Saudi Arabia: Friend and Ally

The current occupant of the White House is looking to burnish his self-proclaimed reputation as the world’s greatest deal-maker with another arms sale to Saudi Arabia. To get rid of any distractions, he has fired the Inspector General who was looking into last year’s artful eight-billion-plus-dollar deal that sent weaponry to the Kingdom last year, over the strenuous objections of Congress.

The Bush family, too, were long-time friends and business partners with Saudi Arabian potentates.

Lately, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is giving some attention to Saad Aljabri, a former top Saudi intelligence officer now living in Toronto. Aljabri was responsible for the kingdom’s estimable counterintelligence operation and is esteemed by former C.I.A. head George Tenet. Former U.S. and British counterterrorism officials credit him with saving hundreds — maybe thousands — of lives. Crown Prince MBS accuses him of stealing from the royal treasury and of being a Muslim Brotherhood sympathizer. Even worse, he is a reminder of the Crown Prince’s predecessor. To encourage his return to Saudi Arabia, MSB has imprisoned, in an undisclosed location and without charges, Aljabri’s son Omar and daughter Sarah.

The COWH is B.F.F. with Prince Mohammed. Perhaps he is jealous of the unquestioned power MBS wields. Such power as demonstrated by the 2018 murder-by-bone-saw of Jamal Khashogge, the dissident and Washington Post correspondent, when he visited Saudi’s Istanbul consulate.

Closer to home, in 2016, fifteen-year-old Fallon Smart was crossing Hawthorne Boulevard in a gentrified section of southeast Portland. She didn’t make it to the other side. Abdulrahman Sameer Noorah, twenty years old and driving with a suspended license, had been passing cars on Hawthorne on that August day. His gold Lexus plowed into Smart at excess of fifty miles per hour, more than twice the posted limit. He kept going.

Noorah later returned to the crash scene and was arrested. He was charged with first-degree manslaughter and felony hit-and-run. Noorah wore a tracking device on his ankle while awaiting trial. Two weeks before the trial date, a black S.U.V picked him up at his Southeast Portland home. A private plane flew him home, to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. His ankle tracking monitor turned up at a sand-and-gravel yard.

Six other Saudi nationals have disappeared from Oregon before trials or completing jail sentences: two accused rapists; two accused hit-and-run drivers; an accused child pornographer; another suspected of sexual assault and; a man accused of carrying a loaded, illegally-purchased firearm. Like Noorah, they were all young men attending a public college or university in Oregon with assistance from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. There are at least twenty similar instances in the U.S. and Canada.

Oh yeah. Remember the skyjackers who flew airplanes into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon? They came to the U.S. from Saudi Arabia.

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