A Saudi intelligence head cast doubt over the credibility of any CIA report that incriminates Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman in the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.
Several news organizations, including the Post and New York Times have reported that the CIA concluded the crown prince ordered the Saudi journalist’s assassination in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2, contradicting Riyadh’s version that he was not involved.
CIA officials have high confidence in their conclusion, which is based on multiple sources of intelligence, the Post reported Nov. 16.
“The CIA has been proved wrong before,” former Saudi director of the national intelligence Prince Turki al-Faisal said in an interview on Saturday.
Assertions made before the 2003 invasion of Iraq by then-US Secretary of State Colin Powell, with former CIA director of central intelligence George Tenet “sitting right behind him,” that the country’s manufacturing of chemical weapons was “a slam-dunk conclusion” proved to be “absolutely false,” he said.
“The CIA is not necessarily the best measure of creditable intelligence reporting or intelligence assessment,” al-Faisal said at the launch of the Beirut Institute Summit recommendations in Abu Dhabi.
Al-Faisal, who was a key figure in Saudi-US ties in the 1980s as intelligence chief and also served as ambassador to London and Washington, said that the relationship between the allies is facing a “big challenge.”
That is even compared with earlier difficult periods, such as the widespread “vilification of Saudi Arabia” in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the US, he said.
The Saudi-US relationship extends far deeper than the price of oil and weapons sales, and the kingdom would not be “reluctant to undertake the challenge of facing these issues,” he said.
A Zurich city councilor has apologized and reportedly sought police protection against threats after she fired a sport pistol at an auction poster of a 14th-century Madonna and child painting, and posted images of their bullet-ridden faces on social media. Green-Liberal party official Sanija Ameti, 32, put the images on Instagram over the weekend before quickly pulling them down. She later wrote on social media that she had been practicing shots from about 10m and only found the poster as “big enough” for a suitable target. “I apologize to the people who were hurt by my post. I deleted it immediately when I
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