SecState Mike Pompeo and SecDef James Mattis: No Direct Evidence, No Smoking Gun Connecting Kashoggi Assassination to Saudi Crown Prince

Most people know about the Katyn Forest Massacre, but if you don't:

In 1940, the Soviets rounded up Polish military and intelligence officers, and members of the Polish intelligentsia, and executed them two-by-two with pistols and dumped them into mass graves.

They killed 22,000 people. They killed them two at a time, one in front of the other, so that they could kill two with one bullet. This laborious process meant that the large-scale slaughter took time -- 28 days. The prisoners were kept in pens, listening to their comrades being murdered, while they were awaiting their own turn to be killed.

The massacre was not known outside of Soviet command circles for a while. But later, the Nazis invaded the other half of Poland, the half that used to be held by their former allies, now enemies the Soviet Union, and discovered the mass graves in 1943.

They accused the Soviets of having committed a major massacre in utterly cold blood.

Now, the Nazis were of course guilty of their own genocidal program.

But they were not wrong about the Soviets being behind this massacre.

Question:

In 1943, with Fortress Europe still mostly held by the Third Reich, and with our brutish Soviet allies tying down most of the Nazi war machine on the Russian Front (and with Russia threatening that they would sign a separate peace with the Nazis and thereby free the Nazis up to send the full force of the Wermacht against Allied troops, unless the US opened a much bigger western front than we had down in Italy) should we have disowned the Soviets and handed Europe to Adolf Hitler?

Churchill decided that such a thought was preposterous, and the Americans followed suit. From Wikipedia:

According to the Polish diplomat Edward Bernard Raczynski, Raczynski and General Sikorski met privately with Churchill and Alexander Cadogan on 15 April 1943, and told them the Poles had proof the Soviets were responsible for the massacre. Raczynski reports Churchill, "without committing himself, showed by his manner that he had no doubt of it". Churchill said "The Bolsheviks can be very cruel".

However, at the same time, on 24 April 1943, Churchill assured the Soviets: "We shall certainly oppose vigorously any 'investigation' by the International Red Cross or any other body in any territory under German authority. Such investigation would be a fraud and its conclusions reached by terrorism".

Churchill, the Lion of Britain, promised the Soviets he'd denounce the truth and call it a fraud created by Nazi terror.

Which he knew to be false (in this instance).

Unofficial or classified UK documents concluded Soviet guilt was a "near certainty", but the alliance with the Soviets was deemed to be more important than moral issues; thus the official version supported the Soviets, up to censoring any contradictory accounts. Churchill asked Owen O'Malley to investigate the issue, but in a note to the Foreign Secretary he noted: "All this is merely to ascertain the facts, because we should none of us ever speak a word about it."

O'Malley pointed out several inconsistencies and near impossibilities in the Soviet version.

Later, Churchill sent a copy of the report to Roosevelt on 13 August 1943. The report deconstructed the Soviet account of the massacre and alluded to the political consequences within a strongly moral framework but recognized there was no viable alternative to the existing policy. No comment by Roosevelt on the O'Malley report has been found.

All of this is to say: Sometimes in war you excuse war crimes by your allies.

There is a war going on, with the Islamist dictatorship Turkey, the deep-pocketed, Western-media-purchasing Qataris, and the Islamist terror state of Iran on one side, and the Saudis, Bahrain, the UAE, Jordan, Egypt (post-Muslim Brotherhood, of course!) and Israel on the other.

The Saudis killed someone. Someone who has previously worked as a mouthpiece for the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda, and was close to more terrorist-friendly elements in Saudi Arabia. Supposedly that was behind him now (supposedly). But whatever his background, it's hard to see his murder as what polite civilized society would call justifiable.

There is a massive information ops being conducted against the US media -- or I should say, with the full complicity of the Western media -- to end our alliance with Saudi Arabia over this, and effectively hand victory in the war to Iran, Turkey, and Qatar, and deal defeat to Jordan and Israel.

There is little doubt that Obama's Boys are rooting for such an outcome. They have long fought, bizarrely, to treat the enemy nation Iran as an ally and the allied nation Israel as an enemy.

But why the hell would the rest of us go along with this plan?

And why the hell is the media pretending that Saudi Arabia's enemies in this war do not routinely kill journalists and kill dissidents living in Western countries?

That wasn't seen as a major problem when Obama handed Iran $150 billion and the permission to update its atomic bomb fuel centrifuge program. In fact, Ben Rhodes served as the Maestro of a Grand Echo Chamber in the media covering up Iran's past, and present, misdeeds to get them their $150 billion.

All the media, nearly, agreed.

Why is it required that we now end all military cooperation with the Saudis?

Also curiously, the media is suddenly interested in the civilian deaths in the war in Yemen, which is being fought between groups sponsored by/allied with Saudi Arabia on one side, and Iran on the other. It's a regional proxy war, in other words.

Back in 2016, when I was reading French newspapers, I noticed the French were covering this war and noting the awful civilian deaths it was producing.

I also noticed that the American media did not report on this at all. It was if the media followed a rule that went like this:

If there was no domestic political fight, no leftwing domestic agenda item, that could be advanced by war coverage, like blaming a Republican President for war deaths, or blaming Israel, the deaths just didn't matter, and in fact, really didn't even happen, as far as the media was concerned.

But now the media does have domestic political squabble they can advance by talking up Yemeni civilian deaths -- they can attack Trump for not doing enough to punish Saudi Arabia, and try to push down his approval rating, and they can fight for the bizarre Pivot to Iran the Obama Boys gave us with the Iran Deal.

And suddenly, the media is covering Yemeni civilian deaths -- something they never covered at all when it was a president they helped elect, Barack Obama, who would be harmed by exposing the civilian deaths and questioning the US' involvement in the war.

Odd, isn't it?

I've said this before myself, but Dave Reaboi said it on twitter recently: The Democrat Party is dedicated to the idea that there are no External Enemies, no foreign enemies. They think this makes them elevated and peaceful.

But they do have enemies -- and their enemies are Internal Enemies, also known as "other American citizens."

And the only time the Democrats or their media Broadcast Communication Shops start pretending they've discovered a new External Enemy, it's really all just kabuki to fight the only war they care about, the war against their internal enemies, their domestic opponents.

The media did not care about Yemeni casualties in 2016 and it does not care about them now. This is about taking down a hated domestic enemy -- Trump -- and rewarding their fellow partisans in the leftwing army by improving Iran's position.

The media did not care about all the actual US citizens Iran killed in terror attacks, both soldiers and civilians on cruise ships, and never for one second thought such piddling concerns ought to stand in the way of Ben Rhodes' and Barack Obama's diplomatic efforts to give Iran the nuclear bomb.

And it also does not care that Saudi Arabia killed a "reporter" who was, as some reporters are (especially in this area of the world), actually a partisan for an enemy faction.

But they'll pretend they care -- again, to get Trump, and to prop up Rhodes' and Obama's Iran Initiative.

The media and Democrats have no enemy but one: you, and all normal, non-leftist Americans.

And if you see them ginning up a moral panic about a supposed foreign enemy, you better take great heed, because what they're really doing is mounting an offensive against you.

Flashback: from Jane D'Oh:

18 Seeing the MFM's hair on fire over Khasshoggi, this got willowed:

Remember when ISIS beheaded an American journalist, and Barry sashayed
in front of a mic for a couple of minutes to tell us, and then hit the
links immediately after?

The press whores were pretty quiet.

Right. There were domestic political considerations of a higher priority -- namely, not undermining Obama's claim that "ISIS was on the run." So this was played down, and barely remarked upon.

Below, clips of Pompeo and Mattis denying direct proof of the involvement of the Saudi Crown Prince in the murder.

Which I think is probably bullshit, but you know, FDR and Churchill knew that the Soviet's claim "The Nazis did the Katyn Massacre" was bullshit too, but they pretended along with it, at least until the war was over.

Correction: I thought I remembered the Nazis had 20 divisions in Russia. But a quick look-up tells me they sent 99 of their 190 divisions to Russia.

Quite a deviation from my memory.

Well, I'm not sure what the right number is so I've rewritten to avoid specifying how many Nazi troops were in Russia. Let's just say it was the majority of their armies.

Another Correction: Commenters say the executions were done with pistols, not machine-guns.

Grump928C adds these details:

Point of history. They shot them, in pairs, by hand, with a pistol.

It took weeks. So for weeks some had to listen to their comrades being murdered and just wait for their turn.

...

and by pairs I mean they shot one bullet through two heads to save ammunition.

Oh, I had no idea about that. I may be being influenced by a brief flashback depiction of the Massacre by Hollywood, in Enigma.

posted by Ace of Spades at 07:08 PM

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