A Saudi Official's Harrowing Account of Torture Reveals the Regime's Brutality

By David Ignatius, The Washington Post

30 July 21

 

eld captive by Saudi agents, Salem Almuzaini, once an official of the regime, was beaten repeatedly on the soles of his feet, his back and his genitals, according to a harrowing account of his torture and captivity filed in a Canadian court. He says he was whipped, starved, battered with iron bars and electrocuted; he also describes being ordered to crawl on all fours and bark like a dog. Accompanying his report are graphic photos of Almuzaini’s extensive scars from injuries he said were inflicted by operatives of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

As set out in the court papers, Almuzaini was first seized in Dubai on Sept. 26, 2017, by United Arab Emirates security officials and sent to the kingdom; he vanished on Aug. 24, 2020, after visiting a senior Saudi state security official, and has not been seen since. His description of his treatment in the intervening years — at two Saudi prisons, and at Riyadh’s Ritz-Carlton hotel, where suspected opponents of the regime were detained in 2017 — offers a horrifying view of the lengths to which the regime under the crown prince, known as MBS, has gone to punish its perceived enemies.

His narrative, translated from Arabic and filed in June in an Ontario court, was sent via text message to the cellphone of his wife, Hissah, in September 2019, according to her family, with instructions that she release it if he were to disappear again. The chilling description, reminiscent of memoirs of suffering by political prisoners in Iran, Chile, South Africa and the Soviet Union, offers the most extensive personal account to date of the alleged brutal conduct of the Saudi regime.

“The days passed, and I continued to fear hearing the keys and the door opening,” Almuzaini writes at one point. “I didn’t know what was in store for me, whether torture or elimination.” He describes how one interrogator ordered him to kiss his shoe, then struck his head. “The sad irony is that there was no other agency I had helped more than the Mabahith and Special Affairs, and now I was under their arrest and subject to their torture,” Almuzaini writes of the Saudi secret police.

The degree of psychological torture and attempted dehumanization that Almuzaini describes is as horrifying as the physical abuse. At one point, his interrogator told him to reach into a box and choose a whip for his next beating; when he hesitated, the interrogator chose one and used it to lash Almuzaini while urinating. Almuzaini was instructed not to say his name, and instead refer to himself as “9,” At another point, he was ordered to eat his dinner off the floor, like a dog.

“I was beset with worry on all sides,” Almuzaini recounts. “I worried for my mother, wife, children, sisters, uncle, companies, employees, my future, the pain in my body, the humiliation, and the fear. In reality, feelings cannot describe it. All I’ll say is that the injustice and repression of mankind were intense. I felt weak and powerless.”

The Saudi Embassy in Washington, informed about the allegations of torture by Almuzaini and his wife, declined to comment, as did the embassy of the UAE.

Almuzaini, a graduate of the Saudi police academy, joined the Interior Ministry and supervised airline projects for Mohammed bin Nayef, who was then in charge of the ministry’s counterterrorism projects and later interior minister and crown prince. According to Almuzaini’s account, when MBN decided to create a private airline company called Alpha Star Aviation Services, he asked Almuzaini to run it. Later, when MBN formed his own commercial private airline company, Sky Prime Aviation, he asked Almuzaini to oversee it in Dubai.

Lawyers for Saad Aljabri, a former Saudi intelligence official, have argued in legal documents that these air operations were initially created to shield Saudi and U.S. covert intelligence operations against terrorist groups.

Almuzaini’s alleged crime, judging from the questions he says he was asked by his torturers, was that he aided in a plot to skim money from the two airlines — something he says he denied throughout the torture sessions. Aljabri has similarly denied any involvement in misusing funds. Companies controlled by the Saudi government have sued Aljabri in Canada, where he now lives, to recover money they claim he stole.

But Almuzaini’s real offense, as outlined in the court documents, may have been that he married Hissah, the daughter of Aljabri. MBS, a rival of MBN, has been pursuing Aljabri since 2017, when he deposed MBN as crown prince and Aljabri fled the kingdom. MBS has been trying to force him to return to the kingdom since then.

Almuzaini’s wife described one gruesome moment that her husband had confided. “He said that once, before he was struck a hundred times without pause, he was told ‘this is on behalf of Saad Aljabri,’ and ‘this is what you get for marrying his daughter,’” she wrote. “Sometimes, the interrogators told Salem while beating him that ‘we are adding extra lashes and beatings because your father-in-law is not here, so you can take his portion.’”

The Almuzaini affidavit was filed to support Aljabri’s claim that, as his lawyers argue in a recent court filing, MBS has “sought to consolidate his power by persecuting his perceived rivals under the guise of an ‘anti-corruption’ campaign” and that payments to Aljabri “were fully authorized and approved” by MBN and other Saudi authorities.

The alleged treatment of Almuzaini is just one example of MBS’s seeming obsession with Aljabri’s family. The crown prince blocked two of Aljabri’s then-teenage children, Omar and Sarah, from leaving the country in 2017, when he began his internal putsch to consolidate power and has used them as seeming hostages to try to force their father to return to the kingdom. Omar and Sarah are now imprisoned. I described their plight in The Post in June 2020, and it was featured in a recent report by Human Rights Watch. Aljabri’s friends, relatives and business associates have also been detained.

After Jamal Khashoggi was murdered in Istanbul in October 2018 on what the CIA says were the orders of MBS, Almuzaini had a flash of recognition. He told his wife that the people who were interrogating him included Maher Mutreb, publicly identified as the leader of the Istanbul hit team, and seven of its other members, according to his wife’s affidavit. Among those present during his torture was MBS’s close assistant, Saud al-Qahtani, the affidavit alleges.

In a bizarre irony, two planes owned by Sky Prime, the airline Almuzaini helped run for MBN, were used to transport to Istanbul the hit team that killed Khashoggi, after MBS had appropriated the company, according to court documents filed by Aljabri’s lawyers.

When Almuzaini was held at the Ritz-Carlton for about six weeks starting in late 2017, the torture stopped, according to his wife’s affidavit. The shakedown was now about getting money — as was the case with about 400 other prominent Saudis, including princes and global financiers, who were rounded up at the Ritz-Carlton in November 2017 and forced by MBS’s operatives to hand over assets.

“We’re going to take all of your money,” Almuzaini writes that he was told at the Ritz-Carlton. “We don’t recognize the contracts or any of your nonsense. We’re going to return the money to the state.” He eventually agreed to sign over 400 million Saudi riyals, about $106 million at current exchange rates.

Almuzaini wrote to his wife: “It wasn’t enough for them to torture and imprison me, but they had to take my money, too. Why was all of this happening? Why all the injustice? I didn’t do anything wrong or commit any sin.… I had offered my services and accomplished many things for the nation. I had helped keep it safe.”

Concluding his searing narrative, Almuzaini says of his captors, “In all honesty, the only words I have to describe them were hypocrites who corrupted the earth.”

We Love You, Alberta - Just Not Your Tar Sands

By Bill McKibben, The New Yorker

29 July 21

If the province’s oil is dug up and burned, it will be calculably harder to limit the damage from climate change.

ome weeks ago, the government of Alberta wrote to me—and apparently to a number of other environmentalists and environmental groups. We are all subjects of an “anti-Alberta energy inquiry,” and have the right to respond to charges that are being levelled by a government commission. Alberta, it turns out, has spent three and a half million dollars in an effort to find out whether foreigners are unfairly targeting its oil-and-gas industry. I’m mentioned dozens of times in the draft report, due to be finished this week, and it contains links to lots of articles of mine explaining why the province’s vast tar-sands project should be curtailed.

It’s like getting a text from an old flame demanding to hear once again why you’ve broken up. The truth is, I’m not anti-Alberta in the least. I think that it’s one of the most beautiful places on the planet, from the ice fields above Jasper to the great delta of the Peace and Athabasca Rivers in Wood Buffalo National Park. I’ve lectured at its universities, hiked its trails, had Tegan and Sara high on my playlist. Lake Louise! Lake Minnewanka! The Calgary Stampede! Edmonton has the largest mall in North America. Calgary was once voted the world’s cleanest city, edging out Honolulu. What’s not to love?

But Alberta has an enormous amount of carbon beneath its soil. If it gets dug up and burned, then it will be calculably harder to limit the damage from climate change. The best estimate for economically recoverable oil in the province is about a hundred and seventy-three billion barrels. Burning that much, according to one calculation, would produce about a hundred and twelve billion tons of carbon dioxide, which is twenty-eight per cent of the world’s total remaining carbon budget if we want to have a fifty-per-cent chance (not a guarantee—a fifty-per-cent chance) of meeting the climate goals we set in Paris. Lay aside for the moment the devastation caused by mining the sludgy tar sands for oil. There’s no way that a country with less than one per cent of the world’s population can lay claim to more than a quarter of the atmosphere.

Alberta started feeling pressure with the battle over the Keystone XL pipeline, which would have run from the tar sands to the Gulf of Mexico. Indigenous people and Midwestern farmers and ranchers decried the damage to their lands and waters; many others (myself included) joined in to point out the damage that the pipeline would do to the climate. People went to jail, marched in huge numbers, and won: KXL won’t be built. In the process, the spotlight cast on the absurdity of the tar-sands project persuaded investors and oil companies around the world to start backing away. Some of the retreat was purely financial: in a world that will need less oil, the attraction of going to a landlocked continental interior and trying to separate petroleum from sand is waning. But some of it was in response to those efforts—banks and oil companies knew that the tar sands were in the spotlight.

This awareness-raising is what the government of Alberta considers unfair. North America has turned into what the Financial Post last week called a “graveyard of mega pipeline projects,” despite the government’s best efforts—it spent $1.3 billion trying to keep KXL alive. And it has struck back not just at environmentalists but at other parts of Canada: Alberta’s former premier, for instance, organized a boycott of British Columbia wine after that neighboring province asked for a review of the oil-spill risk associated with another tar-sands-pipeline project. Various Alberta leaders have regularly threatened to secede, a “Wexit” strategy (a reference to western Canada) that apparently Ottawa takes seriously enough to have invested at least fifteen billion taxpayer dollars in yet another pipeline to the Pacific. Alberta seems to think that it has been singled out for opposition. But the same groups—such as 350.org, which I helped found—that fight tar-sands oil have fought just as hard against Australian coal and American fracking, against pipelines that carry Dakotan oil or terminals that would export Appalachian natural gas, and against pipelines across Europe and Africa. The atmosphere can’t distinguish Canadian carbon from any other kind; it all heats the planet.

You’d think that the government of Alberta would be grateful. Temperatures are soaring across the province; just three years ago, after a record heat wave, an astonishing wildfire forced the evacuation of all eighty thousand people in Fort McMurray, the center of the tar-sands complex. This month, meteorologists reported that lightning strikes across the region were ten times higher compared with a year before—seven hundred and ten thousand within a single day, as more water vapor in the hot air led to fiercer thunderstorms. “It’s comparable to what you would typically see on some of the bigger lightning days in really lightning-prone regions of the United States, like Texas or Oklahoma,” an expert explained. Plenty of Albertans know that the planet is heating up—in 2019, thousands of them joined Greta Thunberg at a climate rally in Edmonton—but government and industry can’t seem to escape from the dream that their oil boom could just keep going. In fact, they have proposed building a new export terminal in the Arctic Ocean, the ice in which is rapidly melting.

This kind of fight will keep going on around the world, as one region after another realizes that environmental sanity requires it to keep its fossil fuels in the ground. Alberta—highly educated, and blessed with sun and wind—is in a far better position than most places to pivot to a new economy, and indeed there are signs that shift is beginning. But it won’t be easy psychologically. Hence the three-and-a-half-million-dollar investment into the anti-Alberta inquiry, not to mention a thirty-million-dollar government “war room” to counter attacks on the oil-and-gas industry, last seen waging a battle against a Netflix cartoon called “Bigfoot Family.”

Government of Alberta: nobody hates you. It’s just that we can all do the math.

Passing the Mic

Born in Ireland, Deborah Brosnan came to the U.S. to earn her Ph.D. at the University of Oregon. Now an adjunct professor at Virginia Tech, she also runs a consulting company that helps corporations come to terms with international environmental law, among other things. It’s a field that may be changing soon, as a panel of twelve international lawyers last month settled on a definition for “ecocide” to propose to the International Criminal Court. If the court adopts it, it would bring environmental crimes a step closer to being prosecuted there. (Our conversation has been edited.)

What is “ecocide,” and why do we need this new category of crime?

Ecocide is “unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment being caused by those acts.” If adopted by the I.C.C., it would allow communities and governments to sue for environmental damage across international borders and in ways not available today. The caveat is that nations would have to be members of the I.C.C.

The timing of this definition comes when the level of CO₂ in the atmosphere, at four hundred and nineteen parts per million, is the highest it has been in eight hundred thousand years. Heat waves, extreme temperatures, rainfall, storms, and wildfires are becoming more extreme and frequent—e.g., the current heat wave in the Pacific Northwest, estimated to have killed over a billion shoreline creatures along the beaches of Vancouver, B.C. Their deaths, in turn, will impact all species in that web of life. Humans are altering entire ecosystems at a large scale and to the point where these systems can no longer persist or provide ecosystem services (such as clean water, fisheries, storm protection, etc.).

The timing is also related to the growing debate and sense of social justice and equity, especially in relation to climate change. Communities in emerging nations and island states suffer disproportionately from climate change’s impacts. But they did, and do, little to contribute to rising CO₂ levels. They have few resources for mitigation or adaptation and no power to change the emissions or policies of those whose decisions impact their environment. Additionally, it is often the poor and indigenous communities that suffer most when ecosystems are damaged or destroyed, and who have least recourse.

These impacts occur through government policies that either do not sustain the environment or actively destroy it. For instance, there was widespread outcry over President Jair Bolsonaro’s Amazon rain-forest policy that saw large-scale forest destruction and fires in 2020, and already, between January and June, 2021, another four hundred and thirty thousand acres have been wiped out.

How do we differentiate between those who are orchestrating this ecocide and those of us who are simply participating in it with our habits?

For now, the focus will be:

1. The scale and duration of the environmental damage and consequences (something also likely to be correlated with the number of people impacted, but not always). Examples of ecocide may include a mining company operating over thousands of acres in Brazil or a commercial fishing company trawling across a large swath of seafloor. The deliberate burning of Kuwait’s oil fields in 1991 would probably have fallen under this effort.

2. The other feature is “wanton”—the [ecocide] law would require a knowledge of the consequences of the actions on the environment and a decision to proceed with intent knowing the harm that would occur.

If ecocide is adopted, there will be a plethora of cases filed that will start to test the boundaries of the law.

Should investors be worried? And what about boards of directors?

Investors should be worried. Ecocide increases the risk and exposure of companies based on their practices, not just in their home country but across the globe. For instance, a company can be taken to court under ecocide for activities it conducts in a foreign country and/or based on its supply chain. For example, the fashion trade is known to be a high consumer of water, and some operations have resulted in environmental damage. Many of these impacts have been in poorer parts of Asia. A fashion company that sources its clothing or raw materials from suppliers or areas where there is high environmental damage would have exposure to be held liable. Supermarkets and food companies that source fish caught by destructive seabed trawling or by environmentally destructive fish farming/shrimp farming would also be affected.

Boards of directors should also be worried. Those who have a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders will need to evaluate the risks from a wide variety of environmental perspectives and business operations. We are starting to see these kinds of cases, such as the Dutch court’s decision against Royal Dutch Shell, over climate-change impacts.

Climate School

Potentially important news from Somerville, Massachusetts, where a startup company, Form Energy, released new information on what would be a groundbreaking product: a battery that uses cheap iron, not pricey lithium. Because iron is heavy, this battery won’t be for cars; instead, it could let utilities store lots of power for days on end, making renewable energy even more competitive with fossil fuels.

Writing in the Intercept, Naomi Klein does a fiery job of explaining how this summer’s extreme weather seems to be reaching people in places that used to be considered safe.

A new report on gasoline “superusers” in the U.S. finds that ten per cent of drivers use a third of all the gasoline consumed by light-duty vehicles. Give these people a coupon for an electric vehicle, fast!

Amazon Watch has issued an important new document explaining why corporations should not be making “net-zero” promises based on “protecting” the rain forest. These pledges don’t, the organization points out, compensate for not actually emitting carbon, and, in any event, the forest offsets often end up damaging, not helping, indigenous Amazonians. Meanwhile, activists have launched a major campaign against plans by Brazil’s President Bolsonaro to build a “grain train” with a thousand kilometres of track through the eastern Amazon.

Brian Kateman and his Reducetarian Foundation have done important work trying to convince people that they can dramatically reduce meat in their diets even if they’re not prepared to be vegetarians. Now he’s released a film to make the point: “Meat Me Halfway.” (Full disclosure: I appear briefly.)

Sabrina Rodriguez does a superb job, in Politico, of making a point that can’t be made too often: the refugee crisis in the Americas is in part a result of climate change. “It’s impossible to know the motives of migrants—and it’s rarely just one reason,” she writes, “but U.S. and Guatemalan officials, regional experts and civil society leaders say climate-fueled displacement is a likely factor for thousands who’ve decided to strike out from home and head to the U.S.”

I did not know that the U.S. Department of Agriculture allows people to cut down native grasses and forests and then plant “organic” crops—there’s a drive under way to close this loophole.

In an interesting and hopeful update to a problem I’ve written about in the past—the shortage of chargers for electric vehicles on long trips—Elon Musk reports that Tesla’s Supercharger network will soon be available for use by E.V.s from any manufacturer.

Earlier this year, Microsoft paid an Oregon forest owner for a quarter million tons of “carbon offsets” to compensate for the company’s emissions, a common part of corporate “net zero” strategies. Now that forest is on fire, and the offsets have turned into carbon-dioxide emissions.

Scoreboard

There’s been flooding around the world this steamy summer, but few incidents match the scale of what happened in Zhengzhou, China, a hub for (among other things) iPhone production. On July 20th, the city got nearly twenty-five inches of rain in twenty-four hours, which is almost a year’s worth of rain in a day. Not surprisingly, Zhengzhou’s decade-old subway system filled with water, killing a dozen people—and raising alarms for subway systems worldwide.

When it comes to emissions, there are factories, airplanes, industrial food systems—and, apparently, feral boars, which, by pawing through soil around the world, release carbon equivalent to that emitted by a million cars.

Patrick Mazza has unearthed some remarkable maps showing what the planet will look like as the sea level rises—they come from Jeffrey Linn, a “speculative cartographer.”

Warming Up

Take a look at these five short films from around the globe, focussed on a “regenerative world.” They are sponsored by the Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson’s Little Sun foundation, which says, “Our aim is that these artworks help to turn an often data-driven and technically heavy conversation surrounding the global energy crisis into an open, intimate dialogue, creating accessible stories and new motivation for global change.”