Bruce Riedel - Mentions and Appearances
Trump wants trophy kills... [The killing of Yemeni Al Qaeda leader, Qasim Al Rimi was] a significant but not fatal blow [to AQAP]. Rimi was a strong contender to succeed Zawahiri some day, but al-Qaeda is a resilient group.
The timing of this [Al Qaeda] audio [claiming responsibility for the Pensacola shooting] is designed to cause maximum humiliation for Trump, who had just retweeted reports of al-Rimi’s death. It’s also a statement that AQAP has infiltrated the Saudi military, which is an embarrassment for the Saudis.
Al-Rimi is an important target, probably more dangerous to Yemen and Saudi Arabia than for Americans given the group’s diminished capabilities during the Yemen war.
Anyone who has had communication with either MBS or his brother Khaled should assume their phone is hacked. Congress needs to get answers from NSA on what it knew about the hack of Bezos phone, when it knew it, and what it has done to stop Saudi criminal hacking behavior.
The Saudis are certain to have hacked many more phones to obtain compromising information on their critics, Americans as well as Saudis.
We’ve never seen [the crackdown on dissidents] on a scale like this. A dissident like Jamal Khashoggi in the past wouldn’t have been considered worth the effort.
The U.S.-Saudi relationship had its finest hour under Bush. It’s no surprise that the Saudis want to remember the good old days. Given the acute crisis in U.S.-Saudi relations, Riyadh urgently needs a capable ambassador in Washington, but not one so tainted with the Khashoggi murder and coverup.
Somebody wanted this information [CIA evidence that MBS communicated with the top aide overseeing the Khashoggi hit team 11 times before and after the assassination] to come out, obviously. I think there is, inside the American national security bureaucracy, a fair number of people who have been warning for some time that Mohammed bin Salman is a dangerous, reckless, impulsive person and they weren’t getting any attention. And now they have proof positive of how dangerous and reckless he is. In Washington, the way you say, ‘I told you so,’ is to leak something... You don’t really need to know the content of these [CIA] reports, it is self-evident. Fifteen people don’t get on an airplane and fly to Istanbul for a day trip and fly back having murdered someone and then made phone calls from the scene of the crime back to the crown prince’s office. You are not talking about the weather.
This [evidence that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman communicated repeatedly with a key aide around the time that Jamal Khashoggi was assassinated] is the smoking gun, or at least the smoking phone call. There is only one thing they could possibly be talking about. This shows that the crown prince was witting of premeditated murder... Will the White House give up the cover-up of the cover-up? I don’t see any sign they are willing to change their tune. But this will certainly increase the pressure to get Gina Haspel to testify on the Hill.
There’s no White House green light to take any sanctions against the [Saudi] crown prince himself. So Pompeo is stuck. They’re all stuck. We’re now engaged in a coverup of a coverup.