the Khashoggi affair may turn out to be the longest-running Washington plotline of this midterm-election season. The Times’ revelation that Trump was a decades-long tax cheat came and went. The September plea deal by Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort receded from the headlines. The national uproar over allegations of sexual misconduct by the Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh lasted…

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Reuters reports: So grave is the fallout from the disappearance of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi that King Salman has felt compelled to intervene, five sources with links to the Saudi royal family said. Last Thursday, Oct. 11, the king dispatched his most trusted aide, Prince Khaled al-Faisal, governor of Mecca, to Istanbul to try to defuse the crisis. World leaders were demanding an explanation and concern was growing in parts of the royal court that the king’s son Crown Prince…

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  Jordan Tama writes: Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi has not been seen since he entered a Saudi Arabian consulate in Turkey on Oct. 2, prompting widespread rumors that the Saudi government is behind his disappearance. A bipartisan group of 11 Democratic and 11 Republican senators sent a letter to President Trump this week, calling for an investigation and a determination of whether to impose sanctions on foreign government officials because of Khashoggi’s reported disappearance, “including with respect to the highest…

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The Washington Post reports: The Justice Department announced Friday it had charged a Russian woman who prosecutors say conspired to interfere with the 2018 U.S. election, marking the first criminal case that accuses a foreign national of interfering in the upcoming midterms. Elena Khusyaynova, 44, was charged with conspiracy to defraud the United States. Prosecutors said she managed the finances of “Project Lakhta,” a foreign influence operation they said was designed “to sow discord in the U.S. political system” by…

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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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