Just days before Joe Biden’s visit to the kingdom this week, a former Saudi intelligence official warned that Mohammed Bin Salman “poses a threat to America.”
In regard to the death of journalist Kamal Khashoggi, Saad Aljabri, a former senior official in Saudi Arabia’s administration, claimed that the crown prince is a “psychopath” and a “killer.”
On Wednesday, Biden, who once called Saudi Arabia a “pariah” when running for president, will leave for a four-day trip to the Middle East to plead for increased oil supply.
“I am here to sound the warning about a psychopath, killer, in the Middle East with boundless riches, who poses harm to his people, to the Americans, and to the globe,” Aljabri said in an interview with CBS’s 60 Minutes.
A psychopath who lacks empathy, doesn’t sense emotion, and never gains wisdom from his mistakes. And we have seen the horrors and tragedies that this killer has committed.
After bin Salman’s revolution in 2017, which led to the ouster of Aljabri’s superior Prince Nayef as espionage chief, Aljabri was compelled to leave Saudi Arabia for Canada.
Aljabri, a father of eight, was informed that two of his children were unable to leave the kingdom and were still being held in a Saudi prison on the same day.
He asserts that his son-in-law was likewise abducted by another nation and sent back to Saudi Arabia.
A buddy in a Middle Eastern intelligence agency informed Aljabri that another hit team from the kingdom would target him in Canada after the murder of Khashoggi in 2018.
The caution I received, he explained, was to avoid being close to any Saudi mission in Canada. Avoid visiting the consulate.
Avoid visiting the Embassy. Why, I asked? Said, “They killed the person, then they dismembered him.” The list is at the top with you.
According to the dissident, a six-person team carrying DNA analysis equipment entered Ottawa in October 2018 and told customs officers they were acquainted.
They were expelled.
Aljabri thinks that his knowledge of bin Salman is the reason why he is being pursued.
This, according to him, includes statements made by the reigning crown prince in 2014 in which he threatened to assassinate King Abdullah in order to claim the throne for his father.
“I anticipate being killed one day,” Aljabri stated, “because this person won’t stop until he sees me dead.”
Biden’s journey this week begins with a diplomatically delicate stop in Israel and the occupied West Bank.
He will go to Bethlehem, which is in the West Bank and where Israel is alleged to have imposed military rule over millions of Palestinians.
On Saturday, Biden claimed that the Middle East had gotten more “stable and safe” in his nearly 18 months in office in an opinion piece that appeared in the Washington Post, the same publication where Khashoggi wrote much of his criticism of Saudi government before his death.
He also disputed the idea that going to Saudi Arabia amounted to a reversing course.
We overturned the blank-check policy we inherited in Saudi Arabia, wrote Biden. Additionally, he admitted that “there are those who disagree” with his choice to travel to the kingdom.
After seven years of a war that has killed 150,000 people in Yemen, he cited his administration’s efforts to persuade a Saudi-led coalition and Houthis to accept a U.N.-brokered cease-fire, now in its fourth month.
Additionally, Biden listed the lessened power of the Islamic State terrorist organization in the area, the conclusion of the U.S. combat operation in Iraq, and his administration’s assistance in brokering a cease-fire in the 11-day Israel-Gaza conflict from the previous year as accomplishments.
Biden pledged as a candidate that the Saudis would “pay the price” for their record on human rights.
The incisive language helped Biden set himself apart from Donald Trump, who made the kingdom his first official overseas trip as president and who continued to hail them as a “wonderful partner” even after the murder of Jamal Khashoggi.
When Biden issued his stern warning to the Saudis, oil was trading for approximately $41 per barrel; today, prices are closer to $105.
The high price of oil is hurting Americans at the petrol pump and raising the cost of necessities while boosting Saudi Arabia’s cash line.
Officials from the White House have stated that energy discussions will be a part of the president’s travel to Saudi Arabia, but they have downplayed the likelihood that the Saudis will agree to raise oil output further because the country claims it is almost at capacity.
The Saudi Arabia travel, according to Bruce Riedel, who served as a senior adviser on the National Security Council for four presidents, is, however, “totally unnecessary” in the current situation.
Nothing that Joe Biden will accomplish in Jeddah will be more difficult for the secretary of state, the secretary of defence, or, to put it bluntly, a truly effective ambassador to accomplish alone, according to Riedel.
There won’t be any result from this that truly justifies a presidential visit, the speaker said.