8 Likes
The Mark One was strictly gravity powered. There’s been a compressed-air design for like EVER.
1 Like
Are we surprised, total amateur hour numpties. My deepest sympathies to Jamaal’s family, friends and his fiancee.
6 Likes
Stage one:
- Nothing happened
Stage two:
- Something happened, but it wasn’t all that bad
Stage three:
- Exactly the worst possible thing happened. We did it. We know that you know that we did it.
- Fuck off, because $110,000,000,000 in notional arms sales.
18 Likes
For anyone trying to keep up…
The Saudis have just admitted that Khashoggi was murdered in their embassy rather than it all being an unfortunate accident after he picked a fight with a dozen trained killers:
MBS (of course) is still completely innocent despite all the evidence pointing at him.
12 Likes
Speaking for myself, it has been their morbidly hilarious failure that has kept me following this. They’ve done almost everything wrong that they possibly could have. Honestly I’ve seen B-movies with more believable scripts.
8 Likes
Oh also: The murderers made one phone call was made to the United States. Who was that to?
6 Likes
Mueller
*End of Season Cliffhanger
11 Likes
Yeah, the idea that this was a rogue operation makes no sense. You don’t get a team of 15 (including, coincidentally, a forensics expert), into a Saudi embassy, murder, dismember, and cover everything up without leadership knowing wtf is going on.
14 Likes
And, if you do, it’s kind of an open question how much legitimacy that leaves the nominal leadership with.
Leaders whose clandestine services are running those sorts of rings around them without a hint of concern have a habit of either obligingly rubber-stamping a long string of similar actions in the future or becoming the subject of a similar action in the future, if they decide to get cold feet all of a sudden.
Unless successfully curbed, fast, the position taken by a state’s violence technicians tends to be the position taken by that state, one way or the other.
10 Likes
I suspect this operation started with:
"This Khashoggi speaks too much truth. How dare he! Bring Me His ________."
It doesn’t take 15 people and a lame-ass body double to just kill a guy. If they wanted him dead, there are much less labor intensive ways of going about it - car accident - poisoning - etc.
If you want a bona fide souvenir, however, you need a team to pull it off ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H make it happen.
4 Likes
Is there a term for this? Like “victim deflection”?
7 Likes
The Trumpkin model in action. Exactly. They learn fast.
3 Likes
“Asshole”?
9 Likes
The manner of killing Khashoggi was barbaric. But suppose instead the Saudis had followed his car with a Predator drone, and blasted him to bits with a Hellfire missile. Would that have been OK then?
3 Likes
16 Likes
A crime? Many things are a crime, but murder is immoral.
Murder is pretty much the number one on both the crime and immoral lists. I mean it’s murder!
Rubio’s tweet is so bizarre. “They murdered Khashoggi, which, by the way, was a real dick move to their friends.”
“Not only did they kill this man,they have left @potus & their congressional allies a terrible predicament”
OMFG, which of those things is worse? Can you not tell, Mr. Rubio? Can you not even pretend?
6 Likes
To me saying murder is immoral seems to be trivializing it, it may depend on how one thinks about it so i am not saying my interpretation is right. But to give you my thought process:
Immoral things are subjective, like i can say that for some people putting ketchup on a hot dog might be immoral. Lying to a priest is immoral. Murder is not subjective, it is factually a crime.
3 Likes
Yeah, I get your point, but it kind of threw me because I think of things being immoral as being worse than illegal: Until recently, driving a car while female was a crime in Saudi Arabia. Smoking pot is a crime in many US states. But even if we legalized murder, it would still be immoral.
I agree it is trivializing to call it immoral. It seems also trivializing it to call it a crime.
“The #KhashoggiMurder was a crime, but it was also disrespectful to Trump…” doesn’t seem better.
I think it is the ‘but’ that is the one of many problems here.
6 Likes
Erdogan has also done a masterful job of dripping out new info every day or so in order to keep the narrative fresh.
13 Likes
