Alwaght- US President Joe Biden declined to penalize Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, for the killing of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi suggesting that the diplomatic cost of such an act is too high.
Despite a detailed American intelligence finding that Saudi de facto ruler bon Salman directly approved the brutal murder of Khashoggi, the US new president refrained from fulfilling his promise to punish senior Saudi leaders while on the campaign trail.
The decision by Biden, who during the 2020 campaign called Saudi Arabia a “pariah” state with “no redeeming social value,” came after weeks of debate in which his newly formed national security team advised him that there was no way to formally bar the heir to the Saudi crown from entering the United States, or to weigh criminal charges against him, without breaching the relationship with the oil-rich kingdom, the New York Times reported.
According to the American daily, officials said a consensus developed inside the White House that the cost of that breach, in Saudi cooperation on counterterrorism and in confronting Iran, was simply too high.
The decision will disappoint the human rights community and members of his own party who complained during the Trump administration that the US was failing to hold Mohammed bin Salman accountable.
Many organizations were pressing Biden to, at a minimum, impose the same travel sanctions against the crown prince as the Trump administration imposed on others involved in the plot.
Biden’s aides said that as a practical matter, Prince Mohammed would not be invited to the United States anytime soon, and they denied that they were giving Saudi Arabia a pass, describing series of new actions on lower-level officials intended to penalize elite elements of the Saudi military and impose new deterrents to human rights abuses.
