there's a difference between healthy skepticism of intelligence agencies and a grasping at straws to cast doubt on anything they do.
So those who claim MBS was responsible may be right or wrong. Without a clear definition of how his potential responsibility relates to US national interest, the matter isn’t even necessarily something the CIA should worry about at all.
By skipping that step and jumping right to PR to help fuel moral indignation in Americans, the CIA is way way way out of bounds.
The agency is not supposed to be a bunch of wise elders providing moral guidance, it’s supposed to protect national security.
Quite likely most senior CIA officials have far more blood on their hands than MBS.
No, also his prosecution of the war in Yemen.
> By skipping that step and jumping right to PR to help fuel moral indignation in Americans, the CIA is way way way out of bounds.
The US at its best stands up for a free press, and against, for example, authoritarian states being free to murder their critics worldwide.
> Quite likely most senior CIA officials have far more blood on their hands than MBS.
In the light of Saudi Arabia's actions in Yemen, this statement is clearly false.
First, the CIA actions in Iraq make this almost certainly true. Yemen is a minor conflict in comparison. Even still, Saudi actions could not happen without the US. The blockade could not take place without US assistance, the bombs being dropped are from US manufacturing, and the raids dropping the bombs could not happen without US intelligence and air support.
Everyone who gets a chance? (-a few European countries who stopped recently.)
It doesn't excuse the fact that SA and MBS are also horrible.
On balance the US causes substantially more human suffering in the world than all other terror groups and despots combined.
It’s strange that character attacks on MBS work so well to make Americans assume that the US must be the good guy.
In the US there is a tremendous appeal to the narrative that the US is the (relative) good guy. American exceptionalism is a religion and it easily leverages the widespread white suoremecist views of Americans who already mistrust the brown folks.
So beware of reinforcing the American exceptionalism dogma when you cite “whataboutism”. It is often budled into that critique.
The US murders journalists.
The free press is one of the cornerstones of US national interest; allowing our journalists to be murdered because they said something about a foreign power is a threat to that.
"A propaganda system will consistently portray people abused in enemy states as worthy victims, whereas those treated with equal or greater severity by its own government or clients will be unworthy"
The free press isn't a cornerstone of national interest - it is a sometimes useful, but often inconvenient tool.
This has nothing to do with press freedom whatsoever.
What if CIA was told to do so? Apparently the SA has not paid /signed by it's deadline for a major weapons purchase. 15B I think... and oil is lower now. So CIA is to serve our interests and has the prince by the b*lls. CIA might even get their entire budget paid by this episode. Oil is under $50 a barrel now or $30+ lower
I am pretty sure Erdogan would not that outraged if the Saudis cut him a deal too.