A senior Saudi prince is now demanding the CIA be put on trial for concluding that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ordered the torture and brutal murder of U.S. resident and Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi last month.
After initially denying involvement in Khashoggi’s killing, Saudi Arabia has since come up with several excuses and theories in a desperate effort to protect bin Salman.
But our own CIA says that bin Salman is definitely involved.
Furthermore, the CIA reportedly has a recording of bin Salman ordering Khashoggi be “silenced” for criticizing Saudi officials and Saudi involvement in Yemen.
If true, such a recording would be a smoking gun that proves bin Salman’s role in the assassination, thus contradicting Saudi claims and President Donald Trump’s insistence that the Crown Prince is innocent.
Trump ignored the CIA’s findings earlier this week during remarks in which he gave Saudi Arabia a pass for the murder, which has drawn international outrage.
Trump has since been accused of being beholden to Saudi Arabia, and that makes a new demand by a Saudi official all the more concerning.
Senior Saudi Prince Turki al-Faisal, who also served as ambassador to the United States and in Saudi intelligence, attacked the CIA this week while speaking to reporters and claimed the agency is lying about bin Salman before going on to suggest the CIA be put on trial.
“The CIA is not necessarily the highest standard of veracity or accuracy in assessing situations. The examples of that are multitude,” al-Faisal said, citing the CIA assessment of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. “That was the most glaring of inaccurate and wrong assessments, which led to a full-scale war with thousands being killed. I don’t see why the CIA is not on trial in the United States. This is my answer to their assessment of who is guilty and who is not and who did what in the consulate in Istanbul.”
Our intelligence agencies have made mistakes before, but they learned from them and instituted policies to make assessments more accurate. It’s time for Trump to defend the CIA, especially against this flagrant attack from a Saudi official who is clearly desperate to protect bin Salman. After all, if Saudi Arabia wants to throw the Iraq War in our face to sow distrust of the CIA, it should be pointed out that the Saudis definitely can’t be trusted since 15 of the 19 hijackers on 9/11 were Saudi nationals. So was Osama bin Laden.
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