The Wall Street Journal is reporting that a human rights commission that reports to King Salman of Saudi Arabia has interviewed prominent women’s rights activists being held in prisons by the Saudi government and has collected accusations of various forms of torture being practiced by Saudi officials against them. These include electrocution, waterboarding, and threats of rape and death.
A top aide to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Saud al-Qahtani, allegedly oversaw some aspects of the torture and threatened at least one jailed woman with rape and death, according to testimony before the commission, those officials and others said.
The horrific details of journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s torture and political murder are the grim realities of the darkest aspects of authoritarian governments. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (often referred to as MBS) has been chummy with the Trump/Kushner clan, and the latter’s insistence on overlooking the most obvious of violations of global decency, without even making a show of censure, is beyond disturbing. So much so that even Republican senators felt the need to publicly condemn the Khashoggi murder. The reasons for this silence on the part of the Trumps may include the big money and protections that Kushner and Trump are suspected to be enjoying by way of MBS.
Meanwhile, the Saudi government has officially denied the charges brought by the Saudi human rights commission—a commission created in 2005 by King Abdullah—calling the allegations “wild claims.”
The commission’s investigators began interviewing some of the kingdom’s most prominent women’s rights activists over the past month at Jeddah’s Dabhan prison, including Loujain al-Hathloul, a 29-year-old who was a leading figure in a grass-roots campaign to have the driving ban lifted.
According to the commission, which spoke with officials and others aware of Ms. Hathloul’s detention, she received some of the most severe treatment while in custody. This included threats of rape and murder, as well as actual waterboarding. According to the WSJ, a Saudi official explained that since the Saudi government has already come out publicly in denial of these allegations, any reformation or accountability is very unlikely to happen.
The fact is, the United States must frequently maintain reasonable relationships with awful leaders around the world. But that is a two-way street, and when the U.S. isn’t willing to publicly shame and pressure those governments—governments that want and need the United States’s friendship—to make better decisions concerning human rights, we all fail.