One key segment of the “60 minutes’ interview aired yesterday was President Trump’s saying, “I will get to the bottom of this, and while this may sound odd coming from me, it is especially serious because Khashoggi was a reporter.” Like Charley Brown continuously try to kick the football that Lucy would always pull away- hope lives eternal. There is a part of my child brain that wants to trust daddy, wants to trust the priest who does those things to me, who can’t accept that a “President” one with the same title as FDR and then Harry Truman, could be other than deeply decent.
The latest explanation by King Nayef bin Abdulaziz (MBA) that the murder may have been done by “rouge elements” of the Saudi regime, might have been remotely plausible if he hadn’t affirmed previously that Khashoggi had left the embassy. MDA runs that embassy, and knows exactly what happened. His first first explanation, that he did not say might have occurred but that it did happen, refutes the current one. That the President of the United States accepts what is a patently absurd, explanation for murder, makes this country complicit in this crime. As of now there is no possible alternative to the conclusion that a legal resident of the United States, and a Journalist, was assassinated by the ruler of Saudi Arabia.
This is a Casus Belli — a term going back to it’s ancient Roman origins, meaning a cause for war. We need not actually go to war with Saudi Arabia, but at the very least must sever diplomatic relations and cancel any mercantile contacts. We must bring this to the United Nations and impose sanctions.
In the absence of such a diplomatic response the United States of America will be complicit to what was more than a random murder, more than excusing internal oppression, but a war on one of the basic principle that define the rule of law.
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Ah, wake up Al.
Our country has elected a leader who has avowed having no interest in the world, in the fate of any other country that his own, the one that allowed him to loot those who were weaker than he. He promised to allow everyone in this country to prosper by ridiculing those who looked beyond our borders, who gave a damn for others. It is this simplistic isolationist mentality, his condemning all international bodies, that actually leaves nothing else but to ally with those with the same mentality.
“America First” means that if MBA, the autocrat of Saudi Arabia can get away with this, with Trump’s help, then we can say that a world of meaning of universal principle that we paid dearly for, all of the millions of dead and maimed over the long war of 1915 to 1945 — are to be trashed. All this done by a two bit thug who managed to hit a sweet spot in history to capture the most powerful position in the most powerful country ever known to humanity
Do not ask for whom the bell tolls, for it tolls for us.
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Article by the fiance of Gamal Khashoggi