Israel and the murder of Saudi "dissident" Jamal KhashoggiIn 2018 Saudi "dissident" Jamal Khashoggi was murdered in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul, Turkey. A murder that led to a gigantic media hype, even calls for sanctions against Saudi Arabia were raised, but as always nothing materialized and business between the West and Saudi Arabia goes along more or less as usual since.
It has later been revealed that Israel's security apparatus was involved in aiding the Saudi regime's tracking of its opponents. We here publish two articles on the matter - and a piece on the hypocrisy surrounding the murder; the fake "outrage" without any real implications for the assailants, and the reaction if it had been for instance Russia, or Iran, who had perpetrated the murder.
- Saudi dissident sues Israeli spyware firm over Khashoggi killing
The Times of Israel, 3 December 2018
- Israeli Software Helped Saudis Spy on Khashoggi, Lawsuit Says
The New York Times, 2 December, 2018
- Just imagine... The response if Jamal Khashoggi had been Russian
RT - Russia Today, 25 October 2018
Read also the article on the Jewish roots of Khashoggi:
Saudi dissident sues Israeli spyware firm over Khashoggi killing
Omar Abdulaziz says NSO Group helped Saudi government hack his phone and uncover his conversations with the slain journalist
By TOI staff
The Times of Israel, 3 December 2018
Quebec-based Saudi activist Omar Abdulaziz. (Screen capture: YouTube)
A Saudi dissident close to murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi is suing an Israeli spyware company, charging that they helped Riyadh monitor his communications with Khashoggi, The New York Times reported Sunday.
According to the report, the suit was filed in Israel by the Montreal-based Saudi dissident Omar Abdulaziz, accusing the NSO Group of hacking his phone in the service of the Saudi government.
Abdulaziz charged that he was repeatedly pressed by the same people who have been accused of killing Khashoggi at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul to return to Saudi Arabia. He recorded some of the conversations.
Following this, according to court papers, he received a text message that looked like a link to track the shipment of a package but turned out to mask a link to the Herzliya-based company NSO Group’s spyware, the report said.
This photo from August 25, 2016, shows the logo of the Israeli NSO Group company on a building
in Herzliya, Israel. (AP Photo/Daniella Cheslow)
He was later informed by Canadian internet watchdog Citizen Lab that his phone might have been hacked and the Saudi government was behind it.The NSO Group has been the subject of much controversy in recent years, with Citizen Lab claiming that the Pegasus software marketed by the company is being used by a number of countries “with dubious human rights records and histories of abusive behavior by state security services.”
Pegasus infects individuals’ phones by sending them text messages that tempt them to click an attached link. If the target clicks on the link, the company gains full control over the phone, including its contents and history, and the ability to activate its microphone and camera at will.
The lawsuit was filed by an Israeli lawyer, Alaa Mahajna, in cooperation with Mazen Masri, a lecturer at the City University of London, the New York Times said, quoting the lawyer as saying they intend to argue that the resulting exposure of the collaboration between Abdulaziz and Khashoggi “contributed in a significant manner to the decision to murder Mr. Khashoggi.”
In this image made from a March 2018 video provided by Metafora
Production, Jamal Khashoggi speaks during an interview at an
undisclosed location. (Metafora Production via AP)
The lawsuit also claimed that just after his phone was hacked, Saudi security forces raided the home of Abdulaziz’s family in Jidda and arrested two of his brothers who remain in detention.In a statement to The Times of Israel on Sunday, the NSO Group argued the lawsuit was “completely unfounded” since it “shows no evidence that the company’s technology was used.”
The company said its products were “licensed for the sole use of providing governments and law enforcement agencies the ability to lawfully fight terrorism and crime.”
Contracts for use of its software “are only provided after a full vetting and licensing by the Israeli government,” the company continued.
“Furthermore, the lawsuit refers to details which are false,” it said. “For example, it refers to NSO engaging with a Mexican company called Balam; NSO has had absolutely no connection with that company. The lawsuit appears to be based on a collection of press clippings that have been generated for the sole purpose of creating news headlines and do not reflect the reality of NSO’s work.”
Israel does not have diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia, but there have been increasing behind the scene ties as both countries face off against common foe Iran.
Speaking to an Israeli audience last month fugitive NSA leaker Edward Snowden also linked NSO to the Khashoggi killing.
“How did they know what his intentions were? How did they decide he was someone they needed to act against that he was worth the risk?” he asked.
“And the reality was they had bugged one of his friends and contacts using software created by an Israeli company. We don’t know the chain of consequence because this company will never comment on this, but it’s one of the major stories not being written about.”
Snowden, a former contractor with the US National Security Agency, leaked thousands of classified documents to the press in 2013 that revealed the vast scope of surveillance of private data put in place after the 9/11 attacks.
Israeli Software Helped Saudis Spy on Khashoggi, Lawsuit Says
By David D. Kirkpatrick
The New York Times, December 2, 2018
A symbolic funeral prayer for the murdered Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul last month.
Credit: Huseyin Aldemir/Reuters
LONDON — A Saudi dissident close to the murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi has filed a lawsuit charging that an Israeli software company helped the royal court take over his smartphone and spy on his communications with Mr. Khashoggi.
The lawsuit puts new pressure on the company, the NSO Group, and on the government of Israel, which licenses the company’s sales to foreign governments of its spyware, known as Pegasus. More broadly, the suit also calls new attention to Israel’s increasingly open alliance with Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf monarchies.
Saudi Arabia and its allies like the United Arab Emirates have never recognized the Jewish state but have quietly found common cause with it in opposition to Iran. Since the Arab Spring uprisings, Israel and those monarchies also appear to have found an alignment of interest in defending the established Arab order.
The lawsuit, filed in Israel by the Montreal-based Saudi dissident Omar Abdulaziz, follows parallel suits by journalists, activists and others charging that the NSO Group improperly helped the governments of Mexico and the United Arab Emirates spy on their smartphones even though the individuals had no criminal records and posed no threat of violence.
The human rights group Amnesty International has also recently accused the NSO Group of helping Saudi Arabia spy on a member of the organization’s staff. Amnesty said last week that it was considering legal action after the Israeli defense ministry rejected a request to revoke NSO Group’s license to export its spyware.
“By continuing to approve of NSO Group, the Ministry of Defense is practically admitting to knowingly cooperating with NSO Group as their software is used to commit human rights abuses,” said Molly Malekar, the programs director of Amnesty International’s Israeli office.
In a statement on Sunday, the NSO Group said its products were “licensed for the sole use of providing governments and law enforcement agencies the ability to lawfully fight terrorism and crime.”
Contracts for use of its software “are only provided after a full vetting and licensing by the Israeli government,” the company said, adding: “We do not tolerate misuse of our products. If there is suspicion of misuse, we investigate it and take the appropriate actions, including suspending or terminating a contract.”
The spyware allows its customers to secretly listen to calls, record keystrokes, read messages, and track internet history on a targeted phone. It also enables customers to use a phone’s microphone and camera as surveillance devices.
Because of those sweepingly invasive capabilities, Israel classifies the spyware as a weapon. The company must obtain approval from the Defense Ministry for its sale to foreign governments. Saudi Arabia paid $55 million last year for its use, according to Israeli news reports.
Mr. Abdulaziz, the plaintiff of the new lawsuit, is a 27-year-old Saudi who sought asylum in Canada and lives in Montreal. In the aftermath of the Arab Spring uprisings, he had become popular among Saudis for online videos and social media commentary criticizing the rulers of the kingdom for their authoritarianism. The consulting firm McKinsey & Company identified him as an influential driver of dissent on social media.
Over the last two months, he has also gained international attention because of his friendship and collaboration with Mr. Khashoggi, a Saudi exile living in Virginia who wrote columns for The Washington Post.
Mr. Khashoggi was killed and dismembered in October in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. American intelligence agencies and many Western officials have concluded that Saudi Arabia’s day-to-day ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, authorized the assassination. He has denied authorizing the killing, and Saudi officials have said that a team of agents sent to retrieve Mr. Khashoggi decided on their own to kill him instead.
[ VIDEO - only accessible from the original NYT article ]
An autopsy expert. A lookalike. A black van. Our video investigation follows the movements of the 15-man Saudi hit team
that killed and dismembered the journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Published On Nov. 16, 2018
The lawsuit claims that in the months before the killing, the royal court had access to Mr. Khashoggi’s communications about opposition projects with Mr. Abdulaziz because of the spyware on Mr. Abdulaziz’s phone.Mr. Abdulaziz has said he was also targeted by some of the operatives close to Prince Mohammed who have been linked to the Khashoggi killing as part of a campaign to bring home or silence Saudi dissidents abroad. After pestering him for months with messages urging him to return to the kingdom, two Saudi emissaries met him in Montreal last May to pressure him in person.
Mr. Abdulaziz covertly recorded the conversations. “There are two scenarios,” one of the agents told him, referring to him in the third person as Omar. In the first option, “Omar is a beneficiary or a winner, because he is going back home,” an emissary told him. “The second side, the state, is a winner and is happy as well,” the emissary added, suggesting that the kingdom might pay also Mr. Abdulaziz large sums of money.
If he declined, however, “Omar is a loser because he is going to jail,” the emissary said, and he said Mr. Abdulaziz might be apprehended at an airport. The Saudi emissaries said falsely that Mr. Khashoggi was also considering returning to the kingdom.
The emissaries said they had been sent by Saud al-Qahtani, a close adviser to the crown prince who has been the target of United States sanctions for his alleged role in the Khashoggi killing. A statement announcing the sanctions also identified him as the supervisor of the intelligence agent who led that operation. But the emissaries made clear that their orders had ultimately come from the crown prince.
They promised Mr. Abdulaziz that the day after he landed in Saudi Arabia he would meet with Prince Mohammed and could ask him for anything. They said they had already booked a hotel room for Mr. Abdulaziz in Jeddah.
Mr. Abdulaziz declined to return to the kingdom and also refused a request to visit the Saudi embassy in Ottawa for further discussions. That request began to look more ominous after Mr. Khashoggi’s death in the Istanbul consulate, Mr. Abdulaziz has said.
The next month, in June, he received a text message that looked like a link to track the shipment of a package but turned out to mask a link to the NSO Group’s spyware, according to court papers filed with the lawsuit.
In August, a research group at the University of Toronto that studies online surveillance notified Mr. Abdulaziz that his phone might have been hacked. The research group, Citizen Lab, later concluded that the Saudi government was behind it.
Around the same time as the arrival of the fake text message, Saudi security forces carried out a raid with search dogs in the middle of the night at the home of Mr. Abdulaziz’s family in Jeddah. Two of his brothers were arrested and remain in prison without charges, according to the court papers.
Mr. Abdulaziz “has also learned that the security personnel in the detention center are using torture against them and are subjecting them to inhumane and humiliating treatment, all in order to put pressure on the plaintiff to force him to stop his activism,” the court papers state.
It was also during the period after the spying began that Mr. Abdulaziz and Mr. Khashoggi stepped up their plans for various social media campaigns to counter Saudi government propaganda. Mr. Khashoggi sent Mr. Abdulaziz $5,000 to subsidize that effort.
The lawsuit was filed by an Israeli lawyer, Alaa Mahajna, in cooperation with Mazen Masri, a lecturer at the City University of London.
The lawyers say in the court papers that they intend to argue that the resulting exposure of the collaboration between Mr. Abdulaziz and Mr. Khashoggi “contributed in a significant manner to the decision to murder Mr. Khashoggi.”
Correction:An earlier version of this article overstated what is known about a report by McKinsey & Company about Omar Abdulaziz. Although the report identified him as an influential driver of dissent on social media, it is not clear whether that evaluation was shown to the royal court.
Barbara Marcolini contributed reporting from New York.
A version of this article appears in print on Page A9 of the New York edition with the headline: Khashoggi Ally Sues Saudis For Hacking His Cellphone.
Just imagine... The response if Jamal Khashoggi had been Russian
By Neil Clark
RT - Russia Today, 25 October 2018
All we have to do to highlight the enormous hypocrisy and double standards which are the hallmark of domestic and international politics is to switch the names around.Here are just a few examples:
Horror Consulate – but damn, it’s our ally’s!
Just imagine…If a Russian journalist, a vocal critic of President Putin and the Russian government, had walked into a Russian consulate in a NATO member state to obtain papers for his forthcoming marriage and never came out again alive. After Kremlin denials, and several changes of story, it transpired that he had indeed been killed while in the Consulate, with claims made that he had been cut up while a ‘look-a-like’ left the building.
Well, that what’s happened to the Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi. And guess what, there have been no diplomatic expulsions of Saudi diplomats from the UK and US - as happened quite swiftly in the Skripal Case, despite Russian government involvement not being proved.
UK Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson has not said that Saudi Arabia ‘should go away, should shut up’ as he said about Russia (see below). Or if he did, I’ve missed it.
And that great human rights respecting liberal, Justin Trudeau, says he is unlikely to cancel Canada’s $12bn sale of armored vehicles to Saudi Arabia because it’s a “difficult contract”. Canada expelled four Russian diplomats over the Skripal case, when no one had died, but none yet over Khashoggi.READ MORE: Canada is 'concerned' with Khashoggi's fate but will sell arms to Saudis anyway – Trudeau
What a surprise. Not.
‘Right’ and ‘wrong’ marches
Just Imagine… If around half a million people marched through the streets of central London calling for a radical change in UK foreign policy and an end to UK involvement in Middle Eastern wars. Would Alastair Campbell be saying that MPs had to take notice – as he did after Saturday’s pro-EU People’s Vote protest?
Well, over 1 MILLION people (myself included), did march through central London on February 15, 2003, calling on the UK government not to attack Iraq. But Campbell, then spin doctor to the pro-war MP Tony Blair, did not want MPs to take notice of that – and they didn’t, despite it being the largest ever political demonstration in British history. Why does he think some protestors should be listened to but others-who take to the streets in much greater numbers, should be ignored? Why didn’t he want us to have a ‘People’s Vote’ on invading Iraq?@campbellclaret You went ahead with the Iraq War, which no one voted for in the first place, despite 2 million people marching against it. But you think 100,000 people marching today should overturn the votes of 17.1 million? #PeoplesMarch#PeoplesVoteMarch
— Roger Mortimer (@supt_praline) October 20, 2018
Nothing to see here folks, look over there instead!
Just Imagine… If in 2009, a leading Russian newspaper, had published an article entitled: ‘Battling Cameron, Russia’s main British enemy’, in relation to the then UK Opposition leader.
And then the newspaper asked the question: Is there anything Russia’s allies can do to make it more difficult for a Cameron-led Conservative Party to rise to power?
Imagine too if this had come after a sustained campaign by Parliamentary ‘Friends of Russia’ in the Conservative Party and pro-Russian government figures in the media, to undermine Cameron’s leadership because they thought he was anti-Russian – and a Senior Political Officer of the Russian Embassy was caught on camera talking about the ‘take-down’ of MPs – including the UK’s Deputy Foreign Minister, who was causing Russia ‘a lot of problems’. The political officer also boasted that he had a fund of ‘more than £1m’ for ‘Labour Friends of Russia’.
We can be sure there would have been major repercussions, involving the expulsion of Russian Embassy staff and the imposition of economic sanctions, and calls for Russian media channels such as RT and Sputnik to be taken off air in the UK.
None of this happened as above, but it has happened if you switch Russia for Israel and Cameron for Corbyn.
But we’re not really meant to talk about it, as it’s an ‘ok’ country – who’s doing the meddling. There have been no expulsions. No sanctions. Instead we have staunch ‘Friends of Israel’ like Tom Watson MP, calling for a ‘Mueller-style investigation’ into the 'subverting' of British democracy, by... you've guessed it –Russia!
The wrong perpetrators
Just Imagine… if, on August 9, 2018, the Syrian air force had bombed a school bus killing 40 boys aged six to eleven who were being taken on a school trip along with eleven adults. And that the 227kg laser bomb which had caused the carnage had been supplied by Russia?
You can be sure that there would have been renewed calls for airstrikes on Syrian government targets and for protests outside Russian Embassies worldwide. There would also have been calls for the UK Parliament to be recalled from summer recess. Pro-war MPs would have demanded that President Assad stood trial at The Hague.
But it wasn’t the Syrian air-force who bombed the school bus in August. It was the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen. And the bomb was supplied by the US, not Russia.
So the neocons and ‘humanitarian interventionists’ stayed as silent as Trappist monks with sore throats.
Leakers are cool – so long as it’s the enemy’s stuff that's being leaked!
Just Imagine… if a Russian leaker of classified Kremlin documents took refuge in the British Embassy in Belarus after rape allegations had been made against him by a country friendly to Russia and he had skipped bail. It then transpired that the Russian authorities had urged the country requesting the extradition not to drop the request – with an email being sent saying ‘Don’t you dare get cold feet !!!’
We can be sure that the person in question would be hailed as a ‘Courageous Fighter for Truth and Freedom’ and Russia would be fiercely condemned for its ‘persecution’ of the ‘dissident’. But it’s Julian Assange, an Australian, who we are talking about here, and he’s been holed up in an Embassy in London. He doesn’t fear extradition to Russia, but to the US – where politicians and commentators have labelled him a ‘terrorist’ and called for him to be killed. It was the British authorities – and not the Russians who urged the Swedes, who had wanted to drop the case, not to get cold feet.
Assange leaked stuff ‘we’ wanted kept secret, like classified Iraq War documents, and a cable discussing how the US could 'exploit' ethnic divisions in Syria, so he's not a ‘hero’ but a pariah. Let’s hope he doesn’t suffer the same fate as Saki’s talking cat Tobermory…
Who's the Aggressor? Who's the 'Regime'?
Just Imagine… if there were two Iranian politicians who went head-to-head in their country’s Presidential elections a decade or so ago. The first politician, let's call him Candidate A, had previously been a prisoner-of-war having been captured while bombing a Third World Country. He’s renowned for his aggressive, pro-war rhetoric against western countries and on the campaign trail sang ‘Bombing the USA’ to the tune of Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born in the USA’.
The second politician, let's call him Candidate B, presents himself as a ‘progressive’ man of peace, and is elected. He even wins the Nobel Peace Prize! But he then follows more or less the same policies of warmongering as Candidate A, and in 2011 bombs a country which had the highest living standards in the whole of Africa, transforming it into a failed state where slave markets re-appear. Candidate A continues to call for more bombing and sanctioning of Western countries, until his death, from a brain tumor in 2018. He is hailed as ‘a warrior for peace’ and is eulogised by the Iranian media and the entire political establishment.
At his funeral Candidate B says of his old ‘rival’: ‘we never doubted we were on the same team’.
What would commentators be saying about these candidates, and what their careers told us about the state of Iranian ‘democracy’?
Well, these candidates did exist but they weren’t Iranian but American. Candidate A was John McCain and Candidate B Barack Obama. And McCain singing ‘Bomb Bomb Bomb Bomb Bomb Iran’ to the tune of The Beach Boys’ Barbara Ann was just further evidence not of his moral depravity, but of what a ‘great guy’ he was.
As for Obama’s destruction of Libya, again: just imagine if an Iranian President had done it.
And finally....
Just Imagine… if a communist faced imprisonment for contempt of court after he had filmed, contrary to reporting restrictions, a group of bankers who faced a trial in connection with fraudulent activities which led to the 2008 Financial Crash.
Do we think he would be hailed as a ‘free speech hero’ as anti-Islam activist Tommy Robinson has been? Interesting thought, isn't it? But of course it wouldn’t happen as the bankers would never have been charged in the first place!
Neil Clark is a journalist, writer, broadcaster and blogger. He has written for many newspapers and magazines in the UK and other countries including The Guardian, Morning Star, Daily and Sunday Express, Mail on Sunday, Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph, New Statesman, The Spectator, The Week, and The American Conservative. He is a regular pundit on RT and has also appeared on BBC TV and radio, Sky News, Press TV and the Voice of Russia. He is the co-founder of the Campaign For Public Ownership @PublicOwnership. His award winning blog can be found at www.neilclark66.blogspot.com. He tweets on politics and world affairs @NeilClark66
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