My Fiancé Jamal Khashoggi Was a Lonely Patriot | Hacker News Reader

My Fiancé Jamal Khashoggi Was a Lonely Patriot

nytimes.com

88 pointsrasengan20 comments

I wonder how this plays in tech, slack is backed by Saudis for instance, and that’s a reason why we never started using it, despite a lot of young developers liking it.

Of course we’re the public sector, so we probably see more political motivations in our choices of tech, but I think it is interesting when your investors become a liability.

Do you have a source that Slack is backed by Saudis?

I find Slack worrisome since all data is centralised and can be read by Slack. And we do that for discussion of development no less! Such discussion should be held in private. Its questionable whether management of a company should be able to read such a papertrail (there are pros and cons) but I don't see pros for a third party reading such. Especially not such massive amount.

https://www.recode.net/2017/9/18/16317902/uber-softbank-visi...

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-softbank-shares/softbank-...

It is true that Khashoggi likely was a much more complicated figure than just some sort of Western-oriented Saudi dissident and a journalist. He was a member of Muslim Brotherhood. He was likely a player with the Saudi intelligence. Here's a link to a widely quoted piece from John R. Bradley at The Spectator. And Bradley is someone who actually worked and knew Khashoggi very well. Judge for yourself: https://spectator.us/2018/10/jamal-khashoggi/

"In Washington in 2005, a senior Pentagon official told me of a ridiculous plan they had to take ‘the Saudi out of Arabia’ (as was the rage post-9/11). It involved establishing a council of selected Saudi figures in Mecca to govern the country under US auspices after the US took control of the oil. He named three Saudis the Pentagon team were in regular contact with regarding the project. One of them was Khashoggi. A fantasy, certainly, but it shows how highly he was regarded by those imagining a different Saudi Arabia."

Sounds like a story full of conspiratorial fiction.

Wow, that's a whole different perspective, and sounds very credible. Indeed, none of the reporting so far has given any indication why he would have become an enemy all of a sudden, but this article makes a clear case for why.

Tl;dr: Khashoggi had 9/11 dirt on Saudis and had recently founded a political party that runs against bin Salman’s vision.

I don't remember any prominent consulate killing during the cold war as a fan of John le Carré novels. Maybe they were covered by Soviets and the West?

Are there any other examples of consular services being used to trap and punish opposition, except the Saudi Khashoggi case in Saudi Arabia's Istanbul consulate?

The Dikko affair, where the Mossad working for Nigeria attempted to kidnap a dissident in London and ship him back to Nigeria in a diplomatic parcel, comes to mind. The plot fell apart, but he would almost certainly have been killed if they had succeeded.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dikko_affair

Not directly at a consulate, that I can recall, but having consular officials on diplomatic status in an adversary nation who are actually intelligence agency operatives was, and is, a pretty commonplace practice.

They had resources to kill or kidnap their targets in a way that creates much less problems than a murder in a consulate.

I rather suspect a bloody pulp-fiction-esque accident a la Tarantino at the consulate.

34 years ago Police Constable Yvonne Fletcher was murdered by shots fired from the Libyan embassy in London:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Yvonne_Fletcher

Apparently they didn't bother to do that in a consulate. Come to think of it, Putin doesn't seem to bother with such pretenses right now. The Skripal suspects didn't even have diplomatic identities...

It's the other way. The Saudis didn't bother to do that in a way that at least gives the perpetrators plausible deniability.

Putin's thugs at least put some effort to cover their tracks.

They may have overestimated their ability to convince people he left the consulate. They may have tried to detain and abduct him. Maybe they even needed some valuable information from him and he died under torture.

There are a lot of possible explanations beyond simply "they lured him to the consolate to kill him". Most of these explanations aren't a whole lot better than that, but these would explain why this all looks so chaotic or amateurish.

Apparently he also was part of the security aparatus in Saudi Arabia.

Not meant as an excuse or an explanation, but important to keep in mind.

> Apparently

Could you provide some links that detail how we know that?

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