If he was killed in some "accident" then the other countries or corporations can easily buy the lie, avoid the confrontation and keep the money/relationship (even if they think it is likely to be state-sanctioned). Because it was such a screw up (fiance waiting outside was a kind of solid witness as well as the recording etc.), it is much harder for others to accept the "accident", which becomes toxic PR and therefore something to distance yourselves from.
Of course, that doesn't mean she wasn't killed as part of a state plot. But there's not much reason to suspect that over the possibility that she was a random murder victim. For her death to be as scandalous and controversial as Khashoggi's, it would have to have the same evidence of suspicious circumstances. For example, the 21-year-old suspect being an employee of Bulgaria's intelligence agency or military covert forces, and being caught and identified right after her death, but taking 1+ weeks to come up with the confession that he randomly murdered her, despite purported audio recordings that suggest that he murdered with political intent.
[0] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/10/viktoria-marinova-mur...
If a human rights activist had been killed in the same way the story would have blown over already. It is not news to anyone that Saudi Arabia is the personal fief of the Saud family, who are brutish medieval thugs. Everyone knows perfectly well that they cut off people’s hands and crucify people and if there’s a government on the Arabian peninsula that doesn’t use torture according to Amnesty or Human Rights Watch I’ll be very much surprised.
The denial was not meant to be credible, it was meant to be nakedly obvious that he was killed in the consulate and they were meant to get away with it s it free as a warning to any other dissidents.
And the next time they will. It’s the combination of being a guy who goes to inside Beltway cocktail parties, the Turkish government having the consulate bugged and the Saudis’ gross incompetence that did it. The absence of any one would have had them getting off Scot free.
Don't see the same outcry. Also the Maltese journalist (Caruana) uncovering European dark money who was bombed --not much press.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/07/world/asia/china-interpol...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/13/world/asia/china-fan-bing...
edit: Memories and perceptions vary, of course, but Caruana's murder from what I remember got a massive amount of attention in the media. The top Google result for "Caruana murder" are currently from the BBC, NPR, The Guardian, and the NYT. In addition, the "Forbidden Stories" collaboration was launched to continue her work:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/17/world/europe/journalist-m...
> After her death, 45 journalists from 18 news organizations agreed to work together to pursue leads from her work on corruption and international money-laundering networks, as well as look into the circumstances surrounding her death. Forbidden Stories, an investigative nonprofit in Paris devoted to completing the work of jailed and murdered journalists, coordinated the collaboration, in which The New York Times took part.
She was killed 1 year ago but her death still gets recent coverage, like this article from 2 days ago from the Committee to Protect Journalists:
https://cpj.org/blog/2018/10/efforts-to-find-mastermind-in-m...
You are doubting that human rights activists are killed by governments?
> presumably you're going to provide us a list with human rights activists who have been killed in the same way
The root-level comment [0] is speculating that there's "something different about this", because Khashoggi's death what seems like an inordinate amount of attention. I'm arguing that his alleged assassination is getting so much attention because of the egregious circumstances and coverup surrounding it. If it were the case that many, or even just a few other people have died under similar circumstances, only to be quickly forgotten, then it would strengthen the implication that the controversy around Khashoggi is partly concocted by some greater conspiracy.
But that doesn't make the parent wrong that Khashoggi getting attention disproportionate to similar crimes (and it doesn't demonstrate a conspiracy; IMHO he simply is more prominent and in many people's minds he is effectively an American journalist and/or represents American values).
I assume you must be aware that horrible things like this happen to many people in many countries - and I wish they all got this level of attention. Just off the top of my head, in China there are people in Xinjiang in labor/re-education camps, people who disappear when they go to Beijing to petition the government, dissidents who the Chinese government kidnaps from foreign countries, etc. That's just one country; there's N Korea, Myanmar, Russia (all the murdered and imprisoned journalists and political opposition) and so many more.
I'm not sure what you're really trying to say. Is the crime in Khashoggi's case qualitatively different? Because he was killed? While not everyone in every example I named was killed, certainly many are.
Of course famous people get more attention when things happen to them (not just death, but relationships, babies, job changes, etc) -- the nature of being famous is that more people know about you at all. But the parent commenter is wrong to believe that the attention and stories given to Khashoggi are simply about the event of his murder. Khashoggi was a journalist for one of the world's largest and most prestigious news organizations -- it shouldn't be a surprise that those newspeople are inclined to make a big deal of his death. And because his life involved being an outspoken critic of a particularly important world leader -- which unavoidably entangles other world leaders, such as President Trump -- the matters surrounding his death are going to continue draw worldwide attention.
Well yes, it turns out people care about it a lot when someone in their group gets cut to pieces with a saw.
Heads of state are routinely dispatching people by various violent means, including "bloody dismemberment" by remote controlled Drones. Normally, this is "OK" by the "international community", unless the head of state in question has crossed the said "community" or violated unspoken "international" protocols not disclosed to us peons.
Another view is that Western leaders never err -- how can they? -- in violently dismembering people (and their families) and only brown (or otherwise shaded) leaders commit such sins. In other words, no Nobel Prize for you, MbS.
I remember chuckling reading in Vanity Fair how the CEOs of the "international" criminal banking guild were all huddled up and worried about the ethical issue of should they go to MbS's upcoming gathering or not. Besides chuckling, I was impressed by the amazing discipline of those who control MSM to line up the bipartisan ducks when the order is issued from on high.
But seriously, in the early 70s the United States of America and Kingdom of Saudi Arabia reached a secret strategic agreement. And the USA no longer wishes to hold up their end of that grand agreement.
Naturaly, HN, this is my opinion.
Why not give examples? I can give a well-known one: President Obama's approval of the 2011 drone strike on Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen residing in Yemen (his 16-year-old son, also a U.S. citizen, was killed in another strike but was not officially targeted for killing).
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/30/magazine/the-lessons-of-a...
It was controversial years later, including today -- his 8-year old daughter was killed during a 2017 U.S. raid [0], but I think we can agree that Obama was far from danger of stepping down. However, the facts surrounding al-Awlaki's and Khashoggi's deaths are different enough to suggest there are natural, non-conspiracy reasons for why MBS is facing far more scrutiny. We can only imagine hypotheticals, but if Obama had ordered a drone strike on Sean Hannity on U.S. soil, and then pretended for a week that it was an accident despite his signature on the kill order, I'm pretty sure he would have faced similar levels of outrage.
> But seriously, in the early 70s the United States of America and Kingdom of Saudi Arabia reached a secret strategic agreement. And the USA no longer wishes to hold up their end of that grand agreement.
The United States's and Saudi Arabia's strategic of the past decades has hardly been "secret". And the U.S. is far from eager to disengage from that alliance, as recent headlines suggest:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/white...
> At the same time, Trump defended the oil-rich monarchy as an “incredible ally” and kept open the possibility that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman did not order Saudi agents to kill Khashoggi.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/feb/01/yemen-strike-e...
An American killed means much more to Americans than 100 people from Saudi Arabia killed, and vice versa.
Even if he had been, say, what’s that conspiracy theorist-cum-journalist, Jones. If he’d bern offed as an American, I’m unsure of yhd media reaction. Of course, you might come and retort hd wasn’t a “true journalist”. But then we’re picking anc choosing fights.
To be clear, I wasn't talking about his legal status. I'm talking about how the conception of him in the minds of many Americans: A journalist for the Washington Post is an American journalist, to a great degree, in many Americans minds. If he worked for the Jerusalem Post or a prominent Saudi news organization, IMHO Americans would have much less interest. Many Al Jazeera journalists have experienced pretty bad treatment, but I doubt most people know.
The rest of the parent comment is a made-up situation.
Power is the only thing that works anywhere (money being a source of power) at a certain level, but that's kind of like saying all science is physics - it'd doesn't really have explanatory use. The question is how and why it's exercised. Domestically in advanced countries, it's controlled to a significant extent by government, which is controlled by citizens and people with power, who all can be manipulated by mass media, who are subject to Facebook and Twitter's power, which is influenced by public opinion and stockholders and the news the CEO reads, etc. etc. etc. It's a complicated web.
> Countries are forced to develop nuclear weapons because treaties are not honored owing to special interests
But even nuclear weapons treaties are influenced by public opinion. After (and before) the treaty with Iran was signed, there was a intense campaign on the U.S. right to discredit it, along with their attempts to discredit everything Obama did, giving Trump sufficient political support to break the treaty. If the public has been strongly in favor of it, it would have been a different story. So what power led the U.S. to break the treaty? Public opinion? Whoever was trying to influence public opinion in that direction? Large donors to the Trump or the GOP? There is a web of influence.
But I will say this for the the theory of "power and money" - the best way IMHO to find the power behind something is to follow the money: Who benefits? Who is benefited from the murder of Khashoggi? Who benefited from the portrayal of the Saudi dictator as a good person? Who benefits from the response?