This is like watching a full-scale ICBM launch from Russia & saying “well, there’s no smoking gun that the Kremlin was involved.” You don’t need one. You are perfectly entitled to presume high level approval based on the nature of the activity itself.
You would naturally, correctly say, in that case, that the (high) burden of proof is on anyone claiming the event somehow happened *without* such approval.
Understand what you have to believe to think that MBS might have been out of the loop on Khashoggi. Not JUST that 15 “rogue” agents, including a forensic doctor, arranged to fly to Turkey & carry out a murder in the Saudi consulate, in the presence of the consul...
But that FOR TWO WEEKS AFTERWARDS, the Saudi Government was somehow unable to discover the existence of a 15-person transnational operation witnessed by consular staff.
Even if you can somehow swallow the idea of a “rogue” operation on that scale—and if you can, please play poker with me—there is just no coherent story you can tell where it takes two weeks for the government to detect it after the fact.
Like, just for the sake of argument, walk yourself through the minimal first steps an earnest internal probe of Kashoggi’s disappearance takes, with the full support of the government, and then try to construct a story where it takes more than 24 hours to discover what happened.
Did the records of 15 government personnel flying to Istanbul using government resources disappear for two weeks? Did the consul and consular staff lie to their own government to cover for a “rogue” wet team for two weeks?
The “smoking gun” is that any imaginable story where this happened without MBS’ complicity is fucking laughable on its face the second you try to lay out the most basic details.
None of this requires either particularly sophisticated logic, profound expertise about Saudi politics, or access to reams of classified information. The Saudi “rogue team” narrative is *ludicrous on its face* given public facts. Pompeo knows this. Mattis absolutely knows this.
Neither Mattis nor Pompeo can possibly believe there’s any significant probability MBS is not complicit here. That they are pretending to regard it as some inscrutable puzzle is shameful and dishonorable.
