Last week, the White House released the official report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) about the death of Jamal Khashoggi, a journalist who was suffocated and dismembered at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018. Although the report begins with the assessment that “Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman approved an operation . . . to capture or kill” Khashoggi, Bobby Ghosh argues that it doesn’t provide much new evidence for this claim:
The ODNI report pronounces the prince guilty by association, but any case based on the four-page document would summarily be tossed out of court. This suggests American intelligence agencies have unearthed nothing in two years that their Turkish counterparts had not already revealed two weeks after the murder.
The lack of fresh evidence may explain the Biden administration’s failure to impose any direct punishment on Mohammad bin Salman, the kingdom’s de-facto ruler. Instead, it has imposed a travel ban on 76 other Saudis. . . . Additionally, the Treasury Department announced measures against a former deputy Saudi intelligence chief and members of the rapid-intervention force of the royal guard.
Biden-administration officials and surrogates will claim that MBS doesn’t get off scot-free, since he has formally been named and shamed by the U.S. government. But in truth, the asterisk against the prince’s name was placed not by President Biden but by Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan—ironically, an enthusiastic jailer of journalists.
Far from being made a pariah, Mohammad bin Salman remains the top dog in Riyadh—with Biden wagging a disapproving finger from the direction of Washington.
Read more on Bloomberg: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-02-27/khashoggi-report-biden-fails-to-make-saudi-prince-mbs-a-pariah