Mike Pompeo Cozies Up to Saudi Arabia While US Citizens Are Imprisoned

By Alia al-Hathloul, Ali AlAhmed and Areej AlSadhan, NBC News

21 February 20

The secretary of state pledged to raise human rights on his visit, but the U.S. has shown little willingness to go beyond lip service for these hostages.

ast summer, when the American rapper A$AP was tried in a Swedish court on assault charges, President Donald Trump dispatched his special envoy for hostage affairs to Sweden.

This week, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has traveled to Saudi Arabia, where our family members are just some of the U.S. citizens and relatives of U.S. citizens being held by the government on spurious charges, denied due process and even tortured. Why is there no sign the hostage envoy is accompanying Pompeo on his trip to Riyadh?

We join Republican and Democratic members of Congress who have urged Pompeo to raise the case of Saudi American physician Walid Fitaihi who — after a brutal detention — has been barred, along with his family, from leaving the kingdom until after his trial on vague charges relating to his obtaining of U.S. citizenship and alleged ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. But we want pressure and attention to be brought to our loved ones, as well.

Pompeo has pledged to raise human rights with the Saudis during his three-day trip, which ends Friday. But the U.S. government has shown little willingness to go beyond lip service for these hostages of the Saudi regime. We need our officials, starting with the secretary, to act now — decisively and without reservation — to secure the release of citizens or relatives of citizens whom they are in office to serve.

But U.S. officials seem to assume America’s long-term interests are too valuable to risk alienating or weakening the Saudi royal family, which enjoys close ties with Trump’s inner circle. Indulging this autocratic and unstable regime not only punishes the domestic activists who most uphold American values, it also undermines the very reliability of any joint military or business undertakings.

Such military and business ventures are agenda items U.S. officials have been much more eager to pursue, but they do so at great cost in moral authority and risk to our interests, even narrowly defined. As long as this culture of impunity persists, no American in Saudi Arabia is safe. And we should not trust Saudi forces to stand alongside our troops who defend U.S. interests and Saudi sovereignty in the Middle East.

Our relatives’ stories are well known to the Department of State, yet it has done almost nothing on their behalf. Our loved ones, and many others like them, are neither revolutionaries nor agents of foreign powers. Their only crime has been to fulfill the fundamental human yearning to be heard. The government of Saudi Arabia has blatantly violated these universal principles.

Alia al-Hathloul: My sister

Loujain al-Hathloul, one of the most recognized Saudi women rights activists, is my sister. She has endured physical and sexual abuse at Saudi prisons since May 2018, just as the regime granted a few of the universal rights for which she long advocated. I was born in Wisconsin, and I hope that my government will stand up for my Saudi-born sister — and for core American values. Even as women have been allowed some basic freedoms, such as the right to drive, Loujain awaits her next court appearance for promoting women’s rights and having contact with foreign journalists and organizations like Amnesty International.

Ali AlAhmed: My cousin

Bader al-Ibrahim, an Oregon native and U.S. citizen, was arrested in Riyadh in April 2019, placed in solitary confinement and denied access to a lawyer or contact with his family. My cousin has yet to be charged with any crime. He is a respected physician and journalist who has written extensively on Sunni-Shiite relations and women’s rights, while I have worked for the past 15 years as a human rights activist to promote political reform in Saudi Arabia.

Areej AlSadhan: My brother

Abdulrahman AlSadhan is a 35-year-old humanitarian aid worker who was seized by Saudi Arabia’s secret police in March 2018 from his office at the Saudi Red Crescent Society. As his sister, a U.S. citizen living in San Francisco, I have spent every day since then trying to find out where he is, what he has been charged with and how he is being treated. Saudi officials tell us only that he is “under investigation,” but they have prohibited contact with his family or legal counsel.

After repeated visits to the State Department and efforts by my representative in Congress, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in early February my father received a brief phone call from Abdulrahman. All he managed to communicate was that he is alive and being held in the notorious maximum-security al-Ha’ir prison near Riyadh.

This small success shows that public pressure works.