Many people are up in arms over President Trump’s red-carpet welcome of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS). They cite the CIA’s conclusion that bin Salman orchestrated and ordered the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi after he entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul to secure documents relating to his upcoming marriage.
At a press conference yesterday, Trump observed that “things happen” in life but emphasized that bin Salman played no role in Khashoggi’s gruesome murder, which bin Salman himself denies playing a part in.
There is an extremely important point to emphasize about this though: When it comes to the power of government to kill its own citizens, the Saudi system and the US system are now very similar. That is, in both systems, the regime wields the omnipotent power to kill any citizen who is deemed to be a threat to “national security.”
After all, keep in mind that Khashoggi was not an American citizen. He was a Saudi citizen. When he walked into that Saudi consulate in Istanbul, it was legally protected property that Turkish officials could not enter without Saudi permission. Moreover, diplomatic staff have immunity from prosecution and thus cannot be arrested for crimes committed inside the consulate.
Therefore, the minute that Khashoggi entered his own government’s consulate, he knew — or should have known — that he was subject to be killed by his own government — the Saudi government. It was a dumb decision on his part, given his previous harsh critiques of his own government.
Why did the Saudi government consider Khashoggi to be a threat to “national security”? Because as a renowned columnist for a world-famous newspaper, he was openly challenging the Saudi regime and many of its brutal, tyrannical practices. For example, he was openly critical of MBS for centralizing authority and suppressing rivals. Moreover, while not openly calling for the overthrow of the Saudi monarchy, he supported concepts that are antithetical to the monarchy, such as freedom of speech, political participation, and limits on authoritarian rule.
Sure, one can say that such things are not valid reasons for killing a citizen, but we need to keep in mind something important: In a national-security state, which both Saudi Arabia and the United States are, it is the regime, not the press or the citizenry, that has the power to decide matters that relate to “national security,” including who constitutes a threat to “national security” and who doesn’t — as well as the omnipotent power to eliminate that threat.
The national-security-state system in Saudi Arabia is no different in principle than the one here in the United States. For example, for the past several weeks, the Trump regime, including the Pentagon, has been killing people on the high seas. While the killings are being justified under such rubric as the “war on drugs,” “narco-terrorism,” and “unlawful enemy combatants,” the bottom line is that the victims have been deemed to be a threat to US “national security,” which then enables US officials to kill them.
One might respond by saying that the US power to kill people only extends to foreigners, not Americans. Not so! Under US national-security law, the president and the national-security establishment (i.e., the Pentagon, the vast military-industrial complex, the CIA, and the NSA) have the final say as to what constitutes “national security” and who constitutes a threat to “national security” and the omnipotent power to eliminate threats to “national security.”
If Trump, the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA decide that an American citizen constitutes a grave threat to “national security (which have become the two most important words in the American political lexicon), then they have the same omnipotent, non-reviewable authority to exterminate that citizen as Saudi Arabia has with its citizens.
That’s why the US government, for example, was able to kill American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki with immunity and impunity. Once he was deemed to be a threat to US “national security,” al-Awlaki was subject to being killed; and he was killed at the hands of his own government, just as Jamal Kashoggi was.
It’s worth pointing out that US officials have not always wielded this omnipotent power. The last thing that the Framers and our ancestors wanted was to live under a government that wielded the omnipotent power to kill them, especially since an abusive regime might begin applying the power to critics of the regime, as the Saudi national-security state has done. That was why the Constitution did not delegate such power to the federal government. It’s also why our ancestors emphasized the point with the Fifth Amendment, which expressly prohibits the federal government from killing people without due process of law — e.g., formal notice of charges and a trial.
Thus, for more than 150 years, Americans lived under a totally different system than the system that now exists in both the United States and Saudi Arabia. Mohammed bin Salman’s red-carpet welcome to the United States should serve as a reminder of why Americans living today would be well-served to restore our nation’s founding system.
