The alleged torture, dismemberment and killing of Saudi citizen and US permanent resident Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi embassy in Istanbul has triggered justifiable outrage throughout the United States and around the world. But amid the outcry over Khashoggi’s death, many media and public figures still fail to acknowledge the war crimes Saudi Arabia is committing in Yemen with US assistance.
Khashoggi, a columnist for The Washington Post, had written critically about the Saudi government and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The Post reported that Mohammed had recently attempted to lure Khashoggi back to Saudi Arabia in an operation resembling an extrajudicial “rendition,” where a person is forcibly removed from one country and taken to another for interrogation. Bloomberg reported that the United States knew the Saudis planned to seize Khashoggi because US intelligence services had intercepted communications between Saudi officials discussing the plan. According to Turkish sources, participants in Khashoggi’s killing and dismemberment were Saudi operatives.
Six days after Khashoggi’s disappearance, New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman made the astounding claim, “If Jamal has been abducted and murdered by agents of the Saudi government … [i]t would be an unfathomable violation of norms of human decency, worse not in numbers but in principle than even the Yemen war.”
Friedman’s attempt to minimize the enormity of the carnage, including over 6,000 civilian casualties and the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, resulting from three years of war in Yemen is not uncommon. Vicki Divoll, former CIA attorney and instructor at the US Naval Academy, told The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer in 2009, “People are a lot more comfortable with a Predator [drone] strike that kills many people than with a throat-slitting that kills one.”
In fact, Saudi Arabia is committing war crimes in Yemen and the…