When Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi was murdered inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, on October 2, 2018, the Democrat Party and their allies in the media tried desperately to encourage President Trump to take drastic action against Saudi Arabia. They suggested if Trump didn’t take immediate action against the Saudi’s that somehow he was complicit in the murder of the alleged “green card” holding columnist.

Townhall is reporting that Khaghossi was not, in fact, a green card holder in the US, as previously reported.

According to a report in Business Insider, Khashoggi simply visited the U.S. on a visa.

Mohamad Soltan, an Egyptian-American activist who sees Khashoggi regularly in Washington, told Reuters that Khashoggi was in the United States on an O-visa, a temporary residency visa awarded to foreigners “who possess extraordinary ability” in the sciences, arts, education, and other fields and are recognized internationally, and had applied for permanent residency status.

Meanwhile, U.S. intelligence believes Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman directly ordered Khashoggi’s killing. According to President Trump, Khashoggi was viewed by the Saudis as an enemy of the state and a national security threat.

“Representatives of Saudi Arabia say that Jamal Khashoggi was an ‘enemy of the state’ and a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, but my decision is in no way based on that – this is an unacceptable and horrible crime,” Trump said.

It appears as though President Trump is correct about Khashoggi’s ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. One thing that has not been reported by the mainstream media, however, was Khashoggi’s ties to his friend Osama Bin Laden.

The Arab Weekly reports – Lawrence Wright, author of The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, couldn’t have imagined one of the other characters in his book was going to be at the center of a huge political and diplomatic controversy, no less than the book’s central character, namely Osama Bin Laden.

The book was adapted for television as a series with the same title and tells the story of Al-Qaeda’s infamous attacks on New York and Washington. In one paragraph, Wright mentions a close friend of Bin Laden’s who shared the latter’s ambition to “establish an Islamic state anywhere.” That friend was Jamal Khashoggi. Both Bin Laden and Khashoggi were at the time active members of the Muslim Brotherhood and later Bin Laden would split from the Brotherhood to form with Abdullah Azzam Al-Qaeda, the most dangerous organization in the world. Khashoggi, Bin Laden, and Azzam were all the merry companions of the same extremist group.

Today, the world is busy keeping up with the news of the disappearance of Jamal Khashoggi, journalist and Human Rights activist in Saudi Arabia, but very few know the man’s past and his affiliation with Al-Qaeda during the war in Afghanistan. He promoted Saudi Mujahedeen focusing on his friendship with Bin Laden.

Now, CNN is reporting that Washington Post reporter, Jamal Khashoggi was not only openly critical of the Saudi government, but was also secretly plotting to help overthrow the sitting government in Saudi Arabia.

In his public writings, Jamal Khashoggi’s criticism of Saudi Arabia and its Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was measured. In private, the Washington Post columnist didn’t hold back.

In more than 400 WhatsApp messages sent to a fellow Saudi exile in the year before he was killed at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Khashoggi describes bin Salman — often referred to as MBS — as a “beast,” a “pac-man” who would devour all in his path, even his supporters.

CNN was granted exclusive access to the correspondence between Khashoggi and Montreal-based activist Omar Abdulaziz. The messages shared by Abdulaziz, which include voice recordings, photos and videos, paint a picture of a man deeply troubled by what he regarded as the petulance of his kingdom’s powerful young prince.

“The more victims he eats, the more he wants,” says Khashoggi in one message sent in May, just after a group of Saudi activists had been rounded up. “I will not be surprised if the oppression will reach even those who are cheering him on.”

The exchanges reveal a progression from talk to action — the pair had begun planning an online youth movement that would hold the Saudi state to account. “[Jamal] believed that MBS is the issue, is the problem and he said this kid should be stopped,” Abdulaziz said in an interview with CNN.

But in August, when he believed their conversations may have been intercepted by Saudi authorities, a sense of foreboding descends over Khashoggi. “God help us,” he wrote.

Two months later, he was dead.

Abdulaziz on Sunday launched a lawsuit against an Israeli company that invented the software he believes was used to hack his phone.

“The hacking of my phone played a major role in what happened to Jamal, I am really sorry to say,” Abdelaziz told CNN. “The guilt is killing me.”

Abdulaziz began speaking out against the Saudi regime as a college student in Canada. His pointed criticisms of government policies drew the attention of the Saudi state, which canceled his university scholarship. Canada granted him asylum in 2014 and made him a permanent resident three years later.

In almost daily exchanges between October 2017 and August 2018, Khashoggi and Abdulaziz conceived plans to form an electronic army to engage young Saudis back home and debunk state propaganda on social media, leveraging Khashoggi’s establishment profile and the 27-year-old Abdulaziz’s 340,000-strong Twitter following.

The digital offensive, dubbed the “cyber bees,” had emerged from earlier discussions about creating a portal for documenting human rights abuses in their homeland as well an initiative to produce short films for mobile distribution. “We have no parliament; we just have Twitter,” said Abdulaziz, adding that Twitter is also the Saudi’s government’s strongest weapon. “Twitter is the only tool they’re using to fight and to spread their rumors. We’ve been attacked, we’ve been insulted, we’d been threatened so many times, and we decided to do something.”

The pair’s scheme involved two key elements that Saudi Arabia might well have viewed as hostile acts. The first involved sending foreign SIM cards to dissidents back home so they could tweet without being traced. The second was money. According to Abdulaziz, Khashoggi pledged an initial $30,000 and promised to drum up support from rich donors under the radar.

But in early August, he says he received word from Saudi Arabia that government officials were aware of the pair’s online project. He passed the news to Khashoggi.

“How did they know?” asks Khashoggi in a message.

“There must have been a gap,” says Abdulaziz.

Three minutes pass before Khashoggi writes back: “God help us.”

The fact Abdulaziz’s phone contained spyware means Saudi officials would have been able to see the same 400 messages Abdulaziz exchanged with Khashoggi over the period.

The messages portray Khashoggi, a Saudi former establishment figure, becoming increasingly fearful for his country’s fate as bin Salman consolidates his power.

“He loves force, oppression and needs to show them off,” Khashoggi says of bin Salman, “but tyranny has no logic.”

Such discussions could be considered treasonous in Saudi Arabia, a country with one of the world’s worst records for free speech.

For the entire CNN story, go here.

 

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