Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi disappears in Turkey

In Donald Trump’s America, what drives foreign policy decision-making in Washington isn’t interests and values — it’s cash and ego. And other countries have noticed.

Want the US to stop criticizing your terrible human rights record? Dangle a possible trade deal. Want the Trump administration to give you a pass on the gruesome assassination of a prominent critic of your brutal regime? A few billion dollars’ worth of US arms purchases should do the trick. Need to get the American president on your side in a messy geopolitical fight? Buy some Boeing airplanes.

President Donald Trump for months has sidestepped Congress to enhance his deeply controversial relationship with Saudi Arabia. But on Monday, a bipartisan Senate effort will start a short process to force a vote on those ties — and possibly deliver one of the strongest rebukes to the administration’s foreign policy.

In May, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo used a legal loophole to export roughly $8 billion in weapons to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. That angered lawmakers — who have the authority to approve or reject weapons sales — from both parties because Riyadh has yet to face any real punishment for the October killing of Saudi journalist, dissident, and US resident Jamal Khashoggi.

Saudi Arabia has imprisoned two US citizens as part of a fresh crackdown on dissent in the country, according to a source familiar with the detained and a report from a human rights group on Friday.

The kingdom recently arrested 11 women activists who were advocating for a woman’s right to drive in the country. They remained under arrest even after Saudi Arabia lifted the ban on women drivers. Their detainment last summer increased pressure from the international community on Saudi Arabia, and particularly de facto ruler Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who claims he’s modernizing his nation’s society.

The trial for the men accused of murdering Saudi dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi began Thursday in Saudi Arabia, with prosecutors confirming they will seek the death penalty for at least five of 11 people charged in the assassination.

Khashoggi’s gruesome murder captured international attention, but the trial for his killing is expected to largely happen outside the public view and follow the official story already put forward by the Saudi government — that its de facto leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), had nothing to do with Khashoggi’s assassination.

The Senate has passed a historic resolution directing the Trump administration to rescind all US military assistance to Saudi Arabia related to its war in Yemen.

The resolution, which passed 56 to 41, is a rare bipartisan rebuke to the White House over its policies toward Saudi Arabia. The measure, which had failed in the Senate in March, was revived and reinvigorated in the wake of the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi on October 2.

A bipartisan group of US senators has introduced a scathing resolution condemning Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia Mohammed bin Salman for being “complicit” in the assassination of Saudi dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Republican senators Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Marco Rubio (R-FL), Todd Young (R-IN) and Democrats Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), Ed Markey (D-MA), and Chris Coons (D-CT) introduced the non-binding resolution on Wednesday, just one day after they were briefed by CIA Director Gina Haspel on the agency’s conclusions about who was behind the murder.

If Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman were in front of a jury, “he’d be convicted [for murder] in 30 minutes.”

That’s what Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN), the outgoing chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told reporters after attending a one-hour meeting with CIA Director Gina Haspel on Tuesday, where she briefed a handful of senators on intelligence relating to the murder of Saudi journalist and US resident Jamal Khashoggi on October 2.

In a sharp rebuke to President Donald Trump and his embrace of Saudi Arabia, the GOP-controlled Senate voted on Wednesday to seriously consider ending America’s role in the Saudi-led war in Yemen.

In a 63-37 vote, lawmakers discharged a bill, co-sponsored by Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Mike Lee (R-UT), and Chris Murphy (D-CT), that would force the US to cease its support for the Saudi-led coalition in its bloody fight against the Houthi rebels in Yemen within 30 days. The White House, however, has threatened to veto final passage of the bill.

If you were surprised by President Donald Trump’s decision to back Saudi Arabia on Tuesday instead of punishing the country’s government for murdering and dismembering journalist Jamal Khashoggi, then it’s worth looking at his worldview again.

Take away the fact that Trump has never been particularly sympathetic toward journalists and that human rights are, at best, an afterthought for his administration and it seems rather obvious that he never planned to retaliate against Riyadh for murdering the prominent dissident in Istanbul last month. Rather, not reprimanding Saudi royalty — especially de facto leader Mohammed bin Salman, better known as MBS — fits perfectly within his foreign policy.

President Donald Trump is once again trying to persuade Americans that the United States needs to keep selling war weapons to Saudi Arabia. That hundreds of thousands of US jobs are on the line if he cancels arms sales to the kingdom.

Once again, that’s not true.

President Donald Trump will stand by Saudi Arabia despite mounting evidence that its leadership was behind dissident and journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s murder last month.

In a statement on Tuesday, the president said that “the United States intends to remain a steadfast partner of Saudi Arabia to ensure the interests of our country, Israel and all other partners in the region.”

President Donald Trump just put out a doozy of a statement that indicates he won’t seriously punish Saudi Arabia over the murder of journalist and dissident Jamal Khashoggi in October.

It’s hard to be sure, though, because the statement — titled “Standing with Saudi Arabia” — is such a rambling, hard-to-follow, exclamation-point-ridden mess.

HALIFAX — Turkey’s Defense Minister Hulusi Akar said Saturday that the team sent to kill Saudi journalist and dissident Jamal Khashoggi may have carried his dismembered body parts through Istanbul’s international airport.

At the Halifax International Security Forum, an annual gathering of leading defense officials from around the world, Akar said it was “possible” that 18 men — not 15, as originally assumed — carried out the operation. They could get away with smuggling parts of the Washington Post columnist’s body through the airport because as diplomats they wouldn’t be searched by security, the minister noted.

A House Democrat will soon introduce legislation to punish Saudi Arabia over the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi — by trying to halt an impending nuclear deal with the country.

Obtained exclusively by Vox, the bill — nicknamed the “No Nuclear Weapons for Saudi Arabia Act of 2018” — if passed would be the strongest rebuke to Saudi Arabia yet since the uproar over Khashoggi’s fate.

Jamal Khashoggi was strangled to death and then dismembered in a preplanned attack inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul, a Turkish prosecutor said on Wednesday — the first official confirmation from Turkey’s government about how the journalist died.

It’s the latest development in an ongoing, horrific murder case that sounds like it was pulled straight from the pages of a gruesome political thriller and threatens to undermine relations between Saudi Arabia and the world.

President Donald Trump reportedly invited the fiancée of slain journalist Jamal Khashoggi to the White House. She said no.

Hatice Cengiz, who was to marry Khashoggi before he was killed inside the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul at the start of October, told a Turkish television news outlet that she declined an invitation from the White House from Trump.

For the past few weeks, the world has been riveted by the story of Saudi dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s disappearance and murder.

But while global attention is focused on Khashoggi’s fate, there are dozens of other dissidents, bloggers, and activists languishing behind bars in Saudi Arabia whose plights have been largely forgotten — and some whose whereabouts are unknown.

The United States is punishing some of the Saudi officials suspected in the likely murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a dissident and journalist killed inside the Saudi consulate in Turkey earlier this month.

On Tuesday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that the US will revoke visas for 21 Saudi officials. This group includes members of the Saudi intelligence services, the foreign ministry, and Royal Court who are implicated in Khashoggi’s disappearance.

In the three weeks since a Saudi journalist was killed inside his country’s consulate in Istanbul, Turkey has led a relentless campaign to hold Saudi Arabia accountable.

Turkish authorities have doled out leaks to the international press — certainly authorized by Ankara’s highest officials because of its tight control on the media — which increased speculation that Jamal Khashoggi’s murder was gruesome.

Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan had promised on Sunday to reveal “in full nakedness” what happened to Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who disappeared inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 2.

On Tuesday, Erdogan presented a detailed account of the events surrounding the journalists’ murder by Saudi officials, calling it a “planned” hit.

When President Donald Trump explained over the past two weeks why he was reluctant to damage the relationship between the US and Saudi Arabia over the disappearance and murder of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi, he kept coming back to one reason: jobs.

“I don’t want to hurt jobs,” Trump said in an interview with 60 Minutes that aired last weekend, explaining that there are “other ways of punishing.”

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin just dropped out of a major conference in Saudi Arabia. It’s the first real rebuke of Riyadh by the Trump administration over the likely murder of journalist and dissident Jamal Khashoggi — even if it’s a small one.

On Thursday morning, Mnuchin met with President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. It seems that Mnuchin’s participation in Saudi Arabia’s Future Investment Initiative, nicknamed the “Davos in the Desert,” came up, since shortly after, Mnuchin tweeted that he would not be attending.

Over the past 24 hours, we learned precise details about what Turkish officials say happened to Saudi journalist and dissident Jamal Khashoggi when he disappeared two weeks ago — and how the Trump administration wants to sweep the issue under the rug.

On Tuesday night, the Wall Street Journal reported that Khashoggi was drugged and murdered inside Saudi Arabia’s Istanbul consulate on October 2 in the presence of a top Saudi official, according to Turkish sources and an audio recording. The New York Times reported on other details from the audio recording of the incident the following morning.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo just took some smiling photos with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman — the person who reportedly ordered an operation that may have led to a prominent journalist’s death.

Pompeo is in Riyadh to meet with Saudi leadership and to discuss the fate of Jamal Khashoggi, a US resident and well-known Saudi journalist, who disappeared after visiting the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul on October 2.

Prominent Saudi journalist and dissident Jamal Khashoggi disappeared last week in Istanbul and may have been murdered — and it’s looking increasingly likely that the highest levels of the Saudi government, who were the primary targets of his criticism, are behind it.

The 59-year-old veteran journalist and columnist for the Washington Post was last seen on October 2 walking into the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul. He was there to obtain a document verifying his divorce so that he could marry his Turkish fiancée.