Criticise the Saudis and you go home in pieces
- Thread starter Malevolence
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Lol at thinking any embassy isn't bugged by host nations, if you want to some seriously demented crap in another nation you use black sites. SA couldn't even be bothered with that.
They might try, but it won't work if they are on the ball or build the building themselves. In SA's case they probably brought in foreign workers to outfit the building and they were planted then.
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Not sure how much truth there is lots of rumour, etc. - supposedly his questioning was recorded by his smartwatch and uploaded to the cloud and the Saudis (clean up squad) deleted local files but didn't realise there was backups... but not sure how Turkey got access to his account though but suddenly that US pastor has gone free... coincidence? whole thing seems kind of dubious and more like a cover up for them bugging the embassy.
If I was interrogating someone in those circumstances first thing I'd do is remove any watches or phones, etc.
I do so love the US and UK and others tut tutting and wagging their concerned fingers when at the end of the day money will out and this will be yet another example where arms sales takes precedence over a death/murder of, in this case, a journalist.
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I read somewhere yesterday the suggestion that Jamal Khashoggi knew of some links between Osama Bin Laden and present day senior members of the Saudi Royal Despots and that they feared that he would release evidence - if true, that seems like sufficient motive for his torture and murder by the Saudis.
It's not actually the arms sales themselves which are the biggest money spinners, it's the after sales service from what I hear from someone who worked in that department.
The UK and US do hold the cards here. If SA decides to stop doing business with us, they suddenly have a whole fleet of aircraft etc which they can't maintain.
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Been a few diplomatic or intelligence, etc. people go missing or turn up dead lately I wonder if there is a much further reaching "clearing house" than necessarily something linked specifically to this guy i.e. some of these people are actually double agents or something not necessarily with interests aligned to what they appear at face value.
Some of the ways the cold war spies bugged offices were excellent.
For instance "the thing" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device)
And we suddenly have a nation full of cars we cant fill up.
Its not so much that we need the arms sale money ('it's nice but it's relatively small compared to our economy) but oil is a little bit more essential and SA make more of it than anyone.
Annoyingly the chance to change that is slipping away as trump kills the Iran deal
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The UK and USA can always buy oil from their new best friends in Iran or Venezuela . . .
Soldato
It would be 90% of their entire military - planes, tanks, ships, guns, bullets, missiles, radars, communications, surveillance etc and a huge portion of their Oil industry would crawl to a halt too.
When it comes to physical maintenance type work needed to keep things running (civilian or military) Saudis prefer not to be "workers" but instead only want to be "managers" instead so the "workers", which can be split into two groups - skilled and unskilled, are almost all imported with the vast majority of the "skilled" workers coming from western countries. Supplying the Saudis with Western "skilled" labour created some of the most lucrative "Government to Government" contracts in the world, where the Western Governments sub-contract to industry to fulfil them, so I wouldn't expect the outrage to have a big enough impact so as to cancel nearly a half a trillion dollars in various contracts (all combined) over this, the amount involved is just too high but I would guess that when the contracts get renegotiated (every 5-10 years or so) the Western Governments who keep quiet about this will get a better deal next time.
Soldato
The UK and USA can always buy oil from their new best friends in Iran or Venezuela . . .
The US only imports between 10-15% of the total oil it needs (figure from 2016 and getting less every year), the rest is self produced and of that 10-15% of imported oil only 15% of that total actually comes from Saudi (2015 figure).
Just throw some easy maths as an example of just how little the amount Saudi exports to the US is, imagine this -
100% of oil needed = 100 barrels of oil
15% which is imported = 15 barrels
15% of the import oil which comes from Saudi = 2.25 barrels
So the US only imports 2.25 barrels from Saudi out of the 100 is uses or in others words, the US only imports 2.25% of the oil it needs from Saudi, which is nothing.
The UK and USA can always buy oil from their new best friends in Iran or Venezuela . . .
Kinda ruin your "joke" when you [snip] like that eh?
I don't have extensive experience of the ME and less so the Saudis but it is interesting the difference in mentality across the region - I've seen instances where things have gone wrong where the Saudis were milling around in consternation for instance while the Egyptian group got down to engineering a solution (and those from England were all looking to someone else for leadership).
Soldato
Yeap, I've worked Saudi, Oman, Kuwait, Qatar so far and only Oman stood out as place where problem solving isn't hard for the locals to grasp. All the others tend to prefer a strict linear path of events so anything which throws them off that narrow path (something breaks) and requires a more "holistic" view of a system (or event) to fix the problem usually causes lots of issues, whereas Western skilled labour tends to be more easily able to think "full picture" in problem solving - whether it's a electronic circuit in a plane or tank thats broke or a oil well head with drilling issues etc.
However, if you need an office environment running with strict procedures with little or no deviation then the locals are in their element.
How much of this "inability" to think holistically is down to the initial education of kids in the ME peninsular (rather than Egypt/Iran etc) is another debate. Currently the schooling until university is heavily regimented with constant repetition of the same few things as opposed to a more Western style of "logical thinking" which teaches you to question "why" and this lack of "logical thinking" is a large hindrance to problem solving if you can only think in single set way.
As an example I taught a group of Saudi nationals on a course in the UK about the maintenance of a large filing cabinet size piece of aviation test equipment. After going through the circuit diagrams for a few weeks, gaining a view of the whole system, I started "breaking" things to show them simple Fault Finding techniques and, despite knowing everything in the circuit, after a day they asked me to stop and instead wanted a book making with a list of every single possible fault which could ever happen with the equipment and telling them exactly what they needed to change (not repair only replace) to fix it because they couldn't make the mental leap from knowing a simple linear "how a system works" to "if it breaks what do I do to fix it" - this wasn't the teams "fault" they'd just never had an education which taught them the "why" as much as the simpler "it just does".
I've often thought the most valuable thing you can teach a child is to be inquisitive.
Soldato
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This is very true, this is one of the reasons why Arab armies are really bad when it comes to tactics and fighting.