Speaking to reporters at the White House on Tuesday, national security adviser John Bolton (read my profile here) gave a good reason for not listening to the the Turkish audio recording of Jamal Khashoggi’s murder. He doesn’t speak Arabic so he wouldn’t understand what was said.
Khashoggi was murdered on Oct. 2 by Saudi officials at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey. But some are now suggesting that Bolton hasn’t listened to the Khashoggi recording because he doesn’t want to hear evidence that might implicate Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman as the responsible party for the murder. That assessment is wrong. With the caveat that the crown prince never again repeat such an action, the Trump administration has rightly decided to prevent the Khashoggi fallout from obliterating the U.S.-Saudi relationship.
Yet while Bolton hasn’t listened to the recording, he has received an intelligence assessment of the recording’s “substance.” That should have been the end of the matter. Except that American Urban Radio reporter, April Ryan decided that Bolton’s excuse was inadequate.
It’s clear from that exchange that Ryan doesn’t know what she’s talking about when it comes to intelligence matters. The Khashoggi recording report which Bolton received would have fully assessed the emotion, inference, context, and substance of what was recorded. Indeed, the intelligence product on the recording would have been so heavily developed that the actual words spoken were only one element of the broader findings. The CIA almost certainly had a range of their top Arabic analysts listen to the audio tape so as to identify any local Saudi or regional inferences from each recorded speaker. This is minute detail that even a fluent Arabic speaker would be hard-pressed to match.
In short, neither Bolton nor Trump need to listen to the audiotape. They can simply trust that which the CIA has given them is the fullest and most accurate assessment possible.
