During a lengthy interview with Saudi Arabian foreign minister Adel Al-Jubeir about the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, Fox News anchor Bret Baier asked if Saudi King Salman “is standing behind the crown prince on all of this?” Surprisingly, Al-Jubeir dodged the question.
Baier did a decent job and asked some tough questions in this interview – which reinforces my former suspicion that there is a directive from higher up (I still think Murdoch) to press this issue. It was just as unlikely that Baier would grill a Saudi official on his own initiative as it was that the Fox & Friends sycophants challenged Donald Trump on the matter on their own.
Al-Jubeir repeatedly insisted that the Saudis are “determined to find out all the facts” and “determined to punish those responsible” for Khashoggi’s death. “There obviously was a tremendous mistake made and what compounded the mistake was the attempt to try to cover up,” Al-Jubeir said.
“You understand the skepticism that a 60-year old columnist, writer, is going to resist a 15-member security team and that one of the members of the team was an autopsy specialist,” Baier said bluntly. “How do you explain all of that?”
Al-Jubeir said he didn't think “all 15 members” were there at the time. He also insisted that it was a rogue operation by people not closely tied to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
That rhetoric was to be expected. But Al-Jubeir’s remark about the king may have signaled something significant:
BAIER: Definitively, King Salman is standing behind the crown prince on all of this?
[long pause]
AL-JUBEIR: [The king] is determined to see this investigation through, determined to ascertain the facts, determined to hold those responsible accountable and determined to … prevent something like this from ever happening again.
That is not a message that King Salman is definitively standing firmly behind the crown prince.
Watch the October 21, 2018 interview below.
If the demented king’s loyalists accept that the fairy stories have no hope of being accepted and believe they can prevail, I’d expect bin Salman’s head to be separated from his shoulders within weeks. But does the young man believe he has the army and security officers behind him? If he does, will he try to usurp his father? Will it all descend into a full scale civil war? Would Russia and the Trump regime take opposing sides?
Oh, what a tangled web they wove when the arrogant, oil-hungry powers of the early 20th Century decided to play god with the people and the map of the Middle East…