Sat 25 January 2020:
US Senator Ron Wyden said on Friday he will move to compel the United States intelligence chief to release information about the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi if the administration does not produce a report on the killing before the end of the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump.
Wyden was invoking the Senate’s power to unilaterally declassify intelligence material to push the Trump administration to release a report into the October 2018 killing of Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey. Such a report was due by law to have been released earlier this month, a deadline the Democratic senator said the administration had flouted.
Steven Aftergood, senior research analyst with the Federation of American Scientists’ Project on Government Secrecy, said threatening to use the authority might push the administration to find “an acceptable middle ground – an unclassified version of the assessment, a classified briefing, or something else.”
Wyden said an unclassified assessment was what he was after, predicting that the push would draw support from at least some Republicans on the committee.
“I don’t think there’s a lot of Republican support for carrying water for nondisclosure here,” he said.
The CIA has concluded that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) ordered the killing of Khashoggi, sources told Reuters weeks after his death.
Even an unclassified version of that assessment could be explosive, given close ties between the United States and Saudi Arabia and between the Trump administration and Crown Prince Mohammed, in particular.
A spokesman for the Senate Intelligence Committee declined comment. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence said in an email that its response to Congress was “in process”.
Human rights
International condemnation following the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2 2018 has not forced the kingdom to change its ways.
“There are some countries that say they believe Saudi Arabia has learnt its lesson from international pressure after the murder of Jamal Khashoggi,” said Yahya Assiri, a prominent Saudi dissident and a former member of the Royal Saudi Air Force, who runs ALQST from London.
“They are still repressing people, still arresting more human rights defenders,” he said.
In October 2018, details of Khashoggi’s murder prompted widespread revulsion and condemnation. The CIA and other foreign intelligence agencies concluded that the kingdom’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, had ordered his killing.
Since the crown prince assumed power in June 2017, President Donald Trump’s administration has strengthened its alliance with the powerful young royal, who has presented himself as a reformer eager to transform the deeply conservative society.
The crown prince has also presided over sweeping crackdowns on dissent, arresting intellectuals, clerics, women’s rights activists and members of the royal family.
Alaoudh said those arrested in the past two weeks had been active during the so-called Arab Spring in 2011. Many of them were still part of “philosophical” book clubs in Saudi Arabia, he added.
Varsha Koduvayur, a senior research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a hawkish Washington-based think tank, said reports that those arrested were people who appeared to have become less politically active signaled that “the dragnet continues to be ever widening.”
“It shows a pretty dangerous sign that there may not be any elements within the monarchy holding him back,” she said, referring to the crown prince.
Notable among those arrested is activist and blogger Fuad al-Farhan, who first started calling for reform while living in the United States, according to Assiri. In 2007, he was arrested in Saudi Arabia and was sentenced in 2014 to five years in prison but did not serve the term because he agreed to stop blogging, he added.
Alaoudh said al-Farhan had demanded the release of all arbitrary detainees in the kingdom during the Arab uprisings of 2011, but that in recent years he had become an entrepreneur and his focus had shifted from politics to business.
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