 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. Today we have with us Prabir Purkayosa, who will be discussing with us the recent developments in the Jamal Khashoggi case. So Saudi Arabia has finally accepted that the journalist was killed in the consulate in Turkey, and the official account of how the murder happened keeps changing. And there has been immense outrage in Western media outlets in response to the murder of the Washington Post colonist. So Prabir, we know that Saudi Arabia does not exactly have a clean human rights record. It has gotten away with worst in the past. And many are saying that what millions of suffering Yemenis could not achieve in terms of getting the nation condemned and getting it to answer for its actions, this one murdered it. So what do you feel is the reason behind this level of outrage this time? Well, I think there are different levels of what shall we say, hypocrisy involved in the outrage that we are seeing. That is not to belittle what has happened, and we will come to that later. But if we look at what Saudi Arabia has been getting away with, one it is unilaterally bombing Yemen with the help of the United States and the British forces, who are complicit not only in supplying military weapons, but also participating in their command operations, essentially the bombing operations. 200,000 Yemenis have died. This is a conservative estimate, 7 million are in dire straits, another 10 million are supposed to be near starvation levels. This is the condition of Yemen. And this is a three-year war that the Saudis have unleashed on Yemenis. As of date, there is still no solid argument given why Saudi is attacking the Houthis in Yemen. No international sanction for this, but yet the Saudi-led alliance, it includes also the United Arab Emirates are involved in this. The global silence on this has been criminal. The United States and UK are participating in this. Their protests on the ground there have also been extremely muted, including this media that we are talking about. The second hypocrisy is the Saudis, as you already have said. Saudis in the past have kidnapped three Saudi princes, of course. It's a huge number of princes in Saudi Arabia. But one of them was the grandson of the Al Saud, even Al Saud, who was really the current starting starter of the dynasty. So even that has not promoted any outcry, that the Saudis could kidnap a prince who was travelling, in this case Sultan bin Turki, who was travelling from Europe to Cairo and took the flight to Saudi Arabia. And this was very similar to the kind of conversations Khashoggi was supposed to have with the Saudis, that they assured him that he was safe, there was no problem. It apparently, bin Turki was also kidnapped. He was also told, don't worry, we are sending a flight. It will take you to Cairo. We are really not interested in doing anything to you, rest assured. And the flight instead landed up with 20 of other people on board, landed up in Riyadh. And those who had non-Saudi passports will let go after three days. It should have been an international outrage, none happened. So Saudis have got away with this and the western media and the western governments have always connived with Saudis to not let any of this come out in the international press and no such outrage was there. So why was the outrage this time? And for that we must see what is the role Khashoggi was playing in Saudi and in the United States. The United States always has an A-Team, B-Team approach, that even if it's supporting Muhammad bin Salman, the crown prince, even then they have a, shall we say, waiting in the wings that in case he becomes unstable, who should I replace the bin Salman with? And bin Naif, the form of crown prince, is always somebody who is waiting in the wings. If bin Salman falls, then he can be put in play. And Khashoggi was always known to be particularly close to the Muslim Brotherhood, whose other B-Team players shall we say for them and also close to the American establishment, particularly the CIA. It's an open knowledge that Khashoggi was a CIA asset when he was the minder for Osama bin Laden in the Afghan war. Of course, the Saudi intelligence agencies as well as the Americans CIA were both involved in the Osama bin Laden, shall we say militancy, jihad, whatever you want to call it in Afghanistan against Afghan regime which was backed by the Soviet Union at that time. So he's been somebody who is important to the CIA and that probably also explains why the outrage. He was no journalist. He was always a very close player to the Saudi regime. He was a right-hand man of Faisal Al-Turki, who was the intelligence chief for 27 years in Saudi Arabia, became the ambassador in UK. Khashoggi went with him, then became ambassador to the United States. Again, Khashoggi was his right-hand man. So he's been a player in the Saudi establishment. And when he's claimed to be a columnist, believe you me, the American establishment is really unhappy that a player so close to them nurtured over the last 30 years should have had this end. And that's the anger that you are seeing. It's not the anger about civil liberties in Saudis who are decapitating people as any capital offense and they do it for a whole number of things, not just heinous crimes. So all of this has not drawn an outrage in international media, not as the Yemen war, the silencing of critics has never bothered them. Kidnapping from all other places has also not bothered them. What has bothered them is that an American asset has been killed in this fashion and we do agree there's a brutal killing and we'll come to that. But this is I think the reason why you have this level of outrage. Although the Western media has responded in this way, we see that the Trump administration's response has been not as strong like for a man who is quick to impose sanctions and start trade wars. He's been very wary of doing that this time saying sanctions would harm US more than they would Saudi Arabia. So what do you feel, would there be, would there really be any adequate response to it? This is very clear that Saudi Arabia is America's partner in the larger geo-strategic balance of the United States. That is why Saudi Arabia has been helped in the Yemen war. This is not an accident that arms deals and bombing of Yemen has gone hand in hand. But also Saudi Arabia is an important player in the region against Iran and also against Turkey now, particularly after the last coup in which both Americans in the Saudis and the Gulf Emirates, the United Arab Emirates were actually thought to be behind the coup. So Turkey has been lost in some sense to the Western NATO Alliance. So therefore for Trump, Saudi Arabia becomes important. Apart from the fact that the Saudi Arabian line shall we say back channel has been entirely Kushner. Saudi Arabia doesn't even have the US ambassador at the moment and Kushner is not Saudi Arabia. He's also the one who links up Israel and Saudi Arabia together. And therefore the importance of Saudi to Trump is not just because of West Asia, but also because of the kind of policies we are seeing with respect to Israel and the fact that White House is directly involved in all of this. Trump at the end of it is only interested in Trump. So I don't think he has any either moral or larger geostrategic picture in mind. And moving to the Saudis explanation and Saudis accounts of this killing, the office account has been changing the whole time from moving from complete denial to a fist fight. And then finally now to what is being called a rogue operation. So all of these are being seen as cover up stories. You think the country will be able to get away with this? Well, first is I think the question to really ask, why do the Saudis think that they can get away with this? And the reason is very simple. They have got away with it till now. That every incident that we talked of earlier, they got away with it. Nobody raised an outcry. And you come from a country which believes that the king is law. And in this king we have a king who is apparently suffering from dementia. So the crown prince is the law. There is no other law in Saudi Arabia. Only what the monarch really deans to call is law. Of course, you have the courts, which are really religious courts. And there's an alliance between the Wahhabi descendants who control the Islamic doctrine in Saudi Arabia and the monarch. In this case it's really the crown prince. So as long as you have a view of the world that money can buy anything and the western media is certainly viable. And so are the western leaders who are viable with arms deals. Saudi has felt that whatever they construct as truth within courts will be accepted by the world as truth. So this is the first time they're finding an opposition. And therefore each of the stories have become more and more outlandish. First, the denial. We let him out. Why the cameras didn't capture him? Why his fiance was waiting outside? We don't know. He just vanished into thin air when he left the embassy. Didn't sell. Because Turkey was also by driblets getting information out. He left from the back door. If you remember that is a story. Not from the front door but somehow he left from the back door. That didn't wash. Then the next story he was killed in a fist fight. Now why would a 59 year old rather portly gentleman get into a fist fight with security officials who seemed to be quite well built and fit is a very mysterious question. So that also seems very suspicious. Particularly when you hear there was an audio office dismemberment and there was creams and this other guy apparently said that you know just put on your music. This is what I do normally. Makes a question. Why 15 people there in a fist fight in a consulate? You could expect one or two people. Why would you have 15 people standing over there in a fist fight? So that didn't sell either. Now we have the chokehold story. Problem is the Saudis have is why did 15 people come in this jet? Why did he actually have in it the head of the forensics in Saudi Arabia? Security forces forensics head come. Why did he carry a bone saw with him? Which he apparently did. Why if the count is true? Why was he listening to music and asking others to listen to music? Was he conducting an orchestra at that point of time? So all of this become very very difficult to explain. Now the report is that yes they overstepped their bounds and yes the body was disposed of. They said the body was not really disposed of in the that's chopped into parts but it seems some identity was carried back almost to tell the Saudi Arabian establishment that really killed him. But the rest of the body was disposed of in Istanbul in one of the forested areas near Istanbul and handed over to some local person. Who is this local person? We have not been told and Turkey probably knows by now who the local person is and if this is so they're already looking for the body. If they really find the body and they're able to really catch the person I think Saudi Arabians are more embarrassment to follow. But in overall terms I think Saudis are looking bad. The pressure has been kept up in Turkey because I think Turkey wants Saudi Arabia to be delegitimized. They have never really felt comfortable. At least Erdogan has not that Saudi Arabia is supposedly the keepers of the two mosques, two holy cities Makkah and Medina because Ottoman Khalifa was the again the head of all of this before Saudi Arabia, Saudi Arabia took over this role. Let's not forget what happened at the end of the First World War. So given all of this I think Turkey's pressure on Saudi Arabia will continue and I doubt that Saudi Arabia will regain its shall be say its legitimacy which you never have had given its record but which the western media has built up to this point you know that almost all the major think tanks of Saudi contributions or United Arab Emirates contributions the major newspapers are deeply in bed with the Saudis in different way. I think all of that is going to come under strain. But nevertheless Saudis are still sitting on huge amount of money cash and cash does buy a lot of shall we say public opinion under capitalism. So we still have to observe that and the second as long as the US dollar depends on the petrodollar cycling which means all the oil deals being denominated in dollar terms the US still controls the petrodollars and that's what underpins the US dollar dominance in the world market today. As long these two things continue Saudi Arabia will have certainly a major role to play and in spite of this blow that it might have suffered I think it will still play a major role in the region because the US is going to prop it up. The only thing is does it damage Muhammad bin Sultan to the extent that he is looked upon as a lame duck shall we say prince and then the royal parliament of Saudi Arabia which is bunch of princes I'm calling parliament as a joke but all the princes get together and say this guy is making the monarchy look bad let's get rid of him. Whether that lead to an internal change in Saudi Arabia will the other princes gather courage to do something about it? Do they have the ability to do so because Muhammad bin Sultan seems to control the internal security forces in the Saudis in a very in a very tight manner this is something that we'll have to watch at the damage is going to be to Muhammad bin Sultan's image as a reformer I think that will now be believed only by Friedman the New York Times columnist I think apart from him I don't think anybody's going to believe that anymore. So thank you for being for joining us today and thank you for watching this clip.