Mohammad bin Salman

The Ritz Carlton Hotel in downtown Riyadh is now serving as a temporary prison, holding some of the 201 people that have been detained on the orders of Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman. 1,800 bank accounts have been frozen.
The drama is escalating on the international front as well. The Saudis are blaming Iran for a recent missile attack from Yemen. The Prime Minister of Lebanon has resigned from his post while in Riyadh and echoes Saudi rhetoric against Hezbollah.

The Saudi-led coalition is waging total war on Yemen in a bid to defeat the guerrilla group, the Houthis or the Helpers of God. The Houthis took power in Sanaa in fall of 2014 and consolidated it in early 2015. By March-April, Saudi Arabia’s Mohammad Bin Salman, now the crown prince, had ordered air strikes on the country that have continued to this day. These strikes have been indiscriminate, hitting schools, hospitals, apartment buildings and key civilian infrastructure like ports, bridges and roads. Any one of these strikes is a war crime.

French President Macron has invited Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri to Paris, a possible opportunity to determine whether Hariri’s sudden resignation, announced in Saudi Arabia, was coerced, as Dennis J Bernstein reports. By Dennis J Bernstein The strange case of…Read more →

President Trump and his son-in-law bet that the young Saudi crown prince could execute a plan to reshape the Mideast, but the scheme quickly unraveled revealing a dangerous amateur hour, writes ex-British diplomat Alastair Crooke. By Alastair Crooke Aaron Miller…Read more →

Tom Secker joins me in the first hour to discuss the upcoming Netflix movie about Anders Behring Breivik and the Oslo and Utoya Island attacks. Tom and I talk about why the film is being made now and the state funding it is receiving from the Norwegian government. We then talk about the writer and director of this film Paul Greengrass. Tom explains his career as a government propagandist and focuses on his film United 93. We then talk about the aspects of the attack we anticipate Greengrass and Netflix will leave out of the film.

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Saudi Arabia pivots to Russia, the new sheriff in town
The post The House of Saud bows to the House of Putin appeared first on BSNEWS.

Clearly, the war in Syria and the international push for regime change against Assad has created strange alliances in the Middle East over the past few years. Among the strangest bedfellows are the Israelis and Saudis. It’s no secret that common cause in Syria of late has led the historic bitter enemies down a pragmatic path of unspoken cooperation as both seem to have placed the break up of the so-called “Shia crescent” as their primary policy goal in the region.

There’s the old warning that at times the “center cannot hold,” but today’s “center” appears to be self-destructing, creating unnecessary crises and conflicts that worsen the world’s predicament, notes ex-British diplomat Alastair Crooke. By Alastair Crooke That “icon” of the…Read more →

President Trump has made the “alliance” with troublemaking Saudi Arabia a centerpiece of his chaotic foreign policy, but the latest jockeying for power in Riyadh may portend unexpected trouble, says ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar. By Paul R. Pillar A…Read more →