Washington Post More or Less Confirms That Jamal Khashoggi Was a Paid Qatari Intelligence/Propaganda Asset

I can see how American "journalists" would regard this as the normal state of affairs and not really that different from a plain ol' "journalist."

Many journalists in the US are paid by Fusion GPS to plant Fusion stories, which in turn were funded by interested parties including foreign governments.

Quotes from the Washington Post below, with commentary added by streiff from RedState.

Perhaps most problematic for Khashoggi were his connections to an organization funded by Saudi Arabia’s regional nemesis, Qatar. Text messages between Khashoggi and an executive at Qatar Foundation International show that the executive, Maggie Mitchell Salem, at times shaped the columns he submitted to The Washington Post, proposing topics, drafting material and prodding him to take a harder line against the Saudi government. Khashoggi also appears to have relied on a researcher and translator affiliated with the organization, which promotes Arabic-language education in the United States.

...

Khashoggi was never a staff employee of the Post, and he was paid about $500 per piece for the 20 columns he wrote over the course of the year. He lived in an apartment near Tysons Corner in Fairfax County that he had purchased while working at the Saudi Embassy a decade earlier. [Note: how did he live in the DC Metro area for about $10K/year?]

Khashoggi also appears to have accepted significant help with his columns. Salem, the executive at the Qatar foundation, reviewed his work in advance and in some instances appears to have proposed language, according to a voluminous collection of messages obtained by The Post. [Journalists accepting "significant help" from government operatives in writing stories is a fact of how journalism is conducted in the Middle East, the Post eliding over this speaks volumes.]

In early August, Salem prodded Khashoggi to write about Saudi Arabia's alliances "from DC to Jerusalem to rising right wing parties across Europe...bringing an end to the liberal world order that challenges their abuses at home."

Khashoggi expressed misgivings about such a strident tone, then asked, "So do you have time to write it?"

So in other words, Khashoggi was largely just a frontman for anti-Saudi propaganda written by an operative of the Saudi's chief Arab rival, Qatar.

"I'll try," she replied, although she went on to urge him to "try a draft" himself incorporating sentences that she had sent him by text. A column reflecting their discussion appeared in The Post on Aug. 7. Khashoggi appears to have used some of Salem's suggestions, though it largely tracks ideas that he expressed in their exchange over the encrypted app WhatsApp.

Other texts in the 200-page trove indicate that Salem’s organization paid a researcher who did work for Khashoggi. The foundation is an offshoot of a larger Qatar-based organization. Khashoggi also relied on a translator who worked at times for the Qatari embassy and the foundation.

...

On Oct. 3, one day after Khashoggi's death, while his fate remained uncertain, his researcher contacted The Post to say that he had a draft of a column that Khashoggi had begun writing before his disappearance. It was published two weeks later. [The likelihood that Khashoggi's last column was ghostwritten to take advantage of his disappearance by making him appear to be an Arabian Thomas Jefferson approaches certainty.]

streiff quotes Dave Reaboi of the Strategic Studies Group noting that it doesn't make sense for the Washington Post to reveal that the man they've been painting as a patriotic martyr for two months was in fact a shabby operative working for a government hostile to his native country except if the Washington Post knew that there were rumors about these texts and possible payments to Khashoggi and they sought to get ahead of a story they knew could no longer be suppressed.

posted by Ace of Spades at 03:22 PM

| Access Comments