shriekingviolet posted:the fiction archetype of the calm, cool professional who receives clear orders for a Big Mission and executes it with careful, traceless precision as he flounces around doing Fancy Spy Shit is a myth.
Moon of Alabama is hinting ominously that the Saudis only fucked up because they secretly wanted the whole thing to be a public fuck-up, so they could send a vague, undefined message to parties unknown. The rare real-flag false flag like a boss.
MoA's list of cleaner imaginary operations the Saudis would have otherwise preferred over using a gang of their government's top-dog killers inside their own consulate:
- Saudi agents inject Khashoggi with super-dope, and with Turkish & foreign agents watching their every move, carry him all the way to an airfield somewhere in or near Turkey's biggest metropolis and onto a plane, then fly away into oblivion
- Saudi agents hire some low-rent rando hitman to shoot Khashoggi in the street and cross their fingers the guy they hire doesn't screw up, get caught and/or rat them out
- Saudi agents post Khashoggi to Saudi Arabia in a big shipping crate like when Mimi mailed Drew Carey to the Great Wall of China
I'm glad that blog is still around to make people like me look reasonable
wasted posted:I think it's just a simple case of there's no longer a reason to peddle the myth of the freedom-loving Jeffersonian contra.
tears posted:they cut up a cia agent with bonesaws?
he would have been an asset rather than an agent. he wasnt a US citizen and it's pretty common for cia to recruit foreign correspondents of friendly nations to do information gathering & propaganda work on an ad hoc basis.
i think the amount of care cia is showing in this case reflects khashoggi's involvement in something sensitive and/or that he was working both sides and the saudis wanted to send a message about their indepedence from the yanks
cars posted:I think he was a reporter that the Saudi government had murdered.
another rhizzone superstar cracks a case wide open, this is what it's all about folks. only here.
cars posted:Like... the CIA showing "care" about this after the President whined about it on TV tells us absolutely nothing. That's what they'd do regardless. And whatever they might be really doing, it won't involve one of their top officials' publicized activities.
There's a difference between caring and sending the head of the agency over to deal with it in person. It's only publicised because she's too visible to go without everyone noticing. I'm not saying the guy was going to expose the truth about Mecca being built by aliens or anything, just that he was doing a little extracurricular stuff while journalisting and it got him in trouble.
Petrol posted:There's a difference between caring and sending the head of the agency over to deal with it in person. It's only publicised because she's too visible to go without everyone noticing.
Sending the head of the agency over and making a big deal about it in the press is exactly how they'd show they "care" about it, in the exact way that shores up their image in the press and their nominal obedience to the White House. It doesn't tell us anything about what they're actually doing about it. And yeah, of course it's "only publicized because she's too visible to go without everyone knowing"; she's going because she's visible, and she's doing it so that everyone knows about it. Publicity is the goal of that exercise, or it wouldn't happen.
Like, yeah the U.S. government is involved here, in the usual way everyone already knows about: it's going to make a lot of noise while making sure nothing really bad happens to the people currently running Saudi Arabia. That's just SOP right now.
cars posted:And yeah, of course it's "only publicized because she's too visible to go without everyone knowing"; she's going because she's visible, and she's doing it so that everyone knows about it. Publicity is the goal of that exercise, or it wouldn't happen.
I guess we disagree on this because afaik it's actually pretty unusual for the head of the cia to personally travel somewhere under these circumstances, but I could be wrong about that. For publicity' sake? it really seems like overkill, but I guess everything about this is ridiculous anyway
mbs killed his oppositions puppy, nothing more elaborate than that i think.. but its backfired and he may get replaced as salman still has moments of lucidity.
Higgins, a doughy pinkish Midlands gamer,
Petrol posted:I guess we disagree on this because afaik it's actually pretty unusual for the head of the cia to personally travel somewhere under these circumstances, but I could be wrong about that. For publicity' sake? it really seems like overkill, but I guess everything about this is ridiculous anyway
I mean, though, why else would it happen? When an unacknowledged asset gets snuffed they probably don't have a policy of sending the head of the agency over to the country where it happened to plant a flag in the body, and the CIA certainly wouldn't need her to go to the site in person to address clandestine agency business on the side, especially since it would be difficult to conceal she was visiting from reporters or hide her specific activities from local state security goons. In general when a high-ranking, publicly visible executive, private or public, travels somewhere with a lot of fanfare nowadays, it's to draw attention from the press and flatter or embarrass whoever they're visiting.
I don't know why overkill in media messaging from the Trump White House would be surprising, I guess. They're pretty consistent about that: they make big, visible moves that "socialize" their message and ignore position-specific Washington etiquette for public officials, and they don't care who calls them stupid or not cricket or whatever so long as the person they send to do something draws attention to whatever story they want told. They don't even seem to care whether most news outlets tell their version of the story, just the ones that hit big Republican voting blocs. I think this is probably another situation where this administration does its P.R. and even diplomatic work through dealing blunt force trauma to the news cycle, and Hell,
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cars posted:
Let's all just laugh at Eliot Higgins now.
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Khashoggi posted:In his customary deceitful way, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif sought to portray Iran as a pleasant country, ready for dialogue with stubborn and hard-line Saudi Arabia. He told an audience at the Munich security conference last week: "We believe there is nothing in our region that would exclude Iran and Saudi working together for a better future for all of us," adding that extremists "are as much a threat to our brothers in Saudi Arabia as they are to the rest of the region. We are bound by a common destiny."
It is still better than the common Iranian rhetoric which claims that Saudi Arabia and Daesh are two sides of the same coin. As Zarif was presenting himself as peaceful lamb, his comrades in the Revolutionary Guard were raising their flags on what was left of a mosque minaret in northern Syria, watching broken women carrying white flags march by.
Those civilians are not Daesh, but some of them might join it after being radicalised due to what Iran is doing in Syria. So to have a joint fight with the Saudis against Daesh, Tehran must change its policies.
Iran looks at the region, particularly Syria, from a sectarian angle. The militias Tehran is relying on, some of which come from as far as Afghanistan, are sectarian. They raid Syrian villages with sectarian slogans, bringing to life conflicts from over a thousand years ago. With blood and sectarianism, Iran is redrawing the map of the region.
lol who was this fucker
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tears posted:lol who was this fucker
the voice of saudi resistance