Tag
#2018
2 articles
The Khashoggi Murder
At 1:14 p.m. on Tuesday, October 2, 2018, the Saudi journalist and *Washington Post* columnist Jamal Khashoggi walked into the Saudi Arabian consulate at 4 Saadabad Caddesi in the Levent district of Istanbul. He was 59 years old. He had an appointment to collect divorce papers he needed for his upcoming marriage to his fiancée Hatice Cengiz, who waited outside in his car. He never came out. A 15-man Saudi operational team had flown into Istanbul on private jets earlier the same day on two separate flights. The team included Saudi intelligence officers, military personnel, and a forensic pathologist named Salah Mohammed al-Tubaigy who specialized in autopsies and had brought a portable bone saw. Within approximately seven minutes of Khashoggi's arrival at the consulate, he was killed. His body was dismembered. The dismembered parts were carried out of the consulate in suitcases. The body has never been recovered. The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency's classified assessment, completed in November 2018, concluded with 'medium-to-high confidence' that the operation had been ordered personally by Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia (commonly known as MBS). The Trump administration declined to release the assessment publicly. The Biden administration released a four-page unclassified version on February 26, 2021. Saudi Arabia conducted its own closed-court trial in 2019 that convicted eight Saudi nationals; five received initial death sentences subsequently commuted to twenty-year prison terms after pardons from Khashoggi's sons. The Saudi narrative — that the operation was an unauthorized rogue action by intelligence officers acting without MBS's knowledge — has been substantially contradicted by the U.S. intelligence assessment, by the Turkish forensic and audio evidence, and by the operational logistics that would not have been possible without senior authorization. As of mid-2026, MBS is the de facto and de jure ruler of Saudi Arabia.
Cambridge Analytica
In 2014, a 27-year-old Canadian data scientist named Christopher Wylie helped design what he would later describe as a 'psychological warfare tool.' His employer, Cambridge Analytica, had paid an academic researcher to build a personality quiz that, through a quirk of Facebook's developer policy, harvested data not only on the people who took it but on every Facebook friend of every taker — eventually some 87 million profiles. The data was used to target voters in the 2016 Brexit referendum and the 2016 Trump presidential campaign. Wylie went to The Guardian in March 2018. Within ten weeks, Cambridge Analytica had shut its doors.
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