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#jamal khashoggi
liberalsarecool · 7 months
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Why give $2 BILLION to a guy who failed countless FBI security clearances and never managed money before?
Can the media follow up?
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wren-der · 11 months
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ginogirolimoni · 1 month
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Non c'è nessuna differenza fra l'arresto e la morte di Aleksej Naval'nyj, l'eliminazione di Jamal Khashoggi e la persecuzione, l'arresto e la richiesta di estradizione di Julian Assange.
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odinsblog · 10 months
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Some evil, greedy, treacherous mother fuckers associated with LIV Golf, all the way around
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👉🏿 https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/07/sports/golf/liv-pga-tour-saudi-arabia.html
👉🏿 https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/19/world/middleeast/jamal-khashoggi-case-facts.html
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The social media company formerly known as Twitter has been accused in a revised civil US lawsuit of helping Saudi Arabia commit grave human rights abuses against its users, including by disclosing confidential user data at the request of Saudi authorities at a much higher rate than it has for the US, UK or Canada.
The lawsuit was brought last May against X, as Twitter is now known, by Areej al-Sadhan, the sister of a Saudi aid worker who was forcibly disappeared and then later sentenced to 20 years in jail.
It centers on the events surrounding the infiltration of the California company by three Saudi agents, two of whom were posing as Twitter employees in 2014 and 2015, which ultimately led to the arrest of al-Sadhan’s brother, Abdulrahman, and the exposure of the identity of thousands of anonymous Twitter users, some of whom were later reportedly detained and tortured as part of the government’s crackdown on dissent.
Lawyers for Al-Sadhan updated their claim last week to include new allegations about how Twitter, under the leadership of then chief executive Jack Dorsey, willfully ignored or had knowledge of the Saudi government’s campaign to ferret out critics but – because of financial considerations and efforts to keep close ties to the Saudi government, a top investor in the company – provided assistance to the kingdom.
The new lawsuit details how X had originally been seen seen as a critical vehicle for democratic movements during the Arab spring, and therefore became a source of concern for the Saudi government as early as 2013.
The new legal filing comes days after Human Rights Watch condemned a Saudi court for sentencing a man to death based solely on his Twitter and YouTube activity, which it called an “escalation” of the government’s crackdown on freedom of expression.
The convicted man, Muhammad al-Ghamdi, 54, is the brother of a Saudi scholar and government critic living in exile in the UK. Saudi court records examined by HRW showed that al-Ghamdi was accused of having two accounts, which had a total of 10 followers combined. Both accounts had fewer than 1,000 tweets combined, and contained retweets of well-known critics of the government.
The Saudi crackdown can be traced back to December 2014, as Ahmad Abouammo – who was later convicted in the US for secretly acting as a Saudi agent and lying to the FBI – began accessing and sending confidential user data to Saudi Arabian officials. In the new lawsuit, it is claimed that he sent a message to Saud al-Qahtani, a close aide to Mohammed bin Salman, via the social media company’s messaging system, saying “proactively and reactively we will delete evil, my brother”. It was a reference, the lawsuit claims, to the identification and harming of perceived Saudi dissidents who were using the platform. Al-Qahtani was later accused by the US of being a mastermind behind the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018.
“Twitter was either aware of this message – brazenly sent on its own platform – or was deliberately ignorant to it,” the revised lawsuit states.
Twitter, now X, does not respond to questions from the press.
The Guardian contacted the company lawyer in the case, Ben Berkowitz of Keker, Van Nest & Peters, but did not receive a response. The Guardian also contacted Dorsey’s new company, Block, Inc, to request a comment from the former Twitter chief executive, but did not receive a response.
After Abouammo resigned in May 2015, he continued to contact Twitter to field requests he was receiving from Bader al-Asaker, a senior aide of Mohammed bin Salman, for the identity of confidential users. He made clear to the company, the lawsuit alleges, that the requests were on behalf of his “old partners in the Saudi government”.
The lawsuit also alleges that Twitter had “ample notice” of security risks to internal personal data, and that there was a threat of insiders illegally accessing it, based on public reporting at the time.
Twitter “did not simply ignore all these red flags … it was aware of the malign campaign”, the lawsuit claims.
On 28 September 2015, Twitter received a complaint from a Saudi user that their accounts had been compromised. But, the lawsuit alleges, the company did not act to bar one of the Saudis who was later accused – Ali Hamad Alzabarah – from having access to confidential user data, even though he had accessed the user’s account previously.
Saudi Arabian authorities, the lawsuit alleges, would formally follow up with Twitter once it received confidential user data from its agents working inside the company, by filing so-called EDRs – or emergency disclosure requests – in order to obtain documentation that confirmed a user’s identity, which it would then use in court. Often those EDRs were approved on the same day.
In May 2015, when two Twitter users tweeted about the kingdom in a way that al-Asaker found objectionable, Albabarah accessed the users’ data within hours. EDRs about the users were then sent, and automatically approved by Twitter, the lawsuit alleges.
Between July and December 2015, Twitter granted the kingdom information requests “significantly more often” than most other countries at that time, including Canada, the UK, Australia and Spain, the lawsuit alleges.
On 5 November 2015, just days before Twitter was confronted by the FBI about its concerns about a Saudi infiltration of the company, it promoted Alzabarah – now a fugitive living in Saudi. In response, Alzabarah sent his Saudi government contact, al-Asaker, a note, conveying his “unimaginable happiness” for the promotion. The note, the lawsuit claims, is evidence that Alzabarah believed al-Asaker had “arranged” or “been influential” in connection to the promotion.
Once Twitter was made aware of the FBI’s concerns, it put Alzabarah on leave and confiscated his laptop, but not his phone, which he has used extensively to contact his Saudi state contacts. Twitter, the lawsuit alleges, “had every reason to expect that Alzabarah would immediately flee to Saudi Arabia, which is exactly what he did.”
The US attorney’s office in San Francisco, which handled the case, did not respond to The Guardian’s request for comment on the company’s handling of the matter.
Twitter would later notify users who had been exposed, telling them their data “may” have been targeted, but did not provide more specific information about the scale or certainty that the breach had, in fact, occurred.
By “failing to give this crucial information, Twitter put thousands of Twitter users at risk,” the lawsuit alleges, claiming that some may have had time to escape the kingdom had they understood the risk. Even once Twitter was aware of the breach, it continued to meet and strategize with Saudi Arabia as one of its vital partners in the region. Dorsey met with bin Salman about six months after the company was made aware of the issue by the FBI, and the two discussed how to “train and qualify Saudi cadres.”
“We believe in Areej’s case and we will zealously prosecute it – but what she wants most is for Saudi Arabia to simply release her brother and let him re-join his family in the United States,” said Jim Walden, a lawyer representing Al-Sadhan from Walden Macht & Haran. “Were that to happen, she and Abdulrahman would gratefully resume their lives and leave justice in God’s hand.”
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gregor-samsung · 1 year
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“ Diceva Eschilo che «la prima vittima della guerra è la verità». Ma la seconda è la logica. Putin affermava di voler «denazificare l’Ucraina», ma usava le bombe e i carri armati, cioè gli stessi metodi con cui Hitler nazificava l’Europa. Gli atlantisti ribattevano che «non si tratta col nemico»: semmai si tratta con l’amico, ma su cosa? Boh. Joe Biden dava del «macellaio» e del «genocida» a Putin, epiteti decisamente appropriati, soprattutto il primo. Ma un tantino indeboliti dal pulpito da cui provenivano: quello del padrone della macelleria (che ha fatto molte più guerre e molti più morti di Putin e al massimo potrebbe assumerlo come garzone). Bill Clinton coglieva l’occasione della guerra di Putin per vantarsi di aver allargato la Nato a Est «pur consapevole che i rapporti con la Russia potevano tornare conflittuali», perché «l’invasione russa dell’Ucraina dimostra che era necessario». Che è un po’ come dire: l’ho preso a calci in culo e lui mi ha spaccato la faccia, quindi avevo ragione io a prenderlo a calci in culo. I trombettieri delle Sturmtruppen ripetevano due mantra. 1. «La Nato è un’alleanza difensiva» (ma non spiegavano come mai nella sua storia abbia aggredito mezzo mondo). 2. «La Nato difende i valori della democrazia» (ma non spiegavano perché vanti tra i suoi soci la Turchia di Erdoğan e abbia appena fomentato un golpettino in Pakistan per cacciare un premier non gradito). Il presidente ucraino Volodymyr Zelensky intimava all’Ue di rinunciare al gas russo «sporco di sangue», «finanziando il genocidio»: lui però continuava ad acquistarlo tramite Paesi vicini e società svizzere, pagandolo profumatamente, «finanziando il genocidio» e per di più incassando da Putin 1,4 miliardi l’anno «sporchi di sangue» per i diritti di transito del gasdotto russo sotto il suolo ucraino.
L’Onu espelleva la Russia dal Consiglio per i Diritti Umani, presieduto dall’Arabia Saudita (nota culla dei diritti umani, apprezzata da Matteo Renzi, ma soprattutto da Jamal Khashoggi, da ottanta giustiziati nel mese di marzo, nonché dai 370mila morti e dai venti milioni di affamati nello Yemen). Per non dipendere dal gas e dal petrolio dell’autocrate Putin, Draghi firmava contratti per far dipendere l’Italia dall’autocrate algerino Abdelmadjid Tebboune (che reprime partiti di opposizione e sindacati, fa arrestare attivisti per i diritti umani ed è fra i migliori partner militari di Mosca) e di altri regimi autocratici che hanno rifiutato di condannare la Russia all’Onu: Qatar, Egitto (vedi alle voci Regeni e Zaki), Congo (vedi alla voce Attanasio), Angola e Mozambico. E continuava a vendere armi all’Arabia Saudita e agli Emirati Arabi Uniti (i macellai dello Yemen), all’Egitto e al Qatar. A supporto del ribaltamento della logica, si provvedeva a ribaltare anche il vocabolario, secondo i dettami del ministero della Verità in 1984 di George Orwell: «La guerra è pace», «La libertà è schiavitù», «L’ignoranza è forza». Putin vietava di parlare di «guerra» perché la sua era solo un’«operazione militare speciale». E chi diceva il contrario finiva in galera. Ma in passato anche i buoni occidentali, quando aggredivano militarmente questo e quello, la guerra non la nominavano mai: meglio “missione umanitaria”, “esportazione della democrazia”, “peacekeeping”. A ogni strage di civili – regolarmente attribuita ai russi, anche nei casi in cui era opera delle truppe ucraine o dei loro fiancheggiatori neonazisti del Battaglione “Azov” – si ricorreva a termini impropri come “genocidio” (distruzione sistematica di un popolo, di un’etnia, di un gruppo religioso) e a paragoni blasfemi con l’Olocausto, la Shoah, la Soluzione Finale (termini finora usati da tutti, fuorché dai negazionisti, esclusivamente per quell’unicum storico che fu lo sterminio nazista degli ebrei). Ma bastava leggere i libri di Gino Strada per sapere che le stragi di civili sono una costante di ogni conflitto e si chiamano precisamente “guerra”, visto che in ciascuna il rapporto fra vittime civili e militari è invariabilmente di 9 a 1. E quella in Ucraina purtroppo non faceva eccezione, malgrado l’indignazione selettiva dei fanatici atlantisti che – per bloccare sul nascere qualunque tentativo di portare Putin al tavolo del negoziato – si affannavano a dipingere quel conflitto come diverso da tutti gli altri per le vittime civili, le fosse comuni, le torture, le violenze gratuite e le armi proibite (anch’esse caratteristiche costanti di tutti i conflitti, inclusi quelli scatenati dai “buoni”). “
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Dalla prefazione di Marco Travaglio a:
Franco Cardini, Fabio Mini, Ucraina. La guerra e la storia, Paper First, Maggio 2022 [Libro elettronico]
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thenib · 1 year
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Niccolo Pizarro.
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jerseydeanne · 1 year
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New Valentine Low Book Excerpt "Meghan’s lawyers also argued that she had no idea about Prince Mohammed’s suspected involvement in Khashoggi’s murder. But by the time she wore the earrings for a second time, this claim was even harder to sustain."
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blueonwrestling · 1 year
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for all my “““anti wwe”““ bias that i have on here, there is no fucking defending the wwe with this whole saudi deal.
and i know yes I know america is not a great country I know the united kingdom is not a great country but for the love of god you are out of your fucking mind if you’re comparing these countries.
an absolute horrible country that is one of the worst human rights violators in the world, a complete and utter sports wash of the country via WWE even after the jamal khashoggi murders they’ve got the literal crown prince guy who ordered it up ther with a wwe title.
DEFEND THIS, ANYONE FUCKING DEFEND THIS PLEASE.
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thesobsister · 7 months
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It's odd how these various allies, client states and vassals of The Most Powerful Nation in the History of the World™ generally lead us around by the short'n'curlies.
I always thought that energy independence meant that we'd be able to dropkick the House of Saud right into the International Court of Justice.
Guess not.
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o-kurwa · 2 years
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Shit you say when that oil money starts trickling your way
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saywhat-politics · 2 years
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Former CIA Director and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo passed up a chance to say he agreed with the CIA’s finding that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ordered the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018.
When asked Tuesday on Hannity, Pompeo replied, “Well, I will leave that to the intelligence professionals. I have actually read what’s there.”
“You should know—read it carefully—there are still lots of questions about what transpired there other than the fact we know that there was a murder,” he added. “And we were highly confident during my time in service that the dozen people—I think it was 13 maybe—that we sanctioned were connected to that in a serious way…”
The Biden administration early last year released an unclassified intel report that concurred with the CIA.
“We base this assessment on the Crown Prince’s control of decision making in the Kingdom since 2017, the direct involvement of a key adviser and members of Muhammad bin Salman's protective detail in the operation, and the Crown Prince’s support for using violent measures to silence dissidents abroad, including Khashoggi,” it read.
Hannity’s questioning of Pompeo came after the White House announced earlier Tuesday that President Biden will visit the crown prince next month to outline “his affirmative vision for U.S. engagement in the region over the coming months and years.” Despite Biden’s previous vow while campaigning for president to make Saudi Arabia a “pariah” state, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre defended the decision, saying that “important interests are interwoven with Saudi Arabia.”
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odinsblog · 25 days
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No one loves Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman more than America’s elite. In recent years, we’ve seen leaders, investors, and celebrities hold out a Saudi exception to human rights in the service of a blurry concept of national interests that requires the U.S. to constantly compromise its values in service of an autocrat. And so MBS has been welcomed back into the establishment fold, and he won over Washington. And now he’s taking a victory lap.
When Saudi Arabia convened a 2018 summit in Riyadh, businesspeople shielded their name tags from view, sheepish about seeking MBS’s money just days after journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s murder. But the stigma has apparently worn off, and big names in finance, tech, media, and entertainment showed up at the Miami edition of Davos in the Desert.
The entire conceit of the conference is that Saudi Arabia can be abstracted from MBS, who is hardly ever mentioned yet remains the unspoken force behind the events. The host, the Future Investment Initiative Institute, a mouthful, is essentially the crown prince’s personal think tank. Session after session offered platitudes and ruminations on the least controversial ideas ever—AI is going to change the world! Climate is important! Sports bring people together! The two-day gathering was titled “On the Edge of a New Frontier,” itself a sort of redundant name. (Isn’t a frontier an edge?)
Yasir Al-Rumayyan, governor of a major sovereign wealth fund that’s currently under Senate investigation, led the proceedings. The Public Investment Fund that Al-Rumayyan runs is the conference’s founding partner and powers its lavish events. That Al-Rumayyan has $70 billion in annual investments to dole out is enough to draw out financial titans, curious entrepreneurs, and former Trump officials.
Jared Kushner, who had grown a beard, was talking about his theory of investing, without noting that MBS’s sovereign wealth funds had reportedly contributed $2 billion to his Affinity Partners. Steve Mnuchin, who similarly snared $1 billion of Saudi funds for his Liberty Strategic Capital, wore a suit and dress sneakers and talked about Israel as a tech hub. Mike Pompeo, in a tie, said that U.S. leadership in the world requires a “stability model” that involves working with “like-minded nations,” though “they’re not all going to be democracies.” Little wonder he rushed U.S. arms to Saudi Arabia as secretary of state as part of an end run around Congress.
Doing business with Saudi Arabia has become so normalized that the CEOs of major corporations and investment firms showed up in droves. There was Accenture’s Julie Sweet, Blackstone’s Stephen Schwarzman, and Thiel Capital’s Jack Selby. David Rubenstein—the billionaire who has played host to President Joe Biden at his Nantucket estate—spoke alongside his daughter Gabrielle. (This year, the Biden administration didn’t send an emissary, but the deputy commerce secretary, Donald Graves, attended in 2021.)
Journalists have kept a distance from Saudi Arabia after the dismemberment of Washington Post columnist Khashoggi, but in Miami the moderators included CNN’s Bianna Golodryga, Fox’s Maria Bartiromo, Bloomberg’s Manus Cranny, and The Wall Street Journal’s Gerard Baker.
MBS has especially used boldfaced names to rehabilitate his standing post-Khashoggi, his crackdown on women activists, and the destructive Yemen war. In Miami, there was a fireside chat with failed Senate candidate Dr. Oz. “Saudi Arabia is, I think, doing some wise investing and shifting mindsets by trying to leapfrog, in some cases, where the West is,” Oz said.
For Gwyneth Paltrow, it was just another fun public event. She spoke about how Goop had “built meaning” for its fans, in conversation with entrepreneur Moj Mahdara, a former adviser to Hillary Clinton. It was particularly incongruous when Paltrow discussed bringing more women to the cap table to fight the patriarchy.
Rob Lowe had some advice for Riyadh’s efforts to break into Hollywood and create its own film industry. “My view is there’s no reason that Saudi shouldn’t be the leader in IP in the same way they’re attempting to be the leader in sports and everything else,” Lowe said. “You need to have someone who can communicate: Why Saudi, why now.”
For all of the glitzy stage management and slick social media branding, at many moments there were fewer than 50 people watching the livestream on YouTube. But what mattered more were the opinion leaders, financiers, and tycoons in the room.
Big Tech was there, too, with Google’s Caroline Yap and Dell’s Michael Dell. Nothing was quite as obsequious as last year’s gathering in Miami when Adam Neumann, Marc Andreessen, and Ben Horowitz—all beneficiaries of Saudi Arabia’s financial largesse—gushed about how MBS is like a “founder,” except “you call him, ‘His Royal Highness.’”
(continue reading)
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u-more · 1 year
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«Non ero io in Arabia a prendere soldi dall’assassino di Khashoggi», dice Calenda. Ma qualcosa nel ragionamento non torna.
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