Four Saudis who participated within the 2018 killing of the Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi received paramilitary training within the us the previous year under a contract approved by the State Department, consistent with documents and other people conversant in the arrangement.
The instruction occurred because the secret unit liable for Khashoggi’s killing was beginning an in depth campaign of kidnapping, detention and torture of Saudi citizens ordered by prince Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, to crush dissent inside the dominion .
The training was provided by the Arkansas-based security company Tier 1 Group, which is owned by the private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management. the corporate says the training — including “safe marksmanship” and “countering an attack” — was defensive in nature and devised to raised protect Saudi leaders. One person conversant in the training said it also included add surveillance and close-quarters battle.
There is no evidence that the American officials who approved the training or Tier 1 Group executives knew that the Saudis were involved within the crackdown inside Saudi Arabia . But the very fact that the govt approved high-level training for operatives who went on to hold out the grisly killing of a journalist shows how intensely intertwined the us has become with an autocratic nation whilst its agents administered horrific human rights abuses.
It also underscores the perils of military partnerships with repressive governments and demonstrates how little oversight exists for those forces after they return home.
Such issues are likely to continue as U.S. private military contractors increasingly look to foreign clients to prop up their business because the us scales back overseas deployments after 20 years of war.
The State Department initially granted a license for the paramilitary training of the Saudi Royal Guard to Tier 1 Group starting in 2014, during the Obama administration. The training continued during a minimum of the primary year of former President Donald Trump’s term.
Louis Bremer, a senior executive of Cerberus, Tier 1 Group’s parent company, confirmed his company’s role within the training last year in written answers to questions from lawmakers as a part of his nomination for a top Pentagon job during the Trump administration.
The administration doesn’t appear to possess sent the document to Congress before withdrawing Bremer’s nomination; lawmakers never received answers to their questions.
In the document, which Bremer provided to The ny Times, he said that four members of the Khashoggi kill team had received Tier 1 Group training in 2017, and two of them had participated during a previous iteration of the training, which went from October 2014 until January 2015.
“The training provided was unrelated to their subsequent heinous acts,” Bremer said in his responses.
He said that a March 2019 review by Tier 1 Group “uncovered no wrongdoing by the corporate and confirmed that the established curriculum training was unrelated to the murder of Jamal Khashoggi.”