KHASHOGGI MURDER: US TO IMPOSE VISA BAN ON 76 SAUDI CITIZENS, NO SANCTIONS ON MBS

Sat 27 February 2021:

The administration of United States President Joe Biden announced a visa ban on Friday targeting 76 Saudi Arabian citizens over the 2018 killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi and have announced sanctions, but Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is not on the sanctions list.

In a statement Friday, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said “the world was horrified” by Khashoggi’s murder and announced a visa restriction policy named after the prominent Saudi journalist and dissident.

The Director of National Intelligence’s (DNI) long-sought unclassified report concluded that the Kingdom’s de facto ruler “approved” the operation in Istanbul to “capture or kill” Khashoggi.

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“We base this assessment on the Crown Prince’s control of decisionmaking in the Kingdom, the direct involvement of a key adviser and members of Muhammad bin Salman’s protective detail in the operation, and the Crown Prince’s support for using violent measures to silence dissidents abroad, including Khashoggi,” the report says, using an alternate spelling for the crown prince’s name.

“Since 2017, the Crown Prince has had absolute control of the Kingdom’s security and intelligence organizations, making it highly unlikely that Saudi officials would have carried out an operation of this nature without the Crown Prince’s authorization,” it added in an executive summary.

Khashoggi was brutally killed and likely dismembered after being lured by Saudi officials to their consulate in Istanbul, Turkey in October 2018. While Riyadh initially denied any role in his death, it later sought to pin blame on what it said was a botched rendition operation.

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“The Khashoggi Ban allows the State Department to impose visa restrictions on individuals who, acting on behalf of a foreign government, are believed to have been directly engaged in serious, extraterritorial counter-dissident activities, including those that suppress, harass, surveil, threaten or harm journalists or other persons perceived to be dissidents for their work, or who engage in such activities with respect to the families or other close associates of such persons,” Blinken said in the statement.

“As a matter of safety for all within our borders, perpetrators targeting dissidents on behalf of any foreign government should not be permitted to reach American soil,” Blinken added.

Blinken said the moves reinforce the world’s condemnation of Khashoggi’s murder and serve to “push back against governments that reach beyond their borders to threaten and attack journalists and perceived dissidents for exercising their fundamental freedoms”.

The intelligence assessment is not new. Former President Donald Trump blocked its release as he consistently sought to shield bin Salman from blame in a killing that rocked the world.

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But the Biden administration has prioritized its publication in-line with US law, despite what may be repercussions for the US-Saudi relationship.

In explaining its decision to lay blame on bin Salman, the DNI pointed to the inclusion of individuals from bin Salman’s personal protective detail, known as the Rapid Intervention Force (RIF), within the team that killed Khashoggi.

The RIF, the report says, “answers only to” bin Salman, and had a history of carrying out operations in the Kingdom and beyond its borders intended to quash dissent.

“We judge that members of the RIF would not have participated in the operation against Khashoggi without Muhammad bin Salman’s approval,” it said. “The Crown Prince viewed Khashoggi as a threat to the Kingdom and broadly supported using violent measures if necessary to silence him.”

The US Department of the Treasury has placed sanctions on the former deputy Saudi intelligence chief, Ahmed al-Asiri, and on the Saudi Royal Guard’s rapid intervention force, known as the “Tiger Squad” or Firqat el-Nemr, the department said in a statement.

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The rapid intervention force, or RIF, was singled out in the declassified US intelligence report for its role in Khashoggi’s killing. The force “exists to defend the Crown Prince, answers only to him, and had directly participated in earlier dissident suppression operations in the Kingdom and abroad”, the report said.

The 59-year-old Khashoggi was lured to the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 2, 2018, and killed by a team of operatives linked to the crown prince. They then dismembered his body. His remains have never been found.

Additionally, the US Department of State will start documenting in its annual human rights report on programmes by Saudi Arabia and other countries that monitor, harass or target dissidents and journalists.

A senior Biden administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity with the Reuters news agency, said the approach aims to create a new launching-off point for ties with the kingdom without breaking a core relationship in the Middle East. Relations have been severely strained for years by the war in Yemen and the killing inside a Saudi consulate of Khashoggi, a US resident who wrote columns for The Washington Post.

Importantly, the decisions appear designed to preserve a working relationship with the crown prince, even though US intelligence concluded that he approved the operation to capture or kill Khashoggi.

“The aim is a recalibration [in ties] — not a rupture. That’s because of the important interests that we do share,” the senior Biden administration official said.