In October 2018 renowned Saudi journalist cum dissident Jamal Khashoggi was murdered at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. The CIA determined that Saudi Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman most likely ordered Khashoggi's murder.
When the news of his heinous murder broke, US President Donald Trump expressed his unwillingness to stop weapon sales to the Saudi regime, citing economic benefits to the US. “This took place in Turkey and to the best of our knowledge, Khashoggi is not a United States citizen,” he told reporters in the Oval Office on Thursday. “I don’t like stopping massive amounts of money that’s being poured into our country,” referring to his desire to sell $110 billion worth of weapons to Saudi Arabia, adding that "it would not be acceptable to me,” Trump said.
On the show 11th Hour with Brian Williams, whistleblower and former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden mentions Khashoggi’s murder and how his friends' phones were hacked in order to track him. At the 24:08 mark he states, "How did the government of Saudi Arabia manage to hack these people's phones, well they did not have this capability in their government, so they purchased it from a digital arms broker, a company called the NSO Group, an Israeli company." He continues, "This company - the only thing they do is manufacture digital weapons and they sell this capability for millions and millions of dollars to the worst governments on earth."
Months before Kashoggi’s death, the Saudi-led coalition bombed a Yemeni school bus killing 40 children and 11 adults. Up until this point the conflict in Yemen had been strictly under-reported by the mainstream media. In October 16, 2018 an article By Hilary Clarke titled “Twelve million face famine in Yemen if bombs don't stop, WFP warns”, the food assistance program led by the United Nations warned the Middle East's poorest country was on the brink of famine. “18 million Yemeni people were unaware of where their next meal would come from and eight million of those were on the brink of famine.” In November of 2018 the image of the starving seven-year old Yemeni girl, Amal Hussain, recirculated following news of her death.
7-year-old Amal Hussain in October 2018 drew global attention to the humanitarian crisis caused by the Saudi-led war in Yemen, where the U.N. says 12 million could be on the edge of starvation. On Nov. 1, 2018 Amal’s family said she had died in a refugee camp. Tyler Hicks—The New York Times/Redux
In June 2019 the US Senate voted to block arms sales to Saudi Arabia, a month later Trump vetoed the resolution unblocking the sale of $8.1 billion in weapons to Saudi Arabia.
Prior to his presidency, Donald Trump sang a different tune on Saudi Arabia. In a video published by a secondary source on YouTube of a Trump interview from Fox News in reference to the 9/11 attacks he says that Iraq and Iran were not responsible for the attacks on the Twin Towers. He insists we need to look into Saudi Arabia and where the people came from.
The interview appears to have taken place at Fox News during the presidency of George W. Bush. It was recorded on a mobile phone and posted to Facebook October 15, 2018 and is no longer available on YouTube where it was recorded from. However, there are multiple sources of pre-election Donald Trump accusing Saudi Arabia of the attacks on September 11, 2001.
On 2nd January 2020 Iranian General Qassem Soleimani was assassinated on the orders of Trump and he is now being portrayed as a “terrorist” in the American media, even though there are several reports he was fighting terrorism in Syria and Iraq. NBC reported back in 2015 that he was leading Iraqi forces against ISIS. Independent Syrian MP for Aleppo, Fares Shehabi tweeted, “FACT: Iranians only came to Syria at the request of the legitimate Syrian government years after the US, EU, Turkey, & some gulf states sent tens of thousands of radical jihadis over to topple the Syrian state!” He continued with his support for the assassinated Iranian General.
Vice-President Pence was scrutinized on Twitter for his tweet connecting an incorrect number of Al Qaeda attackers on 9/11 and then ingeniously linking them to Iran.
Some may think that this time around it should be less convincing we are fighting for freedom, or that we care about those suffering throughout the Middle East, when we supply and profit from the weapons sales to the Saudi regime and are starving the poorest Middle Eastern country to death. However, it is hard to get past the corporate media spin as the facts quickly become murky.
Contradicting US government claims that the assassination has made the world a safer place for Americans, Middle East experts have called for westerners to leave the Middle East ASAP. And this has hit investors right in the pocketbook as Gulf stocks have tumbled.