Last Friday, The Washington Post broke the story that “the CIA has concluded that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ordered the assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul last month.”
This was simultaneously completely unsurprising and vitally important. It was unsurprising because the shifting stories about Khashoggi’s murder that the Saudi government had put out — finally culminating in the claim that it was the work of a “rogue” group — were utterly ludicrous; no one actually believes that a team of 15 operatives would have been dispatched to Istanbul to kill Khashoggi without the knowledge of the country’s ruler.