When the young Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ascended to power in 2017, he was hailed in the west as a liberal reformer, and was welcomed by Hollywood celebrities and world leaders alike. But what has happened to Saudi Arabia’s supposedly radical programme of reform? Saudi expert Madawi al-Rasheed joins the Prospect Interview and takes us behind the power struggles and social debates within the country—and why the west got it so wrong.
Showing posts with label Mohammad bin Salman Al Saud. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mohammad bin Salman Al Saud. Show all posts
7 August 2020
CNN: Saudi Crown Prince accused of assassination plot against senior exiled official
MBS, according to previously unreported WhatsApp text messages referenced in the complaint, demanded that Aljabri immediately return to Saudi Arabia. As he repeatedly refused, Aljabri alleges the Crown Prince escalated his threats, saying they would use "all available means" and threatened to "take measures that would be harmful to you." The Crown Prince also barred Aljabri's children from leaving the country. [...]
The US national security community has been tracking the Crown Prince's vendetta against Aljabri "at the highest levels" according to a former senior US official. "Everybody knows it," the former official said, "They know bin Salman wanted to lure Aljabri back to Saudi Arabia and failing that, that bin Salman would seek to find him outside with the intent to do him grave harm." [...]
"MBS is eager to neutralize the threat posed by Aljabri, whose intimate knowledge of the ruling family's skeletons, and everyone else's, and broad network, equipped him to enable any aspiring challenger to the crown," London says. "I don't rule out the possibility that MBS wanted to kill Aljabri, but it's just as likely, if not more so, that were there a team deployed to Canada, MBS wanted to put Aljabri under observation, information from which might provide insight on his contacts and activities."
16 April 2020
WorldAffairs: Saudi Arabia: Mecca is empty + Oil is Cheap
Now that the global economy is mostly on hold, the demand for oil has dropped dramatically, destroying the market and threatening countries whose economies depend on selling it. Saudi Arabia and Russia have been engaged in an oil-price war to keep the markets in their favor. Saudi Arabia saw another economic loss when the kingdom decided to limit access to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Meanwhile, violence in some of the most at risk countries rages on. In Yemen, preventable diseases like cholera already threaten people with limited access to healthcare and basic necessities. Would a global ceasefire help war-torn countries like Yemen manage their coronavirus outbreaks? On this week’s episode, we talk with experts from around the world about Yemen, oil and Saudi Arabia.
27 March 2020
The Prospect: The political rivalry that shaped the Middle East
Journalist Kim Ghattas joins the Prospect Interview to explain the political conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran—where did it come from, and how has it fundamentally transformed the region? She also talks about lessons from the Arab Spring, and why her own background growing up in Lebanon means she’s able to tell stories that challenge popular Western narratives.
17 November 2019
Bloomberg: Liberated Saudi Youth Wonder Where All the Wahhabis Have Gone
Today the muttawa are nowhere in sight. What’s visible instead is a younger generation of tech-savvy Saudis fired up by a sense of national, rather than religious, identity. “Saudi identity is us. The Wahhabi identity is not us,” says Mashael al-Baoud, who’s in her 30s. She’s standing behind her display of green crocodile-skin charms in the shape of Saudi Arabia and mobile phone cases embossed with the image of the crown prince or the national emblem, two crossed swords and a palm tree. “They have vanished,” she says. “Since they’re not here, we’re showing who we really are.”
But the contrast with the religiously repressed old kingdom is still dramatic. From cinemas to the lively activity in Riyadh’s King Abdullah Park to a top-floor hookah lounge in Jeddah, businesses have sprung up to cash in on the new tolerance. There’s even talk among some Saudis of the alcohol ban being lifted, possibly before the nation hosts the Group of 20 next year. What comes next depends on whether the economy can make enough strides to meet the expectations of a country where three-quarters of the population, including the crown prince himself, is under the age of 35. While they’re excited by the new liberalization, most young Saudis have one nagging concern: Where have the Wahhabis gone, and what are the chances of them coming back? [...]
And among the young, there are a few who are outright against the changes or worry the kingdom is moving too fast. Saudi Arabia is potentially at the “gates of too far,” says Zaid, the man looking for funding for his sandboarding business. From the eastern city of Dammam, he spent seven years in the U.S. and graduated in chemical engineering before returning home in 2017. “The whole society has loosened up. Loosening up is good, but we don’t want to take it to an extreme. You have to keep your culture.”
12 November 2019
Independent: As Saudi Arabia grows desperate, this could be the beginning of the end of the war in Yemen
The Yemen war is about to come to an end. A Saudi official admitted this week that for the first time since 2016, Riyadh is in talks with the Houthi rebels. The talks have surfaced despite the Houthis being in charge of the capital Sanaa and the other most populous parts in Northern Yemen, which indicates that the Saudis are coming to terms with this status quo. The radical approach of effectively flushing the Houthis out of the north has been abandoned. The new approach of accepting the Houthis as part of the new post-war reality in Yemen, on the other hand, is much more sophisticated. [...]
Instead of the endless fighting, Saudi Arabia is trying to convince the Houthis to sever ties with its regional rival, Iran. After all, all the Houthis want is legitimacy of their new strategic posture in Yemen. This, in their view, must be cited in a similar power-sharing agreement that guarantees their share in a federation-like new system that includes president Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi’s government and separatists in the south. [...]
The attack on the Saudi Aramco oil installations in September, which knocked out half of the Kingdom’s production, was a tipping point. This week, Aramco launched an initial public offering (IPO) to be listed on the local stock market, abandoning Mohamed bin Salman’s original plan to list it on overseas markets. The escalation with Iran began to have a direct effect on the Saudi economy.
4 July 2019
Foreign Policy: Mohammed bin Salman Is Making Muslims Boycott Mecca
In late April, Libya’s most prominent Muslim Sunni cleric, Grand Mufti Sadiq al-Ghariani, called for all Muslims to boycott the hajj—the obligatory pilgrimage of Muslims to Mecca.In late April, Libya’s most prominent Muslim Sunni cleric, Grand Mufti Sadiq al-Ghariani, called for all Muslims to boycott the hajj—the obligatory pilgrimage of Muslims to Mecca. He went so far as to claim that anyone who embarked on a second pilgrimage was conducting “an act of sin rather than a good deed.” The reasoning behind the boycott is the suggestion that boosting Saudi Arabia’s economy through pilgrimage continues to fuel arms purchases and direct attacks on Yemen—and indirectly Syria, Libya, Tunisia, Sudan, and Algeria. Ghariani added that investment in the hajj would “help Saudi rulers to carry out crimes against our fellow Muslims.”
Ghariani is not the first prominent Muslim scholar to support a ban on the hajj. Yusuf al-Qaradawi, also a Sunni cleric and vocal critic of Saudi Arabia, announced a fatwa in August last year banning the pilgrimage, instead stating, “Seeing Muslims feeding the hungry, treating the sick, and sheltering the homeless are better viewed by Allah than spending money on the hajj.” [...]
Throughout the Middle East and in other Muslim-majority nations, there has been growing concern over the slaying of Khashoggi, as well as the rising death toll in Yemen, which is expected to reach 230,000 by 2020 through the often indiscriminate airstrikes by the Saudi-led coalition—which has bombed hospitals, funerals, children’s school buses, and weddings—in what has been described as the “worst man-made humanitarian crisis of our time” by U.N. officials. Saudi Arabia’s truculent approach to the Yemen war has isolated itself within its own coalition; even the Emirati government has shown some discomfort toward the Saudi approach.
30 June 2019
Today in Focus: Has Saudi Arabia got away with the murder of Jamal Khashoggi?
A UN report on the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi has said there is credible evidence linking the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, to the crime. Nick Hopkins and Stephanie Kirchgaessner discuss the killing and the fallout in Saudi Arabia and among its allies. Plus: Patrick Timmons on the political reaction to the deaths of a father and daughter in the Rio Grande this week.
8 June 2019
The New York Review of Books: Reckless in Riyadh
America’s delicate treatment of the Saudis persisted: for example, while the two countries were targeting terrorists, Washington said little about the enormous Saudi NGOs that spread their ultraconservative Wahhabi Islam around the globe. As the scholar Will McCants remarked, when it comes to Islamist extremism, “the Saudis are both the arsonists and the firefighters.” Still, the burgeoning ties among spies produced real benefits. At least two plots that could have killed significant numbers of Americans during the Obama administration were disrupted because of Saudi tips. American officials murmured approval when the Saudis took small steps to alleviate the plight of the country’s Shia minority or to promote women’s education and participation in the workforce, but their criticism of human rights abuses—torture and other mistreatment of government critics, harsh punishment of migrant workers, and mass beheadings, whether of Shia “terrorists” or common criminals—remained muted at best. [...]
At first, Vision 2030 gave MBS a real sheen. Donald Trump broke with tradition and made the first overseas trip of his presidency to Riyadh instead of visiting democratic allies. The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote, “I never thought I’d live long enough to write this sentence: The most significant reform process underway anywhere in the Middle East today is in Saudi Arabia.” He praised MBS for rolling back the power of the country’s clerical establishment and proclaimed, “Not a single Saudi I spoke to here over three days expressed anything other than effusive support for [his] anticorruption drive.” During a visit to the US in April 2018, MBS was feted by Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos and, at a dinner party hosted by Rupert Murdoch, entertained by the actors Michael Douglas and Morgan Freeman, before having an audience with Oprah Winfrey.
The sheen faded quickly, though, as it became clear that MBS’s notion of reform owed less to Western norms than to Xi Jinping and the Chinese policy of pushing for economic growth without permitting the expansion of political freedoms. There has been a degree of limited liberalization, but in MBS’s view, reforms must be granted by the crown, not elicited, let alone demanded, by his subjects. Hence the imprisonment of women who pressed for the right to drive and for a relaxation of the “guardianship laws” that give men control over the lives of the women in their families—the very measures that MBS had endorsed and, to some extent, enacted. Despite the reforms, there has also been an increase in the pace of executions. Several are now planned for well-known Sunni clerics who, though previously incarcerated for opposing royal policies, were viewed as too popular to be treated more harshly. [...]
Equally astonishing has been the kingdom’s open embrace of Israel. In 2015 a retired Saudi general, Anwar Eshki, participated in a discussion of Israeli and Saudi mutual interests with Dore Gold, a right-wing Israeli former diplomat, at the Council on Foreign Relations’ office in Washington; in 2017 Saudi media broadcast a lengthy interview with then Israeli chief of staff Gadi Eizenkot. In November 2018 Israeli media leaked a diplomatic cable from the country’s foreign ministry instructing its embassies worldwide to advocate for Saudi foreign policy objectives, especially vis-à-vis Iran. And Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has defended MBS for his involvement in Khashoggi’s murder—in which the Saudi go-between with Israel, General Ahmed Asiri, was implicated. It has also been widely reported that the Trump administration expects the Saudis to fund an Israeli–Palestinian peace agreement; according to MBS, the Palestinians should either accept it or “shut up.”
22 February 2019
Haaretz: Pakistan Just Became Saudi Arabia's Client State, and Turned Its Back on Tehran
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman may have got the cold shoulder from protesting crowds in Tunisia and been publicly sidelined at the G20 conference last November, but he was treated to a hero’s welcome in Pakistan this week. [...]
Khan has acquiesced to MBS’ pointed demand: to join the Sunni Muslim axis against Iran. That formalization of an anti-Tehran alliance that Pakistan has previously hesitated to endorse will have ripple effects both within Pakistan, and across the region.
The first leg of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman’s Asia tour saw him strike $20 billion worth of deals in Pakistan. The financing comes as much needed relief for Islamabad, which is looking to dodge a thirteenth International Monetary Fund bailout amid a balance of payment crisis that is crippling the economy. [...]
Just as India threatens war in retaliation, assurances Pakistan received from both Saudi Arabia and China bolstered its decision that there was no need to go after Jaish-e-Mohammad, the terror group that took responsibility, and whose leadership is still living openly inside Pakistan. [...]
Just as Islamabad gave MBS an anti-Iran podium, Tehran is echoing claims often made by India: that Pakistan provides a safe haven for to jihadists and fails to take action against militants crossing the border to launch attacks on neighboring territories. That identification with its arch-enemy naturally makes Pakistan’s alignment against Iran easier.
2 January 2019
The Atlantic: Unanswered Questions Surround Jamal Khashoggi's Murder
Why kill him in the consulate—the one place in Istanbul where Saudi culpability would be undeniable? Istanbul is a big city, and Khashoggi lived there openly and without security. I met up with him in London not long before his assassination, and when we had breakfast, he sat with his back to the street, in an open café. To slay him with a bullet to the head would have been simple, speedy, and deniable. Many other options exist. Consider the lengthy menu of deniable assassination techniques apparently used by Russia in Ukraine, England, and elsewhere.
Why kill him with sedatives? “The Saudi team brought a syringe packed with enough sedative to be lethal,” according to the Post. Assassins have used many weapons, ranging from firearms to a ricin pellet embedded in the tip of an umbrella. You can guess the advantages of each weapon. A syringe of sedatives is, by any measure, a peculiar choice. Sedatives are not reliable killers, unlike, say, cyanide. But why get pharmacological at all? Evidently the integrity of Khashoggi’s body was not a major concern, so why not just shoot him in the head, strangle him, or stab him in the heart?
Why deploy a team of more than a dozen easily recognized Saudi operatives? A kill mission, especially one in a location of the assassins’ choice, does not require a team of that size, and indeed is more secure with fewer people. Instead of sending in two jets loaded with security personnel, why not fly in three or four killers on Turkish Airlines, traveling separately and using false identities?
11 December 2018
Bloomberg: Putin’s Saudi Bromance Is Part of a Bigger Plan
Day by day, it becomes increasingly clear that a central fault line — perhaps the central fault line — in world affairs is the struggle between liberal and illiberal forms of government. And as this happens, geopolitical alignments are shifting in subtle but momentous ways. In particular, the bonds between the U.S. and many of its authoritarian allies are weakening, as those countries find that they have less in common ideologically with America than with its revisionist rivals. [...]
In the Middle East, Russia is not simply building its partnership with America’s sworn enemy, Iran. It is also making inroads with U.S. partners Saudi Arabia, Egypt and even Jordan, based on those countries’ perception that Putin’s authoritarian regime can act decisively in support of its friends while avoiding American-style meddling in their domestic politics. Orban leads a country that belongs to NATO, but he has a chummy relationship with Putin and his government is generally perceived to be thoroughly compromised on matters concerning Russia. [...]
A second approach would be to embrace the ideological challenge. The U.S. could double down on its relationships with liberal democracies, repairing core alliances that Trump has damaged and cultivating closer ties with democratic powers from Colombia to India to Indonesia. It might redouble investments in protecting democracy where it is endangered and promoting it — in countries such as Malaysia — where processes of liberalization are underway. It might push its authoritarian allies to be modestly more respectful of human rights and political liberties, using levers such as restricting arms sales or discontinuing military exercises. At the very least, it would make clear that its relationships with those allies are more transactional and less special than those with its fellow democracies.
read the article
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27 November 2018
Axios: Defying Trump, key GOP senator to sharpen focus on Saudi prince
In a phone interview, Graham told me he and some of his colleagues have requested an intelligence briefing this coming week to find out whether the reporting is correct that the CIA has "high confidence" MBS ordered the assassination of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. [...]
Why it matters: It doesn't look like the Khashoggi story is going away. It's unlikely new sanctions on Saudi will pass in the lame duck. That means this fight will likely carry over into next year — potentially pitting Democratic senators and a smaller group of Republicans against the president. [...]
The bottom line: Graham is arguing the opposite. "We cannot have a normal strategic relationship with somebody this crazy," Graham told me. Graham said "everything would be on the table" to punish Saudi Arabia, including blocking arms sales.
26 November 2018
New Europe: The inconvenient truth about Saudi Arabia
What makes the truth inconvenient is Saudi Arabia’s strategic importance. The Kingdom still accounts for over 10% of global oil output. Its sovereign wealth fund sits on an estimated $500 billion. Saudi Arabia is the most influential Sunni Arab country, occupying a special role within the Muslim world, owing to its role as the custodian of Islam’s holiest sites. It is central to any policy of confronting Iran. [...]
Israel, too, has indicated support for MBS, owing to his willingness to move in the direction of normalizing relations and, more important, the two countries’ shared interest in countering Iranian influence in the region. And US President Donald J. Trump’s administration is standing by its man, so far refusing to acknowledge his role in Khashoggi’s murder and resisting calls for sanctions against Saudi Arabia.[...]
Consultations should also be held with China and Russia. Unlike the US, both have working relationships with Saudi Arabia and Iran, which gives both a stake in preventing such a war from starting and shutting it down quickly if it does.
22 November 2018
Al Jazeera: Why Saudi Arabia's foreign policy is failing
At the beginning of the Cold War, Riyadh took a backseat in most regional conflicts, leaving the rowdy revolutionaries of the Arab world (Egypt, Iraq and Syria) to take the lead. On Palestine, for example, the Saudis decided to keep a low profile. Although Riyadh backed the war efforts of the so-called "ring states" - the Arab countries surrounding Israel - it always refrained from getting involved in a direct military confrontation with the Zionist state. When it decided to get involved - for example by leading the 1973 oil embargo - it always did so through soft or economic power. [...]
Throughout the Cold War, Saudi Arabia also played a quiet albeit important role in the international arena, contributing to the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union. In the 1980s, it joined Pakistan and the United States in their efforts to support armed groups resisting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, funding most of the CIA programmes to arm and train the Mujahideen. The House of Saud also helped plunge oil prices in the second half of the 1980s, bringing the oil-dependent Soviet economy to its knees. [...]
For the first time in its recent history, Saudi Arabia found itself completely exposed, with no one to fall back on but itself. To add insult to injury, the Obama administration showed little sensitivity towards Saudi concerns as it sought rapprochement with Iran, leaving Riyadh deeply worried about its security. As the feeling of insecurity in the House of Saud grew, "backseat" diplomacy gave way to a more assertive foreign policy; the tactics, however, remained more or less the same: confrontation by proxy. [...]
Not only has MBS created more enemies than he can handle, but he has also chosen the wrong allies. He has embarked on a dangerous path of normalisation with Israel, believing that it would pay back in the long run. But with this decision, he risks losing the hearts and minds of the Arab people to Turkey and Iran, both of which have positioned themselves as champions of the Palestinian cause.
21 November 2018
The Intercept: The Saudi Crown Prince’s PR Campaign Has Totally Failed. Only Donald Trump Still Buys It.
While the federal bureaucracy, Congress, and the press are all turning against MBS, Trump has remained characteristically resolute in the face of the facts. On Tuesday, he released a mind-boggling statement, even by his standards, pronouncing his faith in the Saudi crown prince and prevaricating on MBS’s involvement in Khashoggi’s killing. “King Salman and Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman vigorously deny any knowledge of the planning or execution of the murder of Mr. Khashoggi,” Trump said. “Our intelligence agencies continue to assess all information, but it could very well be that the Crown Prince had knowledge of this tragic event – maybe he did and maybe he didn’t!”[...]
MBS’s authoritarian style has also been highlighted by the way he has responded to the current backlash. Recent weeks have seen the bizarre spectacle of individuals like Prince Waleed bin Talal, a wealthy Saudi businessman who was one of dozens imprisoned by MBS at the Ritz Carlton hotel in Riyadh, appearing on Fox News to sing praises of the crown prince and defend him from criticism. Khashoggi’s own son also appeared recently with MBS, in a sinister-looking photo-op supposedly intended to help “prove” that Khashoggi’s family did not blame MBS for the murder.
The collapse of MBS’s image results from a basic contradiction in his approach to governing: He sought to ease the consciences of American liberals while also running an increasingly aggressive dictatorship. Under his rule, the Saudi government behaved much like authoritarian regimes in Syria and Russia, bombing civilian populations, as well as murdering and imprisoning dissidents. Unlike the leaders of those countries, however, MBS wanted to be loved, or at least praised, in the West.
Vox: Why the US won’t break up with Saudi Arabia over Jamal Khashoggi’s murder
Paul Salem: So energy was a pillar of the early relationship between the US and Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia continues to be an essential producer and exporter of oil globally, and has a huge impact on global oil prices. For a long time, the US got many of its energy resources from Saudi Arabia.
Their partnership also centered around global finance and economics. Much of Riyadh’s great wealth flowed into the US economy in terms of investments, arms purchases, or other businesses setting up shop in Saudi Arabia.
As the Cold War took off, Saudi Arabia also became a strong ally of the US in the fight against communism. The Saudis were religious and conservative, and very much opposed the atheist wave led by the Soviet Union. [...]
When Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (also known as MBS) came to power, he made counterterrorism one of the main pillars of the relationship with the United States. He admitted that moves by Saudi Arabia since 1979 to use radical Islam as a weapon against the Soviets or against the Iranians backfired, and says he wants to change that policy. [...]
I think the US is moving away from actually protecting human rights around the world. It’s partly because the US is no longer the dominant global power that can just order people around.
Al Jazeera: Report: Saudi royals turn on king's favourite son after killing
Senior US officials, meanwhile, have indicated to Saudi advisers in recent weeks they would support Prince Ahmed bin Abdulaziz - who was deputy interior minister for nearly 40 years - as a potential successor to King Salman, according to Saudi sources with direct knowledge of the consultations.
Amid international outrage over Khashoggi's murder, dozens of princes and cousins from powerful branches of the Al Saud family want to see a change in the line of succession, but will not act while King Salman - the crown prince's 82-year-old father - is still alive, sources said.
They recognise the king is unlikely to turn against his favourite son, the report added.
Rather, they are discussing the possibility with other family members that after the king's death, Prince Ahmed, 76, uncle of the crown prince, could take the throne, according to the sources. [...]
The official also said the White House saw it as noteworthy that King Salman seemed to stand by his son - also known as MBS - in a speech in Riyadh on Monday and made no direct reference to Khashoggi's killing, except to praise the Saudi public prosecutor. [...]
According to one well-placed Saudi source, many princes from senior circles in the family believe a change in the line of succession "would not provoke any resistance from the security or intelligence bodies he controls" because of their loyalty to the wider family.
20 November 2018
CNN: With the Khashoggi story worsening, the US may finally have an adult in the room
MBS has also variously presided over a disastrous war in Yemen; the blockade of Saudi Arabia's neighbor, Qatar; the de facto temporary kidnapping of the Lebanese prime minister; and the incarceration in a luxury hotel in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, of some two hundred businessmen and princes, who had to hand over tens of billions to secure their freedom in what the government described as settlements in an anti-corruption drive.
Astonishingly, given the importance of Saudi Arabia there hasn't ever been a Trump-appointed ambassador in the country. The US-Saudi relationship has therefore been largely an informal one managed by President Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, 37, and MBS, 33. [...]
It's hard to think of someone more qualified than Abizaid for the role. Abizaid, aged 67, speaks fluent Arabic and once ran Central Command (CENTCOM), which is responsible for US military actions in the Middle East. This gives him great expertise and experience in the region as well as the gravitas to speak for President Trump. [...]
Jeffrey was one the dozens of signatories of the 'Never Trump' letters by leading Republican national security officials during the 2016 presidential election campaign. In the past, signing such a letter would have torpedoed your chance of serving in a significant role in the administration, but in Jeffrey's case his subject matter expertise has apparently trumped the letter.
17 November 2018
Politico: Trump administration slaps sanctions on Saudis over Khashoggi’s death
The Treasury Department designated the officials for sanctions over what it called “serious human rights abuse,” freezing any U.S. assets and barring American citizens from engaging in business with them. The announcement named royal court adviser Saud al-Qahtani and said he led the team that flew into Istanbul just hours before Khashoggi entered the consulate there for paperwork relating to his planned marriage. Al-Qahtani was fired from his post in late October. [...]
Human rights groups, however, expressed outrage that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who is close to presidential adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner, was left out of the sanctions.
Members of Congress and many in Washington named the crown prince as the orchestrator of the alleged operation to kill Khashoggi, while the Trump administration said it needed more time to investigate and gather all the facts. Trump himself expressed ambivalence over jeopardizing weapons sales with the Saudis by taking tough action in response to Khashoggi’s death.[...]
The Trump administration had been previously quick to slap sanctions on international actors, including in Nicaragua, Myanmar and the Gambia, using the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act, which gives the president broad sanction powers to punish human rights violators. In a statement Thursday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo signaled the administration might not be done responding to the death of Khashoggi, who was living in Virginia at the time of his death.
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