The
Guardian view on Jeff Bezos and Saudi Arabia: with friends like these…
Editorial
Businesses
and governments have turned a blind eye to the kingdom’s behaviour because it
suited them. Now the costs are clearer
Wed 22 Jan
2020 18.30 GMTLast modified on Wed 22 Jan 2020 19.40 GMT
What is the
cost of convenience? Business people may look again at their balance sheets in
light of the Guardian’s revelation that an investigation found the Amazon
billionaire Jeff Bezos had his mobile phone hacked after receiving a WhatsApp
message apparently sent from the crown prince of Saudi Arabia’s account.
For a long
time, the kingdom’s piles of cash and strategic importance ensured that
commercial and diplomatic partners played down its catastrophic role in the war
in Yemen – spearheaded by Mohammed bin Salman himself – and human rights abuses
including the arrest and alleged torture of women’s rights activists.
Then, in
October 2018, Jamal Khashoggi walked into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.
Within minutes, the journalist was dead. After unconvincing denials that he had
been murdered, Riyadh described his killing as an unplanned rogue operation,
later sentencing a number of lower-level officials to death. Suddenly people
felt the need to put some distance between themselves and the kingdom, pulling
out of the grand investment summit overseen by the crown prince. In June last
year, the UN special rapporteur Agnès Callamard issued a report stating that
there was “credible evidence” that the Saudi heir and other senior officials
were liable for the killing, despite the kingdom’s denials.
Now Ms
Callamard and her colleague David Kaye, who cover extrajudicial killings and
freedom of expression respectively, say they are gravely concerned by the
information they have received regarding the possible involvement of the crown
prince in surveillance of Mr Bezos, “in an effort to influence, if not silence,
the Washington Post’s reporting on Saudi Arabia”. They demand an immediate
investigation by the US and others. (The Saudi embassy in Washington has said
it is “absurd” to suggest that the kingdom has been involved in hacking Mr
Bezos’s phone.) Analysis suggests that the handset started sending vast amounts
of data within hours of the businessman receiving a video file from the account
of the crown prince during a WhatsApp exchange, five months before Mr
Khashoggi’s death. They note that, if the analysis is correct, the case is a
concrete example of the harms done by “the unconstrained marketing, sale and
use of spyware”.
It is not
yet established whether or how the incident relates to the murder of Mr
Khashoggi, a prominent and exiled critic of the Saudi government who was
writing for the Washington Post, which is owned by Mr Bezos. There are many
more questions to be answered. Last year the US tabloid the National Enquirer
published intimate details about Mr Bezos’s private life, prompting him to hire
digital forensic investigators. They concluded that the Saudis had accessed his
phone and gained private information about him, though the tabloid’s owner,
American Media Inc, said it was tipped off by his girlfriend’s estranged
brother. The billionaire’s head of security has noted a “close relationship”
between the Saudi heir and AMI’s chief executive, David Pecker – who is also a
close friend of Donald Trump; the president’s loathing of the Washington Post
is well known.
Mr Trump’s
son-in-law, Jared Kushner, was one of the attendees at last year’s Saudi
investment summit. Only a year after Mr Khashoggi’s death, many of those who
had pulled out of the 2018 event were present – including the interim boss of
HSBC and chief executives of the asset managers Blackstone and BlackRock and of
Credit Suisse. (Meanwhile, concerts by Mariah Carey and BTS, and events such as
December’s Joshua-Ruiz fight have sought to improve the kingdom’s public
image.) Yet many of those who have posed smilingly alongside the future king
are doubtless in urgent talks with their digital security consultants. Though
money and power will continue to compel, Saudi’s partners should ask
themselves: with friends like these, who needs enemies?
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