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09-07-2021
WASHINGTON/ RIYADH/ ISTANBUL: The United States Biden administration is facing criticism from rights groups and anti-war advocates for its welcome of Saudi Arabia Prince Khalid bin Salman to Washington, DC, for high-level meetings this week.
Prince Khalid bin Salman is the brother of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, also known as MBS. Over July 6-7, the prince met with US President Joe Biden’s National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Joint Chiefs Chairman General Mark Milley and other senior US officials.
MBS was formally identified earlier this year by US intelligence agencies as having sanctioned the killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi by a Saudi hit squad in Istanbul, Turkey, in 2018. As a presidential candidate in 2020, Joe Biden had denounced Khashoggi’s assassination and pledged Saudi Arabia would be a “pariah”.
“It’s tremendous hypocrisy on the part of the Biden Administration to act like it was going to transform the relationship with the Saudis,” said Medea Benjamin, co-founder of Code Pink, a women’s peace advocacy group in Washington, DC.
“The Biden administration is going against everything that it said it was going to do,” Benjamin told media on Thursday.
She added that it said it would have a different relationship with Saudi Arabia. “Biden talked about MBS being a pariah, and how he was going to make sure that the US was not supporting facilities in their war in Yemen.
“Yet in reality, he puts out the red carpet for MBS’s brother. He continues to sell weapons to Saudi Arabia. And he is keeping information from the public about the killing of Khashoggi,” Benjamin said.
President Biden and his team have walked a narrow line between condemning Khashoggi’s murder and maintaining a working relationship with Crown Prince Bin Salman, the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia. The US wants Saudi cooperation on a range of challenges from Iran’s nuclear program to the civil war in Yemen and the crisis unfolding in Lebanon.
US spy agencies, in a declassified report prepared by the CIA and released on February 26, had assigned responsibility for the operation that killed Khashoggi to MBS.
With release of the report, the State Department put more than 70 Saudi nationals on a no-travel list and the Treasury Department imposed financial sanctions on officials who were directly involved in the killing of Khashoggi. But neither MBS or his brother Prince Khalid were included in those sanctions.
Khalid Bin Salman was the Saudi ambassador to the US at the time of Khashoggi’s murder. At the time he condemned “malicious leaks and grim rumors” surrounding Khashoggi’s disappearance on October 2, 2018, saying any claims that he was missing in the Istanbul consulate “or that the Kingdom’s authorities have detained him or killed him are absolutely false and baseless”.
The Saudi government later admitted a team of Saudi agents had killed Khashoggi in the consulate. (Int’l News Desk)
