Riyadh - Asharq Al-Awsat

When The Washington Post published a few days ago that the late Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was one of its columnists, had a "problematic relationship" with Qatar, it brought to mind questions that were previously discussed and almost forgotten.

One of the issues, back then, was discussed in an article published by author Matthew Brodsky on October 18, "Why is the media ignoring the most glaring questions about Jamal Khashoggi?"

The article published in “The Spectator” said that killing the journalist was utterly unjustified. But there are aspects of the columnist’s past that merit probing.

Brodsky explained that reporters can’t get enough of the gory details and the international intrigue, however, they seem to have forgotten the need to report basic facts, question their single-sourced material, and ask difficult questions of those who know far more than they let on.

"Instead, they just trot out the same biased narratives, devised to lay blame at President Trump’s feet, presumably in order to use this episode as a wedge issue in the upcoming midterm elections," said Brodsky, who published his article in the midst of the media war against Saudi Arabia in October.

The writer cites MSNBC's interviews with Khashoggi’s Washington Post colleague, David Ignatius, and then again with former Obama-era CIA director John Brennan.

The writer noted that Ignatius and Brennan are key figures because they could shed some much-needed light on Khashoggi’s past, which could go some way to determining a motive behind his disappearance. “Instead they just mouthed platitudes.”

Brodsky went on to say that Brennan should know more than he makes out about Khashoggi’s links in high US places, adding that Lee Smith of the Hudson Institute pointed out in a recent column, Khashoggi must have been important to the United States, ‘because even though he reportedly moved to the United States in 2017, he already had a green card.’

“Indeed, as David Ignatius wrote in the Washington Post, ‘Friends helped Khashoggi obtain a visa that allowed him to stay in the United States as a permanent resident.’ What friends? Khashoggi’s green card materialized during John Brennan’s tenure as director of Obama’s CIA from 2013-2017.”

For those uninitiated with Brennan’s “checkered past”, he is most likely responsible for leaking to the media the unverified dossier that connected Donald Trump to Russia, according to the author. He later joined NBC News as a ‘senior national security and intelligence analyst.’

“To say that he has his own bone saw to grind against Trump would be an understatement. Nevertheless, someone should ask Brennan and Ignatius how Khashoggi obtained a green card.”

Brodsky stated that Khashoggi was not the liberal he claimed to be, citing Patrick Poole's notes, who stated that just a few weeks prior to Khashoggi’s May 1988 articles, Abdullah Azzam released his article, “al-Qaeda al-Sulbah” and also cited in Khashoggi’s articles.

The author also referred to John Bradley who also pointed out that Khashoggi was not a “pure liberal reformer and supporter of democracy.”

Bradley discussed that Khashoggi’s steadfast advocacy for the Muslim Brotherhood never waned. Prior to his disappearance, “he was also working with Islamists tied to the Muslim Brotherhood to create an organisation called Democracy in the Arab World Now (DAWN).”

As recently as August 28, Khashoggi penned an article for the Washington Post entitled, “The US is wrong about the Muslim Brotherhood – and the Arab world is suffering because of it.”

In his article, Brodsky demanded further investigations on how Khashoggi came to meet bin Laden, and Abdel Batterjee, founder of the Islamic Benevolence Committee, who invited Khashoggi to Afghanistan.

Khashoggi provided some details in a February 2004 article in the Chicago Tribune, in which he described Batterjee as “completely consumed by the Afghan jihad.”

The US Treasury Department designated Batterjee’s charity as a financier of terrorism in November 2002. A few months after the Chicago Tribune published the 2004 article, the US Treasury Department designated Batterjee for his financial and material support of al-Qaeda.

This comes in the light of an internal political conflict between the parliament and the White House, as Saudi Arabia rejected the recent US Senate position, which was on baseless allegations and accusations, including blatant interference in its internal affairs.

Few days ago, The Washington Post revealed Qatar’s role saying: "Khashoggi’s arrival in Washington came at an auspicious time for The Post, which was seeking writers for an online section called Global Opinions. One of its editors, Karen Attiah, reached out to Khashoggi to ask him to write on the forces roiling Saudi Arabia.”

The Post claimed that Khashoggi was never a staff employee, and was paid about $500 per piece for the 20 columns he wrote over the course of the year.

“As the months went on, he struggled with bouts of loneliness and stumbled into new relationships. He secretly married an Egyptian woman, Hanan el-Atr, in a ceremony in suburban Virginia, though neither filled out paperwork to make it legal, and the relationship quickly fizzled.”

Khashoggi cultivated friendships with people with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization that he joined when he was a college student in the United States but subsequently backed away from, added the newspaper.

Khashoggi also appears to have accepted significant help with his columns from Maggie Mitchell Salem, the executive at the Qatar foundation. Salem reviewed his work in advance and in some instances appears to have proposed language, according to a voluminous collection of messages obtained by The Post.