President Trump's threat of "severe" repercussions if the Saudis are found to have killed journalist Jamal Khashoggi were met with more threats from the Saudi side, including from a media figure close to the royal family who warned of high oil prices and a shift of alliances. Meanwhile Secretary of State Pompeo is in the air heading to Saudi Arabia to get to the bottom of the missing journalist.
President Trump's threat of "severe" repercussions if the Saudis are found to have killed journalist Jamal Khashoggi were met with more threats from the Saudi side, including from a media figure close to the royal family who warned of high oil prices and a shift of alliances. Meanwhile Secretary of State Pompeo is in the air heading to Saudi Arabia to get to the bottom of the missing journalist.
President Trump's threat of "severe" repercussions if the Saudis are found to have killed journalist Jamal Khashoggi were met with more threats from the Saudi side, including from a media figure close to the royal family who warned of high oil prices and a shift of alliances. Meanwhile Secretary of State Pompeo is in the air heading to Saudi Arabia to get to the bottom of the missing journalist.
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning into the Liberty Report.
With me today is Daniel McAdams, our co-host.
Daniel, good to see you.
How are you this morning, Dr. Paul?
I'm doing very well, and I'd like to talk a little bit about Saudi Arabia again.
That hasn't been straightened out, but it's still in the news, and some news even this morning about what's going on.
Of course, we've talked about, and everybody's been talking about Khashoggi all of a sudden disappearing at the consulate in Istanbul.
And it is suspected that maybe the leaders of Saudi Arabia finally got tired of him.
I imagine at times criticizing them.
So the theory is that he's been murdered by somebody in that administration.
And the accusations are there, but Trump has been very much involved in the discussion of this.
Not diplomacy, but at least discussion.
So he said if it's found out that the government of Saudi Arabia killed this person, then they're going to be really sorry about that because he's very angry about this.
Except he wouldn't want to go too far.
He wouldn't want to cut off weapon sales.
Or he wouldn't give up the allegiance to the war efforts in Yemen, that sort of thing.
But there was a bit of a threat enough for the Saudis to come back and say, he better not.
We're going to retaliate.
You know, remember the 1970s?
You know, the embargo, we have control of the oil prices, and it may go to $200, $400.
So there were threats enough to the point where several major individuals like Simon and Bill Ford, won't go to the meeting, the financial meeting in Saudi Arabia.
And also some people from Wall Street.
So under these conditions, Trump called the king.
The king, I guess he's still the king, even though we don't hear about him.
All we hear about is Muhammad bin Solomon, the prince.
But anyway, Pompeo's involved now.
The president said, we'll take care of this.
And he sent Pompeo over there for a negotiation.
So it is getting their attention.
It's getting the attention of some people very much involved.
It's probably not going to go away in a day or two, but it doesn't look like the solution is just simple.
You know, Trump has been very defensive in not cutting off business interests with Saudi Arabia.
I mean, we need the jobs, we need to sell the weapons.
And it's rhetoric, which isn't, as far as I'm concerned, the most healthy thing in the world.
So Pompeo's on his way.
Probably later today.
We may have more news on what's happening.
Yeah, you know, Trump is having a lot of pressure, too, because, you know, of course, all the thousands of people killed in the U.S. and Saudi war on Yemen, don't worry about it.
500,000 killed in Syria with the U.S. and Saudi effort to overthrow Assad.
Don't worry about it.
No big deal.
But one journalist is okay if he was indeed killed.
It's a terrible thing.
But one journalist killed, and then all of a sudden the entire Washington is in a spasm, is in a paranoid spasm.
And so there's a lot of pressure on Trump.
Hey, what are you going to do?
This journalist is a big shot, you know.
And so he said there's, quote, going to be severe punishment if the Saudis did it.
But as you point out, Dr. Paul, don't worry about the weapons.
You know, that's okay.
But a significant development, an interesting development, a reaction to Trump saying, hey, there's going to be severe punishment, is Turki al-Dakhil, who was the head of the state-owned Arabian news network, close to the royal family.
It's state-owned, state-run.
And he had some very strong words over the weekend in an op-ed that ran Sunday.
He said, if President Trump was angered by $80 oil, nobody should rule out the price jumping to $100, $200, a barrel, or maybe even double that.
So what about pricing the oil in one?
Maybe we'll do that, he said.
He said there are 30 ways we can retaliate against the U.S. if they go ahead and move on this.
And of course, the official Saudi reply to this very strong editorial was, no, no, that's not our official position.
Don't worry, the Saudi energy minister said, no, we're going to keep things steady.
But you have to think that that might be something that's thrown out there to say, hey, watch out.
We're not going to take this line down.
The biggest thing that could happen would be a realignment with the Saudis.
And they've thrown out this threat as well.
Well, you horse around with us too much.
We'll go with Iran and we're going to reach out to Iran.
Now, that is pretty major when you think about how many years there's been the fighting going on verbally at least and strategically between Saudi Arabia and Iran.
And they're threatening.
But, you know, if we divorced ourselves, which I don't think is going to happen, then the Saudis' option could be, oh, we'll go with China and Russia and Iran and try to work on a new currency.
So that would be a pretty big deal.
But for some reason, I don't think that's going to happen.
Trump is rather blunt about it.
Most of the time, people would say, well, we're going to protect the military-industrial complex and all these sales.
But they wouldn't be so blunt about it.
But that probably doesn't hurt Trump.
That probably, you know, when he's talking to his populist audience, they probably say, well, that's good.
He's looking out for us, and there are hundreds of thousands of jobs involved.
And this is important.
And he's not going to let them push the price of oil up.
But sometimes these things get out of hand, just how militarily they get out of hand.
Diplomatically, they get out of hand as well.
Yeah, and that's not only the geostrategic reconfiguration was threatened by this journalist, and not just any journalist, as we point out again, but someone close to the royal family.
He also kind of hit below the belt.
He said, if nobody wants to sell us weapons, the market is huge.
Probably we'll get, for example, weapons from Russia.
It'll be more advanced than the weapons that Congress releases to us.
So that's a big one.
Yeah, I think Trump obviously doesn't need this.
He'd like it to go away.
So his suggestion to diffuse this a little bit is, well, maybe it was just a rogue killer that did it.
It had nothing to do with policy.
It had nothing to do because he was a journalist writing criticism of the king and this sort of thing.
It's just rogue people showed up and killed this person.
But your point, I think, is the most important one for us, what we're dealing with about our foreign policy.
Yes, we should have something to say about going on here.
And not so much that we have to protect the oil prices or the military sales, but we should not be, and we said this the other day.
We don't have the authority to be the policeman of the world.
There's been a murder.
You can condemn it.
But we don't have the authority to go and investigate, go into Turkey and Saudi Arabia and decide who killed whom.
No, we can't do that.
But we are very, very much involved.
I mean, we have dealt with the Saudis for a long time.
And sometimes carelessly when you think about 9-11 and no investigation of significance with 9-11.
And we sort of ignore all that.
And I think that right now there may be more of that come up.
And there maybe should be more investigation what's going on.
But where do we have the real impact?
And that is our partnership with the Saudi Arabians with fighting that war in Yemen.
That's a disgrace.
Hundreds of thousands of people dying.
And I think today, and I can believe these stories, that there's a deliberate attempt to starve people to try to bring them to their knees.
It is just outrageous that we're part of that.
That's what we should be dealing with.
We shouldn't be concentrating on the pros and cons and benefits of how we react to this murder.
It's their problem.
It's important.
But it's something that is a distraction from the foreign policy that helps create this condition over there right now.
And, you know, Senator Paul and a few others have been trying their best over months to get people's attention on this Yemen war and our complicity in the killing and slaughtering of innocent people.
Nobody seemed interested.
Nobody wanted to bother.
Now when this one person apparently is killed, there's a lot of attention.
When this thing first started to break, Dr. Paul, I tweeted in my personal account, and I'm very suspicious about this whole simple narrative that was set up by the media.
Here is a Saudi dissident journalist criticizing the Saudi government, and they knocked him off.
That was a very simplistic narrative.
And I just felt very suspicious about it.
I feel even more suspicious day in and down.
So I wrote a couple of questions that I had thinking about this.
And in fact, there was an article in Developed, the big German mainstream publication over the weekend that also raised some big things to think about.
First of all, there's the issue of the internal struggle for the future of Saudi Arabia.
You had the strong Saudi faction represented by Mohammed bin Salman, the young, very impetuous crown prince, wanting to keep this Saudi, the whole country is a family business, wanting to keep it a family business.
But then you have, apparently, according to the developed article, you have Khashoggi, who is a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, who's very anti-royal family, who wants to have kind of an Islamic dictatorship, wrongly called in the Wall Street Journal, for example, a democracy.
It's an Islamic dictatorship.
And so you have this kind of internal struggle.
Khashoggi comes from a very privileged elite family.
He was actually friends with Osama bin Laden.
They were close.
He was very close to Prince Turkey, who was the head of Saudi intelligence all the way up until just before 9-11, which is very, very interesting.
So very elite families.
He himself lived in Virginia.
It makes you wonder what were his ties, and Develop pointed out, what were his ties with Saudi intelligence or a faction thereof?
What were his ties with the CIA?
A lot of these foreigners who live in Virginia who are in exile finally find their way over to Langley to do a little business too.
Well, this is the issue that somebody suggested.
The significance of that being that he may know and can hold it over the heads of the Saudi kingdom dealing with 9-11.
Because, you know, from the day 9-11 occurred, I became so suspicious of it because why did the bin Laden family get ushered out of the country when nobody else was even on an airplane, but their private jets and everybody, they were rounded up and they were ushered off.
And that didn't come up in the investigations, or at least not a full explanation of why that happened.
And that to me would make sense if they were, you know, they suggested, well, why don't you come back here?
We'll give you a job.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And we'll protect you.
But they knew he wasn't coming back, so they had to go out.
But he's no longer going to be able to use the wedge of 9-11.
Yeah, no, I think the more we hear about it, the more questions at least are raised in my mind.
And as you point out earlier, President, on the somewhat breaking news, President Trump said, okay, Pompeo, pack those bags, suit up.
You're going to go over there and you're going to get to the bottom of this.
It's a little bit comical in a way.
And I always sort of, like, for the first time ever feel sorry for Pompeo.
But he's got to go sit down with the old king, find out what's going on, be reassured that they didn't do anything.
Then he probably have to go over to Turkey, sit around, talk to Erdogan, find out what's going on.
So he's going to be doing some shuttle diplomacy.
I can hardly imagine that he's going to have his, you know, a magnifying glass and be a Sherlock Holmes over there.
Well, if you're feeling a little bit sorry for Pompeo, I urge you a little bit of caution.
You know, I think he's a neocon.
Yeah, that's true.
Just be cautious of what he does.
But I know what you're talking about, diplomatic and all.
You know, our Secretary of States are measured by how many miles they fly.
You know, the ones, they want to be seen as flying, really in charge of the empire.
You know, if you had a Secretary of State that stayed at home, maybe used a telephone, you know, in a way, that's what the Secretary of State would do if we had a free society and we minded our own business and we defended our country.
But no, that's not the case.
They have to go, every time there's a problem, put them on the airplane.
We're engaged.
Just like if there's a flood, the president has to go down.
Oh, yeah, there's a flood here.
And we'll take care of things.
We'll print more money and spend more money.
And for some reason, I don't think the net benefit or loss of benefit, what's going to come of this, is I don't think that we're going to see the Saudis completely separate from us and go with the Chinese and the Iranians.
That's probably not going to happen.
I think the military-industrial complex are going to survive well.
I don't think that's going to happen.
And that road killing there will be pushed aside one of these days.
But it's gotten a lot of attention, probably a little bit more than I thought it would.
But there's enough out there that is still stirring around.
And maybe some people believe in a little agitation benefiting because there is the agitation trying to figure out who killed whom, why, you know, and what was the purpose of it all.
But I think that we're going to be hearing about this for a while yet.
Yeah, I think so too.
And we can't really let this go without making one more point, which is the role of Turkey in this.
Turkey, it was on Turkish soil.
The Turks, you know, in Turkish reporting, were absolutely sure he was killed.
We even have some audio recordings.
Some of the early things that they've suggested have turned out to be bogus.
But Turkey is playing a very important role, I think, is in the question whether Turkey, I mean, they seem to be on a charm offensive.
They released that pastor.
Trump said, today I feel very good about the Turks.
Two days ago, I was pretty angry with them.
Chilling Social Media Crackdown00:01:55
So they have to have that role.
Turkey and Saudi Arabia have been at loggerheads traditionally.
And so you have this kind of, are they trying to drive a wedge between the Turks, between the Saudis and the U.S.?
It's a big question, Dr. Paul.
So we could probably do two or three shows on this.
But I would just close by mentioning to some of my followers on my personal Twitter account, which can get spicy at times, that yes, indeed I have been locked out of my account.
It has to do with my sharp reply to someone who came on a thread of mine about the Syrians where I accused this rebel supporter of being a jihadist, and apparently that was a hate attack on this person.
So I am off Twitter for now.
Unfortunately, I've joined the 800 or so others that are now being purged.
So it's pretty chilling, Dr. Paul, when the social media cracks down on people for very unusual things.
There's no doubt it's a big problem and we've suffered from it and you have personally.
But you know, I still remain cautiously optimistic about what's going on because I think there will be alternatives developed because I just read yesterday of a group that seems to be making progress as an alternative for Google.
And it's out there.
It's going to come along.
So we have to keep our eyes and ears and open and support it when we can because otherwise they become and they exist and they will be maintained as nothing more than the arm of government.
So we don't have the government marching in daily with guns and bullets and taking away our Fourth Amendment rights.
But they're close allies with social media and all of a sudden our privacy and our freedom of speech has been hindered and it's not quite a libertarian society and saying, oh, they're free market, they're allowed to do this.
It's a little bit more complex than that.
Anyway, I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.