Timesof24
Former US secretary of state Mike Pompeo in a guide staunchly defended Saudi Arabia
Washington:
Former US secretary of state Mike Pompeo in a guide launched Tuesday staunchly defended Saudi Arabia after the killing of a dissident author, gloating that his diplomatic relationship with the dominion was a “center finger” to US media.
Pompeo flew to Riyadh days after the October 2018 killing of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi residing in the USA who wrote opinion items in The Washington Submit criticizing the dominion’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
“What actually made the media madder than a vegan in a slaughterhouse was our relationship with Saudi Arabia,” Pompeo wrote in “By no means Give an Inch,” a combative memoir of his time as Donald Trump’s prime diplomat.
On Trump dispatching him, Pompeo wrote, “In some methods, I believe the president was envious that I used to be the one who gave the center finger to The Washington Submit, The New York Occasions and different bed-wetters who did not have a grip on actuality.”
The CIA, which Pompeo as soon as led, in findings later declassified by President Joe Biden stated that Crown Prince Mohammed ordered the killing of Khashoggi, who was lured into the dominion’s consulate in Istanbul the place he was strangled and dismembered.
Pompeo in his guide didn’t contest Saudi duty, writing, “This grotesque butchery was outrageous, unacceptable, horrific, unhappy, despicable, evil, brutish and, in fact, illegal.”
“But it surely wasn’t shocking — to not me, anyway. I might seen sufficient of the Center East to know that this type of ruthlessness was all too routine in that a part of the world,” he stated.
He additionally disputed that Khashoggi was a “journalist,” mocking the media of turning him right into a “Saudi Arabian Bob Woodward who was martyred for bravely criticizing the Saudi royal household.”
Pompeo’s remarks introduced fast condemnation, with Khashoggi’s fiancee, Hatice Cengiz, saying she was “horrified and upset.”
“He has spoken with no respect and no humanity about an individual murdered so brutally,” she wrote on Twitter.
Washington Submit writer and CEO Fred Ryan stated it was “stunning and disappointing” to see Pompeo “so outrageously misrepresent” Khashoggi.
“Jamal devoted himself to the values of free speech and a free press and held himself to the best skilled requirements. For this devotion, he paid the final word worth,” Ryan stated in an announcement.
Pompeo insisted that Crown Prince Mohammed was a reformist who “will show to be probably the most essential leaders of his time, a very historic determine on the world stage.”
He stated there ought to as a substitute have been extra scrutiny of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who criticized Saudi Arabia over the killing. Pompeo wrote that the Turkish chief “had gone full Islamist-authoritarian.”
(Apart from the headline, this story has not been edited by Timesof24 workers and is printed from a syndicated feed.)
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