Trump Gives Saudi Arabia Benefit of Doubt in Journalist’s Disappearance

Faults media for treating Saudi officials as 'guilty until proven innocent'

With Saudi Arabia working on the exact language of their admission that journalist Jamal Khashoggi was killed in their consulate in Istanbul, President Trump is shifting his policy toward increasingly vocal defense of the Saudis, and blanket denials that the Saudis are doing anything wrong.

Talk of punishment if found guilty is drying up, and now President Trump is complaining that the media is treating the Saudis as “guilty until proven innocent,” despite having admitted himself that he’d also heard the Saudis are working on an admission that they in fact killed Khashoggi during a “botched interrogation.”

Trump appears content to take the word of Saudi officials as absolute insisting that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman denied any knowledge of what happened in the consulate, and citing the king’s promise of a full investigation.

While certain specifics are still not known, the official narrative shaping up on the Saudi side is that the officials who tortured Khashoggi to death then somehow got rid of his body were not acting on direct orders of the king or the crown prince, but rather were trying to win favor by showing initiative in getting rid of an enemy that the Saudi kingdom, according to US intercepts, had been trying to have dealt with for awhile.

From the Saudi perspective this allows them to promise to punish some officials while maintaining that the leadership is blameless. But as this strategy takes shape, President Trump is increasingly taking a position that the kingdom is blameless in general.

This is likely a response to how poorly Trump’s argument that Khashoggi’s death isn’t worth losing US arms sales deals has been taken. Yet the opportunity to hope the whole incident is forgotten is long past, and a Saudi admission of guilt, however much spin is put on it, is going to force Trump into another shift in position.

Author: Jason Ditz

Jason Ditz is Senior Editor for Antiwar.com. He has 20 years of experience in foreign policy research and his work has appeared in The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, Forbes, Toronto Star, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Providence Journal, Washington Times, and the Detroit Free Press.