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US media following government line on Khashoggi’s murder: Analyst

Friday, 09 November 2018 3:27 PM [ Last Update: Friday, 09 November 2018 3:31 PM ]

A demonstrator holds a poster picturing Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi and a lightened candle during a gathering outside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 25, 2018. (Photo by AFP)

US media is following Washington’s line on the murder of Saudi dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi, says an analyst, adding that it is not mentioning that he might have lost his life for disclosing Riyadh’s funding of an anti-Iran UK-based TV channel.

“I think that this is a major issue and I think it should be reported widely in the United States. I read today’s Washington Post this morning and there was not one mention of this anywhere in the paper. So I think that the American press is following the government’s line and not asking all questions about the situation with Khashoggi and him disclosing information about the Saudi government’s funding of anti-Iran channel,” Michael Springmann, former US diplomat told Press TV in an interview on Friday.

“I think that the real point of the disclosure is that the money for this anti-Iranian British based news channel is 250 million dollars coming from the Saudi court, not the Saudi government, not from some religious institution, giving them maybe plausible deniability, but it is tied directly to the court which was presumably Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman,” he added.

In a report on Oct. 2, The Guardian cited a source close to the Saudi government as saying that the anti-Iran London-based TV channel Iran International received an estimated $250m (£192m) from the Saudi royal court each year.

Now the Guardian correspondent, in a Friday tweet, has revealed that his source was Khashoggi, the Washington Post columnist who was assassinated on the same day as the report was published in a premeditated murder in Turkey blamed on Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman also known as MBS.

Khashoggi, an outspoken critic of bin Salman, entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2, to obtain a document certifying he had divorced his ex-wife, but he did not leave the building.

The Saudi kingdom, after denying the murder for several days, finally admitted that Khashoggi had been murdered in the consulate during an interrogation by rogue operatives that had gone wrong after diplomatic pressure grew tremendously on Riyadh to give an account on the mysterious fate of its national.