One of our journalist is missing?

Oct. 14, 2018

A contributor to The Washington Post has gone missing.

Media and the Turks claim the man has been detained, tortured and murdered by the Saudi’s in their embasay in Turkey.

The Saudi’s admit the reporter came into the embassy, but left – vanishing at some point later.
 later they claim that he was in a fight and died. He supposedly brought in a bone knife with him a kind of weapon that can get past metal detectors

There are conflicting accounts. Turkey, which has little or no love for the Saudis’ (and may even blame them for taking part in an attempted coup several years ago) claim the Saudis had planned to kidnap the reporter because of the reporter’s continued anti-Saudi stories published in the Washington Post. This makes you wonder why then this reporter knowingly walked into an embassy of a world power planning ill for him. More mysteriously he told people he feared for his life and still went.
The Post – seeking to make a martyr of him – claims it was because he needed documentation to complete a divorse so that he could remarry. This is one of the most controversial reporters in the middle east, someone who had ties to Bin Laden prior to 9/11 and reportedly kept close ties to terrorists – which the Post downplayed, claiming he was merely doing his job as a reporter.  

Yet being as smart a reporter as this – he is an ex-Saudi insider going after Saudis with whom he was associated in the past – he is stupid enough to walk open-eyed into their clutches. It is clear that he was up to something much more nefarious than just seeking documents.
His connections as a one-time Saudi insider, his close ties to terrorists organizations would be irresistible to the intelligence community -- which makes you wonder if perhaps he was doing double duty for some agency such as the CIA.
His friends claim he settlef in TUrkey to be around other former saudi outcasts. He was extremely critical of ssudi nation and suggests he might have done more than just report and may well have been part of political opposition. 
U.S. and Turkey unnamed sources quoted by The Washington Post (which rountinely relies on unnamed sources for everything) claim the reporter wore a watch that broadcast his last moments to the internet cloud and that this depicted his last hours of tourture (gruesome one account portrayed it). But other reports suggest this is not the case, and that the whole watch thing is bogus. But this has not stopped The Post from making the reporter into a martyr, or using his disappearance as one more weapon in the war waged against President Trump.

The Post and other media have blamed Trump for setting such a negative tone that reporters have become targets, refusing flatly to acknowledge their own role in making themselves hated with biased and often unethical reporting.

The old saying that you can rob a bank with a fountain pen as easily as with a gun takes on new meaning when it comes to media such as The Washington Post – which can murder someone with a headline as easily as they can with a cruise misstle.

When media comes under fire for misreporting or bias, we tend to circle the wagons and defend our reporters good or bad, justifying any misdeed under the First Amendment.

So The Post and other media are using the disappearance and possible death of this Saudi journalists as a passive-aggressive attack on all critics of media.

This does a disservice the journalist and to journalism itself, and raising red flags about what he actually was doing and what The Washington Post may be hiding about his actual activities.

I suspect that if the truth comes out, The Washington Post will have done even more damage to the reputation of journalism than it already has.