Is the Saudi Government Plotting Against Another U.S.-Based Critic? | Hacker News Reader

Is the Saudi Government Plotting Against Another U.S.-Based Critic?

newyorker.com

49 pointsbb8820 comments

If there was ever a reason to reduce fossil fuel dependency ...

They believed that technology and democracy would save them until the age of techno-tyranny began - thus erasing all of their progress.

He better don't step on any Saudi embassy.

the not so secret reality of all of this is that saudi money is everywhere. and they only very recently allowed women to drive a car.

there's no question that the valley is owned / driven by this influence. the question is: at what cost?

but, I digress, by all means, please, continue on the start-up-y discourse...

>After leaving the Bureau, in 2005, he started the Soufan Group, a security-advisory firm in New York. His company runs a training academy for police and intelligence forces in Qatar, a neighbor and bitter rival of Saudi Arabia.

The beginning of the article would have you think that this related to Soufan's anti-terrorist work. However, reading more it seems that this is related to his employment by Qatar. There is somewhat of a cold war going on the the Middle East between Saudi Arabia and Iran and this seems to be related.

Soufan is basically a mercenary working for a foreign government(Qatar) that another foreign government(Saudi) wants to do in. Even the article does not talk about any intention to kill him in the US, but in Qatar.

This is very different from what happened to Jamal Kashogi who was a journalist and not involved in military or security affairs.

So I guess it's okay then for the Saudi Arabia government to target him, harass him and try to kill him; because he's providing military aid (he's as much a mercenary as Boeing is) to one US ally, and another US ally doesn't like that.

Khashoggi was a long time Saudi intelligence operative who operated in Afghanistan during the Afghan Russian war, then was posted in the US embassy for several years as an intelligence officer, officially "advisor to the ambassador". He turned journalist and was very loyalist to the Saudi royalty. The ascension of the current monarch and his son turned him after power swapping that happened in Saudi, so he left and turned "activist". He held so much dirty laundry on the Saudi govt from his previous work that they saw him as a threat. I doubt Ali Soufan or any other Saudi dissidents are seen as such a threat as Khashoggi.

Thank you for that informative background. Did you gather all this from public articles ?

> This is very different from what happened to Jamal Kashogi who was a journalist and not involved in military or security affairs.

Blatantly incorrect, he had CIA connections.

I have an off-topic observation ...

So I happen to be working in an old VM, and it has an old version of Firefox. And yes, I know that I ought to migrate. Anyway, this old Firefox just won't load some sites, including The New Yorker. But there's a simple workaround:

   user@host:~$ w3m -dump https://www.foo.bar/baz/ | less

I hate to be rude but: No one cares. How is your very specific linux/firefox setup any relevant to this conversation.... ?

It is so common/cliche for the first comment to be: it wont load, too slow, i hate the fonts, etc.. etc...

It doesn't add anything relevant to the convo/topic.

Whoa, that's uncalled for.

Send me some bitcoin and I'll double it.

YMMV, but w3m is a very useful tool.

Also, given your comment history, it's disingenuous to say that you "hate to be rude".

Wtf ? Just upgrade

It's an old #! VM, so upgrading would break too many things.

Also, I haven't made time to settle on which flavor of which Linux distro to switch to. Any suggestions, for someone who loved #!'s OpenBox desktop?

Interesting, I didn’t know about that command. Thanks for sharing.

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