English activists remembered Khashoggi 5 years after the murder of the Saudi journalist

The vigil took place outside the Saudi Arabian embassy in London on Monday evening, as security guards loitered outside the gates of the premises. Some activists chanted slogans such as "down down bin Salman", referring to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, accused of ordering the assassination of the Middle East Eye (MEE) and Washington Post columnist. Khashoggi, who had criticized the government in Riyadh, was killed and dismembered by Saudi agents in the kingdom's Istanbul consulate on October 2, 2018. The US spy agency CIA said it had gathered several intelligence sources that bin Salman , the heir to the Saudi throne, had given the instructions for the killing. Mr. Khashoggi was suffocated and dismembered with a bone saw inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 2, 2018. The 15 assassins included seven members of the team elite personal protection agency of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, known as MBS, who, according to the US intelligence community, “approved an operation” to “capture or kill” Khashoggi.

His body was never found. The killing was at least in part retribution against Khashoggi for comments in The Post in which he called for a freer Arab world and a more open and tolerant Saudi Arabia – and in which he criticized MBS's dictatorial ways. President Donald Trump and his secretary of state responded to the killing by protecting the Saudi despot, refusing to impose severe sanctions against the kingdom, ignoring a congressional resolution calling for sanctions and trying to renew MBS's position. Mr Pompeo makes no secret of his admiration for him, saying that MBS is “leading the biggest cultural reform in the history of the kingdom” and is “a truly historic figure on the world stage”. Mr. Pompeo reveals that, privately, he and Mr. Trump felt they had saved the crown prince from disrepute. He recalls that the then president asked him to go to Saudi Arabia and that he was the first Western official to see MBS after Khashoggi's murder.

“In some ways I think the president was envious that I was the one giving the middle finger to the Washington Post, the New York Times and other bed-wetters who didn't have a grip on reality,” Pompeo writes. . “He said, 'Hey Mike, go and have fun. Tell him he owes us.’” This is the language of a street tough, not the leader of a nation based on the rule of law. Mr. Pompeo offers the weak and ignorant excuse that West Asia is a tough neighborhood. “The episode was bad, but it wasn't surprising, not to me anyway,” he writes of the murder, because “this kind of ruthlessness was all too normal in this part of the world.” Mr Pompeo hails Mr Trump's decision not to punish the crown prince, saying it was "not a close call". He then continues to defame the murdered Khashoggi by calling him an “activist” and not a journalist, claiming that he “had supported the losing team in a recent fight for the throne”. Khashoggi's journalism, including his criticism of the Saudi despot, was in the best tradition of American values of free expression, shedding light on the dark corners of the world. Mr. Pompeo reveals that he is a stranger to these principles