Mohammed bin Salman leads a murderous regime that is currently blowing up innocent civilians in Yemen (with weapons bought from America), and he leads a country with a long and storied history of suppression and violence against its own people.

Oh, and he just ordered the murder of Saudi Arabian journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who entered the Saudi embassy in Turkey, and left in a number of body bags after being hacked to pieces with a bone-saw.

Khashoggi’s crime? Speaking out against the Saudi Prince and his regime.

Thus, I wouldn’t call Mohammed bin Salman a spicy cat, but hey.

Now we’re not exactly fond of Piers Morgan around these parts (really, really not fond of him), but he does talk some sense in his latest column for the Daily Mail.

We’re as shocked as you are. To start, here’s how Khashoggi was murdered:

He was dragged from the consul-general’s office to the table of a study next door.

There, for seven long, agonising minutes, Khashoggi [below] was reportedly tortured and hacked to pieces with a bone-saw while he was still alive.

He was decapitated and had his fingers cut off one by one. Then, the severed remains of his torso were put in 15 plastic bags and removed, to be later dissolved in acid.

Khashoggi’s ‘horrendous’ screams of pain were so loud they were heard downstairs by a witness. The chief executioner was allegedly ‘Dr Death’ Salah Muhammad al-Tubaigy, ‘head of forensic evidence’ for the Saudi general security department.

His official title is President of the Saudi Fellowship of Forensic Pathology and he’s a man who enjoys his work.

As Tubaigy began to dismember Khashoggi’s body, he apparently put on earphones and listened to music, advising other members of the squad to do the same.

Now Mohammed bin Salman (or MBS, as he is often referred to) can deny any knowledge of this all he wants, but that’s utter garbage. In the hours before the murder, a 15-man team of highly trained professionals, including royal House of Saud bodyguards and intelligence officers, were flown in from Saudi Arabia to Turkey.

Before we get onto the life and times of MBS, an infographic:

OK, so we’ll start with what Piers has to say about MBS:

…it is he who has presided over the on-going and appalling Saudi-led war crimes in Yemen, costing more than 16,000 civilian deaths and widespread famine.

It is he who has allowed the extremist Wahhabi doctrine of Islam to gather steam, the one that drives ISIS and other Islamist terror groups.

It is he, according to yesterday’s The New Yorker, who sent a bullet in an envelope to persuade a land-registry official to help him seize some land.

And it is he who rounded up, imprisoned(in a five star hotel) and in some cases tortured over 500 other members of the Saudi royal family to blackmail them into paying multi-billion-dollar ransoms for their release.

That bit about Hollywood and Silicon Valley:

It was quite the spectacle as the 33-year-old crown prince booked the entire 100-suite Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills for his week-long visit, at a reputed cost of over $1 million.

Oh, and just in case things got a little crowded, he also booked 40 more suites at the nearby L’Ermitage for another $250,000.

Such astonishing extravagance startled even Hollywood tycoons, and impressed them too.

‘MBS’ was treated with fawning deference by the biggest names in the movie business that queued up to meet, greet, wine and dine the young leader.

Why?

Well the main reason was MBS’s decision to end Saudi’s 35-year ban on movie theaters last December, thus opening up a potentially huge new market for the film industry.

As with all things Saudi, money talked…

MBS had flown to LA from Silicon Valley where he met with equally starry-eyed tech giants like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, who now owns the Washington Post.

Everybody is now doing their utmost to distance themselves from MBS, except for this guy:

Trump loves pictures, and he loves money, and he loves pointing at things. Basically the trifecta above.

We are going to leave behind Piers and the Daily Mail for now and check in with NewsAU, describing how the dream MBS was selling has all but disintegrated:

The 33-year-old leader pushed ambitious plans to transform the country into a modern state through a series of reforms that would secure its economic future. The ultraconservative kingdom lifted its driving ban on women in June this year.

Bin Salman boasted a “Vision 2030” plan to ease social controls in the kingdom and embrace a more open and tolerant interpretation of Islam.

He was the young reformer set on bringing the Middle Eastern kingdom into the 21st century and opening it up to the world, with western diplomats hailing him as a breath of fresh air in the regressive nation.

Of course, this was largely a PR exercise designed to make the country more palatable to the West. But it worked.

TIME Magazine featured him on its cover. He had televised interviews with western media outlets, with 60 Minutes hailing him as a “revolutionary” who was “emancipating women”. He dined with Morgan Freeman, director James Cameron and The Rock, who posted on Instagram that it was a “pleasure” meeting him and a “fascinating experience”.

Various incidents have put stains on that image — he arrested at least seven high-profile women’s activists in May, detained Lebanon leader Saad Hariri and allegedly forced him to resign, and threatened to arrest anyone who dared question his reforms.
Late last year, he was behind a Game of Thrones-style purge billed as an “anti-corruption” campaign, detaining dozens of members of Saudi Arabia’s political and business elite accused of corruption.

Under his watch, Saudi Arabia intervened in the civil war in neighbouring Yemen, entered a massive diplomatic spat with Canada, and isolated Qatar by closing the smaller country’s only land border.

But it was the mysterious disappearance of one of his most prominent critics, Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, that saw bin Salman crash and burn in the eyes of the West.

Shortly, and with the evidence mounting they have no choice, Saudi Arabia will release a statement saying that Khashoggi was killed as the result of an interrogation that went wrong.

Only those who stand to benefit financially will buy that lie.

Spicy.

[sources:dailymail&newsau]