Mike Pompeo: Jamal Kashoggi was an activist

[NewYorkExpress]

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/mike-pompeo-criticizes-jamal-khashoggi-activist-rcna66973

Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo sharply criticizes murdered Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in his new book, questioning his journalism credentials and lambasting what he calls the media’s sympathetic coverage of his brutal killing at the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul, Turkey.

“He didn’t deserve to die, but we need to be clear about who he was -- and too many in the media were not,” Pompeo wrote in “Never Give an Inch: Fighting for the America I Love.” NBC News obtained a copy of the book in advance of its Jan. 24 release. 

Pompeo, a potential 2024 presidential candidate, mocked the media’s portrayal of Khashoggi as “a Saudi Arabian Bob Woodward who was martyred for bravely criticizing the Saudi royal family through his opinion articles in the Washington Post.”

Pompeo, who also served as CIA director in the Trump administration, described Khashoggi as an “activist,” claiming that he was a journalist only “to the extent that I, and many other public figures are journalists. We sometimes get our writing published, but we also do other things.”

[certified hummus supporter 🇵🇸🤝🇺🇸🤝🇺🇦]

Damn, just how much is MBS paying Pompeo to blow him off?

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

The line between journalism and activism can be quite thin, but that's not really a viable criticism of Jamal individually but rather of the field's general way of operating nowadays.

[Absentee Voting Ghost of Ruin]

Continuing to treat examples like this as shocking departures from a non-existent norm, instead of the actual baseline Republican, allows society at large to continue with Republican denialism - the pretense that Republicans are not an imminent grave threat to America.

[Badger]

The line between journalism and activism can be quite thin, but that's not really a viable criticism of Jamal individually but rather of the field's general way of operating nowadays.

At the end there You misspelled " since the invention of the printing press".

[Landslide Lyndon]

These Republican office holders make Mr. Potter look like the nicest man on earth.

[Hindsight was 2020]

Pompeo is a f**king piece of sh*t

[Sir Mohamed]

And Mike Pompeo is an enabler of authoritarians and wanna-be authoritarians.

[President Johnson]

Michael Richard "there's going to be a smooth transition to a second Trump Administration" Pompeo says a bunch of nonsense... a total surprise. Not.

[Horus]

Mike Pompeo is a useful idiot for the House of Saud.

[President Johnson]

Mike Pompeo is a useful idiot for the House of Saud.

To be honest, too many American and European politicians are. Both conservative and liberal, as well as moderates.

[ingemann]

Mike Pompeo is a useful idiot for the House of Saud.

Yes, but he is also right, Khashoggi was primarily a political actor in Saudi Arabia. I don’t know why Mister Bone Saw decided to butcher him, but I suspect it was because Khashoggi was enough of a outsider that MBS could kill him as statement to Khashoggi’s patron without risking it turning into a feud. What MBS forgot was that Khashoggi was not just political actor in Saudi Arabia or a journalist (no one would really have cared about his murder if he was a real journalist), he was also a Washington insider, someone people knew in Washington.

[Mr. Smith]

This is a feature, not a bug.

[All Along The Watchtower]

What’d the point of him saying this? Is he trying to play down or even justify Khashoggi’s murder or indeed, all the other crimes of the al-Saud?

[Unpoisoned Chalice]

Mike Pompeo (R-KS)
Mike Pompeo (R-KSA)

[Buffalo Mayor Young Kim]

Well it’s quite impossible to be a journalist and not be an activist in a place like Saudi Arabia.

[Alben Barkley]

TIL Murder is OK as long as it's against an "activist," at least according to Republicans.

You might claim that's not what he's saying, but otherwise what even is the point of saying this? It's clearly done to justify or downplay the severity of Saudi Arabia's crime against humanity.

[All Along The Watchtower]

Damn, just how much is MBS paying Pompeo to blow him off?

I think Pompeo might be doing this for free in hopes of future reward. Which is obviously disgusting, but remember that MBS is already de facto Supreme Leader of Saudi Arabia (geopolitically significant even aside from Muh Black Gold), and controls a hell of a lot of money and an army of well-heeled Beltway lobbyists; and he has effectively been given a pass over Khashoggi by both Trump and Biden (not to mention Yemen, or an escalation in brutality against domestic dissent in general). Plus, it’s Saudi Arabia—if 9/11 couldn’t rupture the relationship with the US, what could?!

Consequently, even if Pompeo will never be President, he could make a killing from cashing in on his government experience like so many people across the US government do, and he already has a relationship with the Saudis so he might as well lean in to it like Kushner and Mnuchin (many such cases).