Without hard data released to the public we should not take the claim at face value.
The intelligence agencies have a lot of credibility to earn back after the Snowden revelations. No claims should be trusted without conclusive source material.
The question is, why is the CIA trying to sway public opinion about this? Why do we tolerate the CIA or FBI being PR agencies for selectively leaked information? And why do we assume that their actions are in the national interest when it is not defined beyond platitudes about freedom.
The CIA has been shady far before the Snowden revelations, you can find plenty through the Freedom Of Information act.
>And why do we assume that their actions are in the national interest when it is not defined beyond platitudes about freedom.
Are you saying supporting SA is in our national interest? I don’t need the CIA to release info about SA for me not to support them. I’m not going to change my stance because of some possible CIA motive.
>Are you saying supporting SA is in our national interest
Officially supporting Saudi Arabia has been the US position since Nixon was president for the purposes of lowering oil prices and assisting Israel. Supporting Saudi Arabia is undeniably in the national interest if you ask the people in this country who have been amassing power since that time. National interest and human rights are separate priorities.
Nicely put comment. If the goal is oil prices, the options include full annexation of Saudi, supporting a favored group of Saudi elites/royals, and many other options. Each has its humanitarian ups and downs.
It may be the case that national interest sometimes requires making humanitarian trade-offs, and there is nothing wrong with using the consent mechanisms of democracy to find a path for US policy amid those trade offs.
But I am certain that creating a pretense that US actions are driven only by humanitarian concerns and framing the larger policy issues to the public as over-simplified good vs evil is extremely dishonest, and should not be funded by taxpayer dollars.
It seems that much as the tooth fairy is practice for religion, religion is practice for politics.
> Are you saying supporting SA is in our national interest?
Not at all. But rather than focusing on something concrete (and falsifiable) like national interest, our leaders and officials moralize and stoke righteous indignation.
> Are you saying supporting SA is in our national interest?
This is "if you're not with us, you're against us". It was a bad argument then and it's a bad argument now. Can we try to keep such short sighted reasoning off of HN?
The CIA has been a traitorous organ of nefarious and evil deeds for decades. But it has also successfully duped generations of Americans into believing it is acting in their best interests - such is the nature of the dire evil possible when you've got the ability to keep anything you want, a secret.
What we need is for the American public to rein in their military-industrial-pharmaceutical masters. But, they can't really do that, for as long as regimes such as Saudi Arabia have bought their country out from under them.
> Are you saying supporting SA is in our national interest?
I’m not who you’re replying to, but yes it absolutely is. We don’t support SA because we secretly like mean people. We have a vested interest in keeping oil flowing.
Was interfering in the most recent political turmoils in Egypt in our national interest? When you look at how much oil moves through the Suez Canal, absolutely.
Stabilizing access to oil is in our own selfish national interest (we need oil) and in our global interest of stabilizing the world. When countries don’t have access to the natural resources they need, they tend to invade other countries to get them. We want to avoid that.
Considering the above, I really wish politicians in the US would frame clean energy as a national security issue. We are far less likely to be bumbling around in the Middle East if we don’t need their natural resources. Would we still sell hundreds of billions of dollars in arms to theocratic authoritarian nut jobs? Maybe. At the very least we should chip away at the reasons we have for doing so.
While I would characterize the word “stability” in this context as newspeak meaning “destabilize in our favor” the gist is true.
Yet everything the US does must be framed as some kind of sacrifice for some group’s freedoms, its women, children, etc.
I don’t know what would constitute a morally defensible national interest. That is not an easy question. But at least it is an honest question.
Honesty is not the goal however when there is a need to gain consent of the masses to do violence against the innocent whose lives are deemed worthless by our national interest.
the public opinion doesn't need to be swayed on this and it's unlikely that the cia would ever release things that would threaten their process of getting such things.
there's a difference between healthy skepticism of intelligence agencies and a grasping at straws to cast doubt on anything they do.
Public opinion about MBS was quite favorable a few short months ago, and it is this story alone that threatens it.
So those who claim MBS was responsible may be right or wrong. Without a clear definition of how his potential responsibility relates to US national interest, the matter isn’t even necessarily something the CIA should worry about at all.
By skipping that step and jumping right to PR to help fuel moral indignation in Americans, the CIA is way way way out of bounds.
The agency is not supposed to be a bunch of wise elders providing moral guidance, it’s supposed to protect national security.
Quite likely most senior CIA officials have far more blood on their hands than MBS.
>In the light of Saudi Arabia's actions in Yemen, this statement is clearly false.
First, the CIA actions in Iraq make this almost certainly true. Yemen is a minor conflict in comparison. Even still, Saudi actions could not happen without the US. The blockade could not take place without US assistance, the bombs being dropped are from US manufacturing, and the raids dropping the bombs could not happen without US intelligence and air support.
The war in Yemen has been going on for years, and started during the Obama administration. I'm glad it's finally getting the bad press it deserves, but that's as likely a consequence of the press beating up on the Saudi government as a cause of it.
The CIA does not manufacture or sell weapons, and it doesn't set weapons sales policies. War profiteering American military industrial complex companies manufacture, sell, and lobby to make this possible. The allowance for the arms sales is made possible by the legislative and executive branches, so you can blame primarily POTUS and the Senate for not just the arms sales, the very definition of blood money, but also funding the military logistics the American military has been providing to Saudi Arabia for the deaths of Yemeni civilians. But the people pulling the trigger are the Saudis.
This is whataboutism. Both are horrid: Corporations in the United States that build and sell weapons with the permission of the US government, other western governments and corporations that do the same as well. Yeah, horrid.
It doesn't excuse the fact that SA and MBS are also horrible.
Not at all. To qualify I would need to be defending MBS.
On balance the US causes substantially more human suffering in the world than all other terror groups and despots combined.
It’s strange that character attacks on MBS work so well to make Americans assume that the US must be the good guy.
In the US there is a tremendous appeal to the narrative that the US is the (relative) good guy. American exceptionalism is a religion and it easily leverages the widespread white suoremecist views of Americans who already mistrust the brown folks.
So beware of reinforcing the American exceptionalism dogma when you cite “whataboutism”. It is often budled into that critique.
This sort of flamewar comment will get you banned from Hacker News regardless of how many bad things the CIA did. You've been posting like this repeatedly; please stop.
Not when it can contract that out to the Saudi government then help them cover it up. But yes, your point is well taken. It was just more convenient to have MBS murder that particular Washington Post reporter, this time. But the other "enemies of the people" are on notice that they'd better watch their mouths and asses.
There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that the US contracted out this murder to SA, or even approved it before the fact. Your post is warrantless speculation masquerading as obvious truth. This helps damage trust in your already fragile democracy. Please don't do that.
> Without a clear definition of how his potential responsibility relates to US national interest, the matter isn’t even necessarily something the CIA should worry about at all.
The free press is one of the cornerstones of US national interest; allowing our journalists to be murdered because they said something about a foreign power is a threat to that.
China currently has dozens of journalists "in jail" meaning they are most likely dead and the US media hasn't said a peep. Shouldn't they be calling for sanctions against them, rather than attack Trump for doing just that with his tariffs?
"A propaganda system will consistently portray people abused in enemy states as worthy victims, whereas those treated with equal or greater severity by its own government or clients will be unworthy"
And yet, Julian Assange is facing extradition for being a journalist (And earlier, the Trump administration was looking to extradite an American journalist to Turkey.)
The free press isn't a cornerstone of national interest - it is a sometimes useful, but often inconvenient tool.
>>By skipping that step and jumping right to PR to help fuel moral indignation in Americans, the CIA is way way way out of bounds.
What if CIA was told to do so? Apparently the SA has not paid /signed by it's deadline for a major weapons purchase. 15B I think... and oil is lower now. So CIA is to serve our interests and has the prince by the b*lls. CIA might even get their entire budget paid by this episode. Oil is under $50 a barrel now or $30+ lower
I am pretty sure Erdogan would not that outraged if the Saudis cut him a deal too.
> The intelligence agencies have a lot of credibility to earn back after the Snowden revelations
Huh? If anything the Snowden revelations showed that they'd been hoovering up even more than previously understood. Those revelations make it more credible that they were intercepting communications of ostensible US allies like the Saudis.
I don’t think there’s any question as to the quality of cia intelligence. If anything Snowden really proves us the scale of their gathering and capabilities.
> I don’t think there’s any question as to the quality of cia intelligence. If anything Snowden really proves us the scale of their gathering and capabilities.
Weren't Snowden's releases about the NSA, not the CIA?
And it's totally unrelated to RMS, who only encourages NSA and FBI agents to follow Snowden's example:
[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies, ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
Same motive your local cops have when they leak all kinds of information about this gang banger or that one to the local media in advance of him/her being charged. Increases likelihood of conviction.
Of course in this case, there would be no charges, or trials or anything of that nature, but I'd think the same principle is at work. It puts pressure on certain people when they let everyone know that they know. (Along with the not so subtle subtext reminding everyone that their information gathering reach is long, and their memory longer.)
The gathering methods are encompassing and technically adept, but that does not mean that the announcement reflects data that actually exists.
Nor does it answer the question of why the agency chose to selectively promote the claim, which is the main issue.
We know from many other examples that hard data is used to sell and add credibility to analytical opinions that are at best informed hunches. Yet we are led to believe that the data speaks for itself.
The whole thing is strange, there's definitely a lot of different factions in the US fighting behind the scenes for their own agendas, certainly not fighting for the average american.
It should be known that Khashoggi's uncle made billions as a weapons broker and helped the CIA funnel guns to Osama Bin Laden when he was fighting for the CIA as the Mujahdeen.
My inner conspiracy theorist says that the CIA is pissed that Trump shut down their gun running operation in Syria and they want to keep the middle east in chaos forever because it's good for their budget
The fact this story has been covered so much by the media because of "freedom of the press" while they completely ignore China routinely disappearing journalists tells me there's an agenda being pushed. Nothing about this story seems organic
Khashoggi was employed by the Washington Post, which is probably the second most influential newspaper in the US behind the NYT.
Were the Chinese journalists you mention also employed by a prominent American newspaper and residents of Virginia with influential friends? If not it seems very easy to see why this case has gotten more publicity.
>The question is, why is the CIA trying to sway public opinion about this?
The WSJ actually cares about this issue, and they want to stay on their good side as they're a huge help in their PR campaigns. Nothing they are releasing is really new, this release was already claimed by a Saudi aide, and their releases have happened at times where they'll easily be missed.
Here is the publicly available evidence: A bunch of Saudi intelligence agents and wetwork contractors flew into Turkey for the express purpose of murdering a political opponent of the Saudi regime, which they successfully did at the Saudi embassy. They then attempted to replace him with a body double to fool efforts to detect their crime. The crime itself was recorded on audio. Everyone knows exactly who murdered him, where, how, and why.
After doing this, they disposed of his body (which they still have not returned) and promptly lied dozens of times in a row about the circumstances of his disappearance and death. They originally pitched he had wandered out of the embassy. Then that he had disappeared unrelatedly. Then that he had died, but no one knows how. Then that it was after a fight in the embassy. Then eventually admitting that it was a targeted murder, but by rogue agents. At each step, they lied until their lies were publicly and definitively exposed, largely by the Turkish government who are understandably mad that a foreign government exploited the diplomatic easement given to embassies to murder someone on their soil.
In conversations following up on this affair, the position of the Saudi government has been simultaneously that Khashoggi was a dangerous anti-government subversive who no one should mourn because he deserved to be killed, that KSA should face no consequences and be the ones to determine what justice means, and that no one not being charged by the KSA could possibly be involved in the decision to do this.
We have two possibilities from this stage: Case 1: This was ordered by either the Crown Prince or someone near him; or Case 2: This was a wonderful act of serendipity that the Crown Prince thinks was a very good outcome, but which was independently pursued by Very Bad Men Who Will Be Executed, and surely they were acting alone.
How would we be able to tell between cases 1 and 2 (besides the fact that case 2 is completely implausible and is "Kid with Crumbs Around Mouth Claims Dog Broke In To Cookie Jar" nonsense)? Well, we'd know for sure that case 1 was true if for example we had access to the Crown Prince's private correspondence and it demonstrated that he was involved. It would be difficult to discern between the two without this. Okay, so we all agree that the next step in this investigation is someone who intercepted the Crown Prince's correspondence to confirm what it says.
Note that at this stage in my post, the United States and its intelligence community has not been mentioned and nothing said so far relies on its credibility. So, given this, would you care to make a case for Case 2? Would you care to hypothesize which institutions, globally, we might rely on to make Case 1?
The CIA and FBI suck and have agendas. Turkey sucks and has an agenda. KSA sucks and has an agenda. And yet we can do better than nihilism when it comes to adjudicating this situation.
It's interesting (and a bit disturbing) to see our public agencies embroiled in domestic and international political struggles.
Personally I have no means to determine veracity and don't have a reason to believe anyone who says anything at this juncture. Here's what I do know: there is a lot of money and power at stake and a number of interested parties who would like to sway public opinion, in the US, KSA and internationally.
I believe Trump has had some run ins with the CIA, and them giving him a black eye politically could be a motive. Trump probably has to play nice with KSA, there isn't a practical economic way around that at the moment. MBS also has made a lot of enemies in KSA, many of whom no doubt have incredible means and connections. But really no way to tell what the truth might be. Not sure it matters for me personally other than a disgusted headshake at all involved parties.
Excellent points. I agree. I think one thing that is very clear is that the CIA should not under any circumstances be acting to promote domestic PR about political events. That is out of scope and was until a few years ago illegal.
Turks and Saudis have been enemies for centuries. The Khashoggi incident occurred in Turkey but on sovereign Saudi territory (an embassy). The Turks were watching _very_ carefully and apparently had eyes both outside and inside the embassy, an obvious violation of diplomatic protocol. The event has become an opportunity for the Turks to embarrass the Saudis and attempt recapture of the leadership of the Sunni Muslim world from the Saudis.
Brilliant article. The Ottomans had an empire that lasted over 650 years, any Saudi "state" was no match for them. At one point Ottomans were a major threat to Europe, reaching and almost taking the gates of Vienna https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Vienna (Polish knights saved the day and then some!) . The Saudis must've been semi-organized nomads, no match for Ottoman armies. Once, I think the Sultan sent the ruler of Egypt, Ali Pasha, with his mercenaries and truly pwned the Saudis.*
But things change, or some think that they changed. Even today, SA army is not even a close match for the Turks, but money talks when it comes to alliances. Personally--call me a bigot--but I think it will SA decades if not generations to have a true modern army, not based on tribal loyalties and BS.
Fun Fact: Muhammad Ali Pasha gained control of Egypt in the name of the Sultan as was customary. Wiped out the Mamelukes, after inviting their leaders to a diner (killed by Ali Pasha's soldiers.) https://www.historytoday.com/richard-cavendish/mamelukes-are... He became so powerful that the Sultan made agreements with him, he was almost no vassal and his family ruled Egypt until 1952.
Now the soldiers that made Ali Pasha that great were Albanian mountaineers, that fought not to embarrass themselves and for spoils. Totally undisciplined, uneducated, headstrong and they'd no orders from anyone else but their local area chief. They'd kill a superior for an offense and all soldiers would rally toward the "killer". Eventually they became a threat to Mohamed Ali Pasha's power so he sent them to fight the Wahhabi /Saudis in early 1800's. Two birds with a stone. Here's a typical Albanian mercenary in Egypt http://photobucket.com/gallery/user/Edli82/media/bWVkaWFJZDo...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_Ali%27s_seizure_of_po...
It’s pay walled, but the text I can see gives no indication that the cia could read the text. Just that at least 11 messages were sent. Sounds like traffic analysis.
11 messages with a few hours before /after? makes sense, and let the Saudis think that we know the what the messages say. If he sent e message every 3 days normally and then sent 11 the day of the killing...
A head of state such as SA, known to buy latest tech and hacking tools, to use un-encrypted messages? I'm wondering if CIA has a way in encrypted chats and only uses that info in rare instances--and even then without confirming anything. But MBS knows what he used...
These guys are not exactly masters of tradecraft; look at the wet work team's ham-handed attempt to impersonate Khashoggi leaving the embassy. Or for that matter, pretty much any aspect of that whole operation. Smooth operators they are not.
Also, the KSA is basically a one-man dictatorship at this point. I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that the Saudi COMSEC guy is not giving MBS a stern talking-to every time he does impulsive 31-year-old dictator stuff like, for example, using unsecure messaging services to communicate with his goons while they're murdering a dissident overseas.
yeah, we often overestimate the general OPSEC awareness and measures these guys take. I mean doing this in a foreign embassy, in Turkey of all places, in the foyer? When I worked overseas our security people told us to assume everything is bugged ... they swept the SCIF everyday, and before any meeting where sensitive information is discussed. Basically, anything not in the SCIF is capable of being monitored/hacked by intelligence services.
Whoever they hire, is likely to be in touch with foreign secret services before they do the job. The fact that they have a common fixer posting on forums to buy zero days is very amateurish and shows their sorry state. USA, Russia, China, UK etc all have homegrown expert with security clearances doing that stuff.
Maybe MBS is too dumb to use open source apps like Signal, who knows?
Hillary Clinton, the secretary of state for arguably the most technically advanced country in the world used a private server to send classified information.
Assumptions like these are dangerous.
Note - do not turn this into a "but her emails" discussion.
A non technical person who has access to droves of intelligence gleaned from spying may be unaware that they have nothing but a very superficial comprehension as to what is actually going on.
I would venture to say that a great number of leaders in the west, east, developed and developing countries could not describe how a computer works. Don’t bother asking them about encryption.
There was a bank in Russia that hired a dude better known under a moniker "Pchela" to enforce use of pgp, and infosec in general.
He devised a plan under which staff is trained, tested, and punished for incompliance.
Once the whole of banks ~1200 people staff got certified, they set a deadline for enforcement after which anybody caught will be fired on spot.
The day after the deadline they spotted ~60 people in the bank sending plaintext, or replying to an unsigned email. And among them, one director level employee.
They had to fire them all, including a directress who went on trying to suing them for years.
Putting a root kit on a head of state's phone would be a great way to have your penetration discovered, so it's probably not the route they took, and TEMPEST wouldn't work on phone screens as it was a 1980's technique targeting the RF emissions of CRT displays common then (and which were fundamentally different in nature from modern solid state displays).
It’s paywalled, so I can’t see what what kind of messages they were, e.g. sms, whatsapp etc. Even though it seems stupid for someone in his position to send ordinary texts, he may not know that. Think of trump using his own phone to tweet.
Given that the target was going to the embassy to get a marriage license, I believe that MBS deliberately wanted to spread fear by disappearing a journalist.
I think MBS very much expected to be found out, but likely assumed that it would not be such a public spectacle in US media with actual implementation details.
There's a good chance this came out when it was clear that the administration was never going to allow details to be released. They kept the CIA director from briefing Congress on this assessment. At some point the pressure to correct public falsehoods builds and takes other channels.
These are the same morons who got dozens of their assets killed because they left their chat completely unsecured to the point it could be found in Google search results.
The days of G-men are over, it's a bunch of Ivy league clowns whose daddies couldn't get them a job on wall street.
Of course in this case it's just the CIA trying to sway the public. Look up Operation Mockingbird and then remember that Anderson Cooper interned with the CIA
I am glad there is a way for these things to come out and hopefully Karma catches up to this thug. It didn’t feel right that our country's leadership has set a price of $450B for our values as a nation. We are better off not taking their money than comprising our values.
Saudi royal family is deeply integrated with US and EU power structures outside of Gadaffi corrupting a bunch of politicians in EU the scale is hard to compare.
Please don't create accounts to break the site guidelines with, such as for political or national flamewar. We've banned this one and another, but continuing like this will eventually get your main account banned as well.
Defining such things is usually a misstep, because it invites people to find loopholes. But as of this moment it appears to me thus: using language aggressively to defeat an enemy rather than create connection.
I doubt CIA does official statements like this, but WSJ has their sources. So they make the statements and they don't.
No matter what, CIA must've revealed a method, like the Turks did when they claimed they had a video. But then, it's a Game of Thrones on a very important country so it may be worth it. Maybe we'll keep the oil cheaper for a few years ;)
Well, that assumes any of this is true. The press is happily repeating anything it hears from Erdogan, who has his own stake in this and who is no saint either.
I have no love for the Saudis, nor many of the other countries over there, though. I tend to view it as Game of Thrones material for a foreign state and I hate it, but figure that it's really none of our business.
Not the I have much sympathy for the Saudi, but that’s lot of fuss for one extrajudicial killing. How many drone strikes did Obama order? How many people did Putin get assassinated? Outside of a handful of tiny countries, I don’t think any head of state didn’t order some assassination one way or another in the last 2 years.
I think the opposite conclusion should be true. Make any other extrajudicial killing as transparent and visible as this one and you’ll get the same level of “fuss”
Also that the drone strikes are against "terrorists" and not "journalists" (although how to confirm this I'm not sure).
While any extra judicial killings are a very bad direction IMO, most people would agree that democracy should protect journalists but not terrorists.
Tl;Dr - supposedly if we took the people who get drone strikes to court they would be found guilty in the states anyway, a journalist wouldn't be so there killing is considered unjustified
Thank god all the terrorists wear t-shirts identifying them as such.
Also, luckily everyone in the world agrees who the terrorists are, so it's not a problem.
Furthermore, it's awesome that governments never use the terrorist label on people they just don't like.
Thought experiments:
Are the people that Kim Jong Un calls "terrorists" good guys or bad guys?
Are people that drop explosives remotely from miles away "terrorists" or "good guys?"
Why do we bother with trials in this country? Since those people would probably be found guilty, wouldn't it be better to just find them guilty from the offset? Especially when issuing lethal sentences!
This is not meant to be snarky, at least not a lot, just trying to show that things aren't this clear cut.
> Also, luckily everyone in the world agrees who the terrorists are, so it's not a problem.
Why should everyone in the world have to agree who the terrorists are? This sort of relativism is corrosive and it's not a luxury terrorists and dictators indulge in. They're clear who the bad guys are, and it's us. That's what makes them our enemy, regardless of how they happen to percieve their own interests and the langugage they use to describe them.
So you are adopting the same world view as dictators and terrorists. At least you’re not trying to justify that somehow “we” still have the moral high ground.
If you mean by "the same world view" that I believe there is a difference between right and wrong. Then yes, I entirely agree with the terrorists and dictators on that point.
I'd imagine some terrorists and dictators like beer and chocolate-covered pretzels as much as I do. If so, I agree with terrorists and dictators about that too.
But we do have a difference of opinions when it comes to deliberately blowing up children or building theocratic states, for example.
I'ts not without precedent. In the 80s a police officer was shot and killed from the Libyan Embassy in London. Escalated to GB cutting diplomatic relations, then a siege.
FWIW I don't see anything controversial in your comment.
The intelligence agencies have a lot of credibility to earn back after the Snowden revelations. No claims should be trusted without conclusive source material.
The question is, why is the CIA trying to sway public opinion about this? Why do we tolerate the CIA or FBI being PR agencies for selectively leaked information? And why do we assume that their actions are in the national interest when it is not defined beyond platitudes about freedom.