Saudi Operatives Who Murdered Khashoggi Evoke the Pentagon’s School of the Americas-And Complicity?

Under the Pentagon’s watchful eye at the School of the Americas, Latin American military officers learned to combat “subversives,” an elastic category during the Cold War that included journalists, teachers, labor leaders, and Catholic priests and nuns who worked among the poor and oppressed. (1) The training consisted of attacking and suppressing strikes, demonstrations, and other ideological deviations supportive of human rights and political and economic equality. It involved secret detentions, torture, enforced disappearances, sexual assault, massacres, and assassination techniques-El Salvador’s Archbishop Oscar Romero being just one of hundreds.

Documents obtained by the New York Times now show that four Saudi operatives known to have taken part in the gruesome murder and dismemberment of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018 received paramilitary training from an Arkansas-based private security firm under a contract approved by the US State Department. “While unsurprised by the revelation given the United States’ long history of training death squads in Latin America, the Middle East, and elsewhere, human rights activists said that the Times reporting provides further evidence of U.S. complicity in the Khashoggi murder.” (2)

US intelligence reports revealed that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman approved the Khashoggi assassination, which took place inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul. While the Times emphasized that “there is no evidence that the American officials who approved the training of the Saudi operatives knew that they were involved in the crackdown inside Saudi Arabia, others, like John Schwarz of The Intercept, scoffed at the notion that no one knew “that training the murderous dictatorship of a murderous dictatorship could lead to them murdering people.” (3) The US sends millions of dollars of military aid to the Saudis and supports its war in Yemen.

Overlooked in the inspiring tale of how the US defeated the Soviet Union are unseemly matters like death-squad training and assassinations. According to the Pentagon’s curriculum, perceptions of institutional causes for poverty and injustice, or a lack of basic freedoms, “deform” history. Malcontents who insist otherwise are Kremlin agents or dupes. (4) Among Latin Americans this prestigious institute is known as the “school of assassinations” and “school of coups.” The coups in Guatemala, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Peru, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Panama, and continued support of civil wars, led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians.

Sunjeev Bery, executive director of the advocacy group Freedom Forward, said that “Saudi Arabia is just the latest example in a long history of dictatorships whose assassination and torturers received US training.” Others emphasize how the so-called Global War on Terror replaced the Cold War, and how the Pentagon transformed its proxy wars and the paramilitary training of foreign soldiers to using its own troops to invade, occupy, and destroy entire countries like Afghanistan and Iraq. This not only included secret detentions and rendition sites and torture at Abu Ghraib, Bagram Airfield, and Guantanamo Bay, but assassinations.

During the Cold War, one American commandant of the school told a reporter that graduates are never forgotten. “We keep in touch with our graduates, and they keep in touch with us.” Consequently, are the Saudi Operatives who killed Khashoggi still in touch with the US State Department? Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman most certainly is.

Dallas Darling (darling@wn.com)

(1)   Smith, Michael K. Portraits of Empire: Unmasking Imperial Illusions from the “American Century” to the “War on Terror”. Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 2003., p. 180.
(2)   See here.
(3)   See here.
(4)   Smith, Michael K. Portraits of Empire: Unmasking Imperial Illusions from the “American Century” to the “War on Terror”., p 181.