Part Three: Prince Mohammed Bin Salman: The Tyrant of Saudi Arabia

Robert and Dave continue with Prince Mohammed Bin Salman's early adult years and rise to power.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also Media.

Speaker 2 (00:05):
Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the podcast where we're
continue to talk about Mohammed Ben Salmon and the Saudi
royal family with our guest David Bell. Welcome back to
the show. Dave. It's been a little while between our
first and last recordings. Yeah, been the first recording in
this one, have you been?

Speaker 3 (00:23):
I got COVID not currently, but I got ice. Yeah.
I also Robert.

Speaker 4 (00:28):
Last night, I had a dream about you, a dream
about me. Okay, So my dream was that we were
taking a shower together in b the suits and then.

Speaker 2 (00:42):
I had to that makes the TV appropriate.

Speaker 3 (00:44):
Yeah, Then I had to poop in the dream and
left the shower. Day, where are we building to here?
This is the dream. This is the dream. And I
went to the bathroom in dream?

Speaker 1 (00:54):
Is it?

Speaker 3 (00:56):
Yes?

Speaker 4 (00:56):
Because when I woke up, I didn't have to poop
in real life, so I was like, oh, thank god,
that was just a dream. Yeah, I had to poop
in the dream. So I left the shower and Alex
Schmidty was in.

Speaker 2 (01:06):
The bathroom, our other old roommate.

Speaker 3 (01:08):
Making coffee in the bathroom and in the dream classic coffee.

Speaker 4 (01:14):
I should have started with the fact that I have
terrible dreams, and that that was the dream.

Speaker 2 (01:19):
That doesn't sound like a good one.

Speaker 3 (01:21):
It wasn't bad, it was fine.

Speaker 2 (01:24):
I don't know that i'd call that fine. Well, Dave,
thank you for telling the audience about your upsetting dream.
I'm sure no one's going to be weird about it.
Among our listener base. We were going to react normally
to your shower story. Ah. You know who else reacts

(01:45):
normally to things?

Speaker 3 (01:47):
Who me?

Speaker 2 (01:48):
The Saudi royal family, you know, because they're all they're
basically aside from the billions and billions of dollars in
oil money and the fact that they don't have to work,
and the fact that an entire country are basically slaves them,
you know, they're just down to earth, regular guys like
Tim the Toolman Taylor from the show that maybe twenty
percent of our audience remembers.

Speaker 3 (02:08):
Yeah, the guy that the guy, the criminal guy.

Speaker 2 (02:12):
To me, Tim Allen, a simple everyman with who runs
a television show out of his house. Anyway, So one
of the few. As we've stated, most of like the
young princes, are not super productive individuals, right, They're mostly
spending their time kissing asked try and get like a
better cut of the family fortune, doing as little as possible,

(02:37):
and grafting off of like the money that should be
going to support the Saudi state. There's a few exceptions
to this rule, right, Mohammed bin Salmon, the subject of
our episodes, is one. His father, the soon to be
King Solomon, is another. And another one of the exceptions
to this rule was Mohammed bin Nayef, born in Jedda

(02:57):
at the end of August nineteen fifty nine. He had
more more than a quarter century on his younger cousin.
His father was Prince Niaf bin Abdulaziz, full son of
the Great King Abdulaziz, and a full brother of two
other kings, Fad and the new King Solomon. He was
thus a lot closer to the throne from the jump
than anyone ever thought that mohammadan Salmon was going to
be right like, he just kind of seems like a

(03:21):
much better bet as which one of these guys is
going to actually like make it to the high seat.
His father, Naif Been Abdulahziz, had been nicknamed the Black Prince,
and he'd risen to power first when his older brother,
the Minister of the Interior was assassinated by that other
prince who was angry about TV being legal. I know,
there's a lot of princes in this story.

Speaker 3 (03:43):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (03:44):
Nief succeeded his brother, which meant that he was now
working directly with the Wahabists, who traditionally had allied with
the House of Saud in order to push their hardline
fundamentalist policies. Prince Niaf became what the Brookings Institute described
as an arch reactionary, and he was the orchestrator behind
many of the kingdom's most puritanical new laws, cracking down

(04:06):
on freedom and anything that even hinted of social liberalism.
That's the Black Prince right. He violently suppressed the movement
to make Saudi Arabia's monarchy more of a constitutional monarchy
like in the UK, telling one interviewer, I don't want
to be Queen Elizabeth, which who does.

Speaker 3 (04:21):
Who does you know what I might take it?

Speaker 5 (04:26):
Uh?

Speaker 3 (04:28):
She had, Yeah, well not now, she said, Corkis.

Speaker 5 (04:31):
You know this actually came up on Margaret kiljoy show
before and we decided I would make a great Queen
Elizabeth because I would just fire myself and dismantle the monarchy.

Speaker 3 (04:41):
Yeah, oh yeah, that would be very effective.

Speaker 5 (04:43):
I would be I would be a great queen.

Speaker 1 (04:46):
I go mad with powers and I love corgies.

Speaker 5 (04:49):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (04:50):
So he earned the Black Prince earned his nickname because
of how harsh his policies were to the non citizen
worker population in the kingdom. So it was noteworthy when
his so on NBN, we've got NBS and NBN and
they're about to be rivals, made his debut as a
public person, spurning his own country in favor of the West.
So he doesn't go to school in Saudi Arabia. He's

(05:12):
not interested in attending a school in the Arab world. Instead,
he goes to like the oppositest part of the world
he possibly can, Portland, Oregon. I know, Portland shows up,
You're gonna ask what I was gonna guess, Berkeley.

Speaker 3 (05:28):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (05:30):
No, he goes to fucking NBN. Goes to Portland, Oregon
for college. He attends both Lewis and Clark College and
Portland State University. Incredible, Yeah, really funny. He does not
graduate from either. Most articles will say that he's a
graduate of Lewis and Clark or of PSU. Neither is true.

(05:50):
I can't even I can't even confirm that he got
a degree. Everyone says he's got a BA right. The
book Regime Stability in Saudi Arabia by Sticks Dinsley claims
that he studied for his master's degree in political science
and graduated in nineteen eighty one, although again no one
says where. Everyone says he went to Lewis and Clark

(06:10):
at PSU and he got a degree, but nobody says
where the degree is from, and we've confirmed it wasn't
either of those colleges.

Speaker 3 (06:17):
I don't know.

Speaker 2 (06:19):
Yeah, Lewis and Clark College. A guy that Mohammed bin
Salmon sparred with came here. Yeah, yeah, I don't know.
Maybe not the best ad, so yeah, I don't know
that he actually did graduate. Stigwrtes that he took quote
courses on security issues with the FBI from nineteen eighty
five to nineteen eighty eight and trained with Scotland Yard's

(06:41):
Anti terrorist units in London from nineteen ninety two to
nineteen ninety four. In nineteen ninety four he began working
regularly with his father, Interior Minister nief and Riyad, And
I think this is a situation where he's probably not
that great a student. I don't think you would have
qualified to have special training with the FBI in Scotland
yard based on his own merits, but because he's a

(07:02):
prince and he's someone who is going to be a
big part of the Saudi state. When he when he
expresses I'm interested in anti terrorism work, right, I'm interested
in like training with Western law enforcement organizations and counter terrorism.
They're all like, well, this is our chance to have
a man on the inside, right, this is our chance
to have like a guy in Saudi Arabia, not like
a spy, but a guy who's who we know, is

(07:23):
like a friend to us, who we feel like we
can trust. As opposed to this this regime is kind
of a black box to us otherwise, Right.

Speaker 4 (07:30):
It helps, it helps with your credit, It just puts
it's just a good I get it where it's like,
all right, you might you might not be. It's like
when The X Files had Stephen King wrote an episode
and they're like, well, he probably doesn't know the show,
the voice of the show, but he's Stephen King.

Speaker 3 (07:43):
Let's throw him on.

Speaker 2 (07:44):
And he didn't you know? That episode was the best.

Speaker 3 (07:46):
It was really. It was also heavily rewritten.

Speaker 2 (07:49):
Yeah, it would have had to be Yeah. Yeah, they
should have let Mohammed ban Naya write an episode of
The X Files. Oh yes, he was training with the
FBI in the nineties. He could have done it watching
the X Files, right. Oh yeah, he mused to have
an opinion on Fox Moulder. Oh yeah. So it's unclear
to me how much the elder and younger Knif coordinated here,

(08:11):
because remember his dad, the Black Prince, is this guy
who's very much lockstep with the clerics and is focused
on we need to crack down on anything that seems
like someone having fun in the Kingdom, right, whereas his
son is like, I'm friendly with the West, i went
to Portland for fucking college. I'm training with the FBI's
he's making he's putting out into the world, at least

(08:32):
image of he's much more of a liberal guy. He's
much less of a hard liner, right.

Speaker 3 (08:37):
I bet he knows where to get some great ascid.

Speaker 2 (08:40):
He probably did at one point.

Speaker 4 (08:42):
Yeah, Like, there's several places in that list where I
feel like he.

Speaker 2 (08:48):
Yeah, the FBI academy, I bet they had some great shit.
Oh yeah, So it's hard to say to what extent
is this, he and his dad are kind of working together,
knowing that the kingdom needs both someone who can reach
out to the West and can seem like he's modern
and someone who can get arm in arm with the

(09:08):
clerics and feel like, no, no, no, we're not trying
to draw the country forward into some scary version of modernity.
But there do seem to have been some real clashes
between them right One of them is over the fact
that his dad, the Black Prince, doesn't take seriously the
dangers of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism, Like he keeps being told, hey,

(09:30):
there's something brewing in your country, and he's like, nah,
I feel like Saudi Arabia and terrorism are never going
to be like two words that show up next to
each other in the public imagination. Per that analysis by
the Brookings Institute, Naief was conspicuously slow to recognize that
al Qaeda posed a threat to the Kingdom. He'd become
friendly with bin Laden during the Russian Afghan War, when

(09:51):
bin Laden was allied with the Musjahdeen and viewed him
as being exclusively focused on defeeding the Soviets. Naieff believed
al Qaida's reputation as a terrorist organization a product of
American propaganda, and was sure that all Kaita posed no
real threat to the Kingdom, a delusion he had in
common with much of the royal family. Prince Niaff was
not popular with the CIA. He was seen as uncooperative,

(10:11):
and for good reason. In nineteen ninety six, when chait
terrorists bombed a US Air Force base in Dahran and
killed nineteen Americans, the CIA asked Niaf for information on
the terrorists and their ties to Iran. Despite the Kingdom
and Iran being ostensibly geopolitical and religious rivals, Niaf stonewalled
the US. Our understanding is that he was afraid we'd
attack Iran and he wanted to avoid war. Bruce Rydell,

(10:33):
author of that bookings piece, was an CIA analyst at
the time, and he claims the general opinion over here
is that Niff was simply an American, right, and that's like,
I don't want to give too much credit to the
analytics skills of the pre or post nine to eleven
CIA right, for.

Speaker 3 (10:49):
Sure, for sure.

Speaker 2 (10:50):
So my assumption is that Bruce is like rog about
some part of the analysis there. I think maybe it's
just that he's not as much anti American as he is,
like anti having a problem, and if al Qaeda is
a serious threat to the kingdom, then he's got a
problem because a lot of people in Saudi Arabia are
close to Bin Law and a lot of people in
like the ruling class, have been funneling money to him

(11:11):
and organizations that are related to al Qaida, And if
they're really dangerous, then the there's a big problem. And
there's just this. It may just be the deep human
need to like not have a problem, right, That's part
of what's going on with night.

Speaker 3 (11:24):
No one likes to start shit.

Speaker 4 (11:26):
I get that where it's like, yeah, maybe Obama, maybe
he'll you know, yeah, call him Obama, Osama bin Lawn.

Speaker 3 (11:34):
Maybe he'll settle.

Speaker 2 (11:35):
Down, right, he'll calm down. Yeah, and n.

Speaker 4 (11:40):
Sorry forgive me. I'm I'm less educated on like what where?

Speaker 5 (11:45):
What?

Speaker 4 (11:45):
Like what was osamavid Lan's position before nine eleven? Like,
I oh, I mean like a lot of people only
heard of him until after.

Speaker 2 (11:53):
He bombed I mean he and al Kaida bombed the
world tradinges that are in ninety three. I think it
was right, Okay, oh yeah, Now it's very clear to
anyone paying attention that Bin Laden is going to continue
to be a problem for like the Kingdom and its
relations with the rest of the world. But there's this

(12:14):
big doubt with a lot of guys is like, are
they really terrorists? Is this the Are the Americans making
all this stuff up?

Speaker 3 (12:20):
Right?

Speaker 2 (12:21):
And the Black Prince's son, Mohammad bin nief INBN seems
to have been one of the rare people high up
in the royal family because of his training with these
Western agencies. Who actually is like, no, Al Qaeda is
probably an issue, and there'll be an issue for us too.

Speaker 3 (12:36):
Right.

Speaker 2 (12:37):
His feelings, his understanding of the matter is much more
in line with how the Americans are feeling, right, and
so he spends a lot of the nineties burnishing his
credentials and relationships with the Americans who staff security agencies,
being like, look, I'm the guy in the royal family
who sees things clearly that you can work with. There's
a big moment of conflict between the Elder Naif and

(12:57):
the CIA. In nineteen ninety eight, Vice President Al Gore
goes on a trip to Saudi Arabia alongside Bruce Rydell,
who's now working for the NSC they met both Naifs
and later learned during their visit that the Ministry of
the Interior had spotted and defeated a plan to attack
the US consulate while they were there. Up to that point,
al Qaeda had mostly avoided operations inside the kingdom, right,

(13:19):
And so now while al Gore is in country, they
bust a plan to attack the consulate while the US
Vice President there, and that really rattles people. And suddenly
Mohammad bin Naief is the only guy who's been saying like, hey,
we should be taking al Kaeda seriously, and suddenly he
gets a lot of attention, is like, oh, maybe he
was right. Maybe MBN has been correct all of the time,

(13:41):
and we should be listening to this guy when it
comes to security advice. Right.

Speaker 4 (13:45):
It's yeah, going back to like people are all like conflict, right,
and if someone's just like, hey, that guy's a problem,
that guy's a problem. Will go as long as we
can up to the point where it's like, oh wait,
they're going to hurt me.

Speaker 3 (13:58):
Oh well, we got to do something about this. Oh lie,
oh my good.

Speaker 2 (14:02):
If al Gore gets killed by al Qaeda while I
am in charge of security, that probably is the problem
for me. That's bad that like, I probably don't do
well afterwards.

Speaker 3 (14:12):
Yeah, no, I'm finding a new career after that.

Speaker 2 (14:15):
Yeah. So in nineteen ninety nine, MBN is appointed to
the Ministry of the Interior as a senior minister overseeing security.
By the fall of two thousand and one, he was
considered by many experts to be the number one guy
in the Saudi government to talk to you about counter terrorism.
And then comes nine to eleven. Right, you know you're
well aware. Yeah, So basically there were some big buildings

(14:38):
in New York and then there weren't as a result
of these guys who learned how to fly, but not
all the way. Right, that's the that's the brief description
I would give se yeah, yeah, seventy.

Speaker 1 (14:54):
But the test.

Speaker 2 (14:56):
Yeah, that's basically what happened. Right, there were some other.

Speaker 1 (15:01):
Thanksging not wrong. That's what's funny.

Speaker 4 (15:06):
I hate to sound listen, I hate to sound really old,
but I'm realizing that there are young people now that
do genuinely have to like learn about nine to eleven.

Speaker 2 (15:15):
Now, yeah, we forgot, well they did. Yeah, so they
cause a massive upset inside the Saudi security establishment. Right,
this is as big a problem as it could possibly be,
because fifteen of the nineteen hijackers were Saudi. Yeah, that's
a kind of their deal, right, Bush was rattling his

(15:35):
saber at Iraq and they'd had fuck all to do
with all Kainda. Like right after the attacks, we start
making it starts becoming clear we're going to move on
a rack. Pretty soon.

Speaker 3 (15:43):
They had WMD's Roberts.

Speaker 2 (15:48):
So obviously, if you're thinking about this from the respect
of the Saudis, Bush is about to fuck up a
rock and they had nothing to do with this. We
had a lot to do with this. Not only were
fifteen and the nineteen hijackers Saudi, but a lot of
guys in the Saudi royal family. We're shuffling money to
places that wound up getting to Al Qaida right one
where or the other.

Speaker 4 (16:10):
And they're like, hey, that guy you brought is a
big problem. He's a big problem. And then he hit
d Trade Center. Yeah yeah, and then you hit like
the guy next to him because you wanted to hit
that guy instead. That's essentially it, right, It's like, yeah,
we already had a problem. We didn't like Saddam for
a while, and we were like that says Adam, last straw,
you did it.

Speaker 2 (16:31):
Yeah, And so there's this worry that like, well, how
do we know they're not going to fuck with us next, right,
because we kind of we actually have it coming a
lot more than erect us. And obviously, you know, it's
not just that bin Laden, the guy who plans the
attack or does is seen as planning the attack, is
the man is a Saudi too. But the Black Prince

(16:51):
in most of his peers had scoffed at the idea
that al Kaida was dangerous. You know, it doesn't take
a bright person to see if the Royal family is
in danger. Here Mbn is the new blood. He's not
tainted by the mistakes of his father or the older generation.
He's got good connections to US government, particularly in the
CIA and the FBI, and he starts using them. And
then in two thousand and three something happened that would

(17:12):
electrify his career. On February fourteenth, on the holy day
of ida A Lada Osama, bin Laden issued a communicate
through al Qaeda accusing the royal family of betraying the
Last Caliphate to the British Empire and their Zionist allies.
This mirrored their behavior supporting the US and its wars
against Muslims. He predicted that the US would use air
bases in Saudi Arabia to support its invasion of Iraq.

(17:34):
The announcement was basically a declaration of war against the Kingdom,
or at least this has been laden announcing that he
was widening the scope of the existing war to include
the Kingdom. Right, al Qaeda is now at war with
the Kingdom, at least with the Kingdom's royal rulers. In May,
al Qaida operatives launched an attack on a Riyad compound
where Western military advisers worked with Saudi officers. Eight Americans

(17:57):
and two Australians died, among others. CIA director George Tennett
flew to the Saudi capital and warned the Crown Prince,
al Qaeda is going to target your family next. Just
a few months later, Mohammad ban Nayaf has made the
number two man in the entire Ministry of the Interior.
It was a vote of confidence in his ability to
orchestrate the Kingdom's response to al Qaeda and to effectively

(18:18):
reform its security and intelligence agencies. TenneT would later write
that the Cia considered Mohammad bin Nayef its number one
man in Saudi Arabia. Right Dell writes, Mbin led the
counter offensive. The Interior Ministry issued lists of the most
wanted al Qaeda terrorists and then proceeded to hunt them
down ruthlessly. Whenever any of the men on a list
were eliminated in firefights or ambushes, the ministry would update

(18:40):
the list with the names of the next most wanted
al Qaida fighters. It was a tough and dangerous time.
Most foreigners who could leave the kingdom did so, or
at least sent their families away. Mbin was the face
of the Saudi war on al Qaida, appearing on television
and in the newspapers to explain the threat the kingdom
was facing. So he becomes like the figure who is
like leading the Saudi war effort against al Qaeda. He's

(19:03):
like both in propaganda, his face is everywhere and the
West season as the guy who's very successfully orchestrating this
response to al Qaeda violence in the country and within
the royal family. He's seen as the guy who is
protecting us from this like surge of violence, from this
dangerous and unpredictable network, right, Like he's he's really if
you're looking at who's going to follow as like who's

(19:26):
going to be of this generation, Like the guy who's
in line to be king Mohammed and Nif is looking
like someone who might be crown prince and then king
one day. Right, Like he's he's really distinguished himself, far
more than Ben Salomon has. He's really nothing at this
point in time, right.

Speaker 3 (19:41):
Right, Yeah, Now he's gonna fight. He's gonna fight. Oh
some of the they're gonna fist fight.

Speaker 2 (19:47):
He's gonna fist fight Bin Laden and make himself the king. Yeah,
as as we know, kings are supposed you're supposed to
as a king defeat one dragon and Mohamus ban Lad's
kind of a dragon, right yeah?

Speaker 4 (19:59):
Yeah, said he was the perceived designer of nine to eleven?
Does that mean like was he like the Jon Favreau
of it? Like was it like that? Oh, there's other
people like.

Speaker 2 (20:09):
He's the Matt Groining of nine to eleven. We're like, yeah,
but he's not. Like Conan O'Brien has a lot more
to do with planning nine to eleven than than than
than Matt Graining. Right, If we're if we're Simpson's name.

Speaker 4 (20:24):
Yeah, like they were, Yes, Like he's in charge, but
there were a lot of talented people under.

Speaker 2 (20:30):
Yeah, there's a lot of talented Harvard graduates making making
the show work underneath him.

Speaker 3 (20:34):
Yes, you got it.

Speaker 2 (20:36):
Who's the David X Cohen of al Qaida? Find out
would we come back from?

Speaker 3 (20:40):
Uh?

Speaker 2 (20:41):
You know this break.

Speaker 5 (20:44):
That was a really good one.

Speaker 2 (20:52):
We're back. David X Cohen is the Khalid Sheikh Mohammed
of of nine to eleven. Okay, that's right.

Speaker 3 (20:59):
Thank you.

Speaker 2 (21:00):
You can graph all of the great Simpsons writers onto
figures within al Qaeda, very easy to do. You can
you can graph all of the all of the South
Park guys onto a member of Isis. You know, that's
just the way, that's just the way things work.

Speaker 5 (21:14):
I'm glad to know, like where they all stand.

Speaker 2 (21:18):
Yeah, yeah, I would say like South Park has more
of an Isis vibe, well, where whereas the Simpsons is
more like an al Qaeda kind of deal.

Speaker 4 (21:25):
So Isis is like two guys, like two guys and
then and then like a small handful, but the two guys.

Speaker 5 (21:35):
Like some kind of org chart family tree type situation.
To get clarification, where where does family guy fall in
in this matter?

Speaker 2 (21:44):
Robert family guy just is an act of terrorism.

Speaker 3 (21:47):
So gonna say it's one to one.

Speaker 2 (21:48):
Just Ye, it's one to one. So we're back and
we're talking about Muhammadan Naief leading the Kingdom's response to
a surge of terrorism by al Qaeda in side the country. Now,
a major characteristic of Naief's response was a commitment to
avoiding the kind of collateral damage that would have made
light it looked like the situation was totally out of control. Right,

(22:11):
You don't want to be blowing up too many things
or killing too many civilians as you search out for
these al Qaida operatives, because it makes it seem to
the people like maybe maybe the royal family has no
idea what's going on. Maybe you guys are completely out
of your depth here, right.

Speaker 5 (22:26):
He.

Speaker 4 (22:28):
You know, these days you can do all sorts of
things to civilians, it seems in the name searching things.
But yes, yes, generally you don't want to do that.

Speaker 2 (22:36):
You used to be able to We used to be
a proper country, you know. Yeah, So he distinguished himself
from his peers by ordering his forces to focus on
outreach to the families of dead al Kaida operatives. Parents
were told their children had been victims and received a
degree of state support in dealing with the social fallout
from their children's actions, rather than being suspected themselves and

(22:57):
told that like your child is you know, you should
be ashamed of your kid. They were told like, no,
you're your kid was a victim of terrorism too, right,
And the goal of this is to not create more terrorists.
If you make the whole family seem like they're all targets,
then more of them are going to be sympathetic to
al Qaeda and potentially join and become a problem. U.

(23:20):
So he's trying, Yeah, he doesn't want to do what
the US does.

Speaker 3 (23:23):
Also, I've used that excuse in my family before, Yeah,
to get out of all sorts of things.

Speaker 2 (23:30):
No, you guys here victims in this too. Yeah. His
responses were generally seen as effective reducing al Qaeda's influence
in the Kingdom. Perhaps the best evidence of that was
the fact that ben Lauden and company considered him a
strategic target worth expending resources to take down. Here's how
Ben Hubbard described the first attempt on Mohammed Banya's life.
That focus on engagement almost killed him. In two thousand

(23:52):
and nine, the brother of a storied Saudi bomb maker
who was hiding out with al Qaida and Yeman, announced
that he wanted to return to the Kingdom and surrender
to Mbien in person. The Prince received the man in
his palace, ordering that he not be searched to avoid
humiliating him, and sat next to him. The man detonated
a bomb hidden in his rectum, killing himself and giving
MBM what we're described at the time as light wounds. Now,

(24:14):
first off, that's rough, but bomb bad. That's a bad
assassination attempt.

Speaker 3 (24:22):
I was gonna say, if you're asked.

Speaker 2 (24:24):
First, next to you, Yeah, you're right next to him.

Speaker 4 (24:26):
And you set off a butt bomb. That to me,
and then it doesn't hurt the person next to him.
What that sounds like without knowing more information, is that
your ass exploded and everybody turned and went, oh my god,
what happened?

Speaker 3 (24:39):
Are you okay? And you're on the ground like I
need help, My ass just exploded. Like I might even
try to pretend like maybe there's no bomb. I was
just like, I don't know what happened.

Speaker 2 (24:48):
An accident, an accident, No, I think he blows into
pieces because as a spoiler, the public note is that
MBN was barely wounded. He's there's a lot of evidence
that he's pretty bad hurt by this, that maybe he's
actually never the same afterwards. Again, when a man explodes ass, first,
you're the shrapnel that's hitting you is pieces of a

(25:10):
man's ass, So among other things, you're gonna get infected, right,
like his guts and stuff for hitting are getting or
piercing your body.

Speaker 4 (25:18):
Even if I'm physically fine, I'm not the same after that,
a man's ass exploded next to me.

Speaker 3 (25:25):
Like, That's all I'm talking about for the rest of
my life.

Speaker 2 (25:29):
Yeah, a really unique form of PTSD. So the next year,
mbn's force is exposed and I'll Kita plot to smuggle
bombs into the US via shipping containers. The bombs are
intercepted and the attack is thwarted, making NBN into a
hero at home and within US intelligence agencies. He continued
to remain the top man in security throughout the Obama years,

(25:50):
where he developed a close working relationship with CIA Director
David Petraeus. He also got on tight with John Finer,
chief of staff for Secretary of State John Cai He
would later tell a reporter that Inmbian's people saved my
butt more than once, which given what had just happened
to NBA John Carreys, where someone's gonna butt bomb him. Yeah,

(26:13):
he literally saved my ass.

Speaker 3 (26:15):
I'm glad he has a sense of humor about it.

Speaker 2 (26:17):
Yeah. I don't know if he meant that as a joke.
I don't know that John carries that funny a man.

Speaker 4 (26:23):
Yeah, and then a terra somewhere is like, oh, I
never thought to put the bomb in there, but.

Speaker 2 (26:28):
In his butt.

Speaker 3 (26:29):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (26:31):
Salmon comes to power as king in twenty fifteen, as
we talked about last episode, and he very quickly removes
the guy who had been crown Prince that the old
king had wanted to succeed after King Salomon, and he
makes mohammedd b Nayef the crown prince. And this is why, right,
Mbian is the natural pick to be crown prince, because

(26:52):
he's the guy who has been dealing with the war effort. Right,
he's the guy who protected the country, who saved it
from al Qaide.

Speaker 3 (27:00):
He's his asshole pick.

Speaker 2 (27:02):
He put his ass on the line. He took someone
else's ass in an explosion right, and a lot of
Americans cheer. This development is the best thing to happen
to US power in the Middle East for generations. The
CIA could hardly have hand picked a better successor. Best
of all, as they saw it, Nief was a legitimate
hero in Saudi Arabia. He wasn't someone whose reputation they

(27:22):
had to prop up. We don't have to make this
guy into a puppet. He's already a hero, right right,
it's a it's a great bet. So April of twenty fifteen,
Naieff has made the crown prince and up through twenty sixteen,
it doesn't seem like Mohammed bin Salman, who again is
the subject of these episodes, and we've had to explain
a lot of other guys. He doesn't like he's got

(27:44):
any chance of taking the crown or power for himself.

Speaker 3 (27:47):
He's got real Jeb energy.

Speaker 2 (27:50):
He's got a lot of Jeb energy at this point, right, yeah,
je yeah, real Please got him managing the family like
office and everything like that, and he's taking on a
lot of power for himself. But he doesn't seem very special.
And MBN just seems unassailable, right, Like, how could you
possibly compete with this guy. You're twenty years younger. You've

(28:13):
never survived an assassination attempt. MBN is on like his
third by this point. You've never fought, prosecuted a war successful.
He's got all these friends in the West. But there
are already early warning signs for those who truly understood
inner family power politics within the kingdom. When he appointed
MBN Crown Prince, King Solomon also collapsed in Mbien's court,

(28:35):
because every one of these princes at this level has
their own like royal office. Salmon collapses his court into
the main royal court. And I think this is streamlined
like he frames it, says, we need to be more efficient,
so we need to like collapse all these courts together
so that they work more effectively. But the crown prince's
royal court had always been seen as an important perk

(28:57):
in a good way for an ascendant prince to build
a base power for his own future reign. You're picking
out people that you want to be loyal to you.
You giving them early jobs ways that they can make
a fortune for themselves. Right, if you don't have control
over your own royal court as crown prince, you're losing
out on a way to like build power for yourself,

(29:19):
and the fact that Mohammed Man Salmon is in charge
of the royal court allows his twenty six year younger
son to start making powerful allies and bribing influential royals
with court positions. So you can see already there's some
signs that maybe King Solomon doesn't intend for Mbian to
ever actually take the throne, right, that maybe he's setting

(29:39):
his son up and kind of doing a fuck job
on Mohammed Man Nayef. Behind the scenes, people close to
the royal family begin to whisper that even as he
took on the crown, King Solomon was suffering from the
early stages of Alzheimer's. In this version of events, just
as the king makes Mbian his official successor, he's starting
to seed a lot of his power and decision making
to his younger son Mohammad b and Salomon, who he

(30:02):
appoints as defense minister upon taking office. Right that, maybe
NBS is orchestrating a lot of this from the start,
because King Solomon's never all that competent to run anything,
So maybe from the jump, from the start of his
dad's time as king, NBS is trying to figure out
how can I get Mohammad Banayev out from being the

(30:22):
crown prince right, And so he's orchestrating all of this,
and he makes sure he gets the job as the
Minister of Defense because he knows that I want to
kick this guy out of power. This guy has already
developed a reputation as a war leader for our people,
so I need to develop a reputation as a war
leader for our people. And he wastes no time. Yeah,

(30:42):
but he's got to do a lot worse bombs than that, Dave.
In March of twenty fifteen, Mohammad and Salomon orders Saudi
forces to intervene directly in Yemen's latest civil war. If
you don't keep track of politics in that region, it's
important to know that Yemen has been embroiled in a
series of internescing Conft since nineteen sixty two. There have
been numerous different sides and coalitions, all backed by foreign powers.

(31:05):
Over the course of these conflicts, and throughout the last
half century or so, there have been Saudi military leaders
and princes who had advocated that the kingdom get more
directly involved in the fighting. The most recent phase of
fighting in Yemen was triggered, like so many other things,
by the Arab Spring. In twenty eleven, mass protests forced
the current president, a guy named Salah, to resign. His

(31:26):
vice president took over for what was meant to be
two years, during which time the government would be reorganized
into a new federal system and elections would be held.
Well attempts at working out a political arrangement failed, this
guy stays in power, and in a desperate attempt to
deal with the country's crippling economic problems, he cuts fuel subsidies.
This sparks protests and mass dissatisfaction with a no longer

(31:50):
scene as legitimate regime, A rebel group called the Huthis
was perceptive enough to take advantage of the situation. The
Huthis are a religious minority. They're from the Zadi sect
of Shia Islam, which is like five percent of the population.
Schmul and Zohar Letterman describe their motivations and adjourned article
for the Journal of Genocide Research. The Huthis protested against

(32:11):
their political and economic marginalization, as well as the encroachment
of Saudi Wahabi religious doctrine on the Sada province in
northern Yemen where they were based. So NBS's decision to
intervene doesn't come out of nowhere, but it's a distinct
shock to a lot of his peers and family members.
His cousin, the still crown Prince INBN, wasn't informed ahead
of time before Saudi forces start going to Yemen, and

(32:33):
the head of the National Guard, another cousin, also isn't
told ahead of time, right, none of the people who
should know before Saudi Arabia sticks its dick into this
civil war and Saudi operations are going to rely heavily
on the right. It's like he doesn't tell anybody before
he does this because he wants it to be his baby.
He thinks it's going to be a big success that

(32:54):
like immediately we're gonna kick the Huthis out, We're gonna
stabilize the situation in Yemen. And I want all the credit,
right right, I don't want any of these guys to
get credit. Obviously, it's gonna work quickly, because it always
works quickly.

Speaker 4 (33:09):
It's always fine. Yeah, there's man, it's a sickness like
where you can get resumes all the way. Obviously, today
where world leaders are like, we have created a society
where to be like respected, you have to go into
somebody's country and start screwing around and then get all
the credit.

Speaker 3 (33:27):
And it never seems to work out like that way,
but I guess it does because we keep doing it.
We're gonna invade Greenland or whatever where. It's just like,
that's what world leaders do. They start shit in other countries.
So I have to do it too if I want
to seem like a world leader.

Speaker 2 (33:46):
Yeah, it's it'll make me seem powerful, It'll make me.
I need to prove that I'm better than the last
guy who couldn't do it successfully?

Speaker 3 (33:52):
Right?

Speaker 4 (33:52):
Should it should have just paid people to put bombs
in their butts.

Speaker 2 (34:00):
We're all seeing the wisdom of al Kaieda here, right.
You know, simple goals in life. If all you want
is to put a bomb in a man's rectum and
detonate it next to another man, you can achieve that goal.
No one can take that from al Qaeda.

Speaker 5 (34:11):
You know.

Speaker 4 (34:12):
I have a question, Robert, if you had a butt
bomb and you what would you say before you exploded
it next to the person.

Speaker 3 (34:19):
Hmmm, Because I've been.

Speaker 2 (34:23):
That's a good question, Dave, I don't have a good
retort in my head right now, Okay, Sophie.

Speaker 1 (34:30):
Oh crap, Oh that's good, that's good.

Speaker 4 (34:33):
I would, I would, I would casually turn them and
go you ever eat asked before?

Speaker 3 (34:37):
And then.

Speaker 2 (34:40):
That's a really good one day. That's a good one, Dave. So,
the public justification for Saudi Arabia getting involved in the
civil war that does not involve it is that the
ousted president of Yemen had asked for Saudi help, right,
which he kind of he had. But the most obvious
behind the scene Mean's justification was that the Huthis had

(35:01):
Iranian backing, right, and MBS, along with most of his
inner circle, believe the Houthis were nothing but a proxy
for Iran, which is a probably a mistake that a
lot of world leaders make, which is like, these people
are getting arms or maybe training from this other country
that's my enemy. They must not be a real group.
This must all be a fiction created by this other
evil country, as opposed to like, well, the Huthis get

(35:24):
stuff from Iran, but they have their own base of power,
they're their own movement. They're doing a lot right, which
is why they've gotten where they are and they're going
to be a lot harder to destroy than you think
as a result of all of that. Right now, that said,
none of this alone explains why MBS decides to send
forces into Yemen. Was almost his very first action upon

(35:44):
getting into a position of power. The Leaderman Brothers write
that quote, Mohammed ben Salmon seems to have seen what
he believed would be a short and easily won battle
against the Huthis as an easy way to bolster his
images in military and political leader. And I've come across
several other analysts who say the same thing. Nobody ever
gives more detail than that, And we don't have any
quotes from behind the scenes or whatever. He does not
have a very porous office. There's not a detailed here's

(36:07):
what was happening, you know, behind the people haven't written
a dozen books about being inside his office at this time,
right because that's just not how Saudi Arabia works. You'll
get bone sawed if you do that sort of thing,
you will. So I'm left to assume that even these
much more knowledgeable analysts don't have a great deal of
detail from inside NBS's office, so to speak. And this

(36:28):
is one of the most frustrating parts of the story
to me, because there's not really a set. I don't
have a good answer as to why did you think
this would work? Man, he'd grown up and there were
a good reason to think a guy like NBS, who
seems to be relatively smart, should have known this was
a bad idea. He grew up watching the US fail
in Iraq and Afghanistan, right like you saw this fail.

Speaker 4 (36:49):
We in the previous podcast we talked about like you know,
teachers weren't allowed to like give him back grase, no
one can say no to him. It's it's and this
is it's a sickness. It's like if you spend your
life where everybody is not allowed to say no to you,
by the time you get to this point, you're like, yeah,

(37:10):
it'll all work out, won't it. You know what else
would like everything has told me that.

Speaker 3 (37:17):
So yeah, yeah, humor yeah.

Speaker 2 (37:20):
So he doesn't pay attention to the fact that this
never hasn't worked in recent memory. He doesn't pay attention
to the fact that gibbons dysfunction was spurred on by
the Iraq War. The Huthi's attacked former President Salah for
having supported the US during the early years of the
Global War on Terror. Somehow MBS seems to have convinced
himself that using a mix of air power and mostly
foreign troops, he could win a quick and overwhelming victory

(37:42):
against a group he thought was nothing more than an
Iranian cutout. This would be proven disastrously wrong, and without
any more detail behind the scenes, I'm left concluding that
Mohammad and Salmon made a really bad decision because he
was arrogant and too intellectually lazy to realize he was
making a mistake. Most sources do seem to agree that
he was the deciple and leading voice in Saudi Arabia

(38:02):
going to war. Many human rights activists Bara Chabon expressed
to the Middle East IE his opinion that Saudi Arabia
would have had some involvement in Yemen's civil war no
matter who was in power, but NBS made it certain
that that involvement would be direct military. Right, they would
have done something. They would have tried to send some money,
They would have tried to, you know, since some form

(38:22):
of a they would have tried to bribe an official
or whatever. But because it was MBS, it was made
a guarantee that they were going to send in soldiers
and planes and try to intervene directly and militarily. Quote,
if it weren't for Ben Salomon, Saudi Arabia might have
influenced the war through funding and supporting certain groups. Instead,
it takes a direct leading role in a campaign of

(38:43):
vicious air strikes. For the first few months, the Saudi
coalition carried out strikes on mostly military targets. They learned
a version of the lesson the US is currently failing
to learn over and over again in the Gulf of Aden,
which is that you can't destroy a group like the
Huthis just by carrying out air strikes. You can't bomb
them away. It's really hard to bomb people away when

(39:03):
they know the terrain and can hide behind rocks and stuff.
There's caves, there's bunkers, there's just hiding under the fucking sand.
You know, Like, it's hard to kill people that way
as much as you need to.

Speaker 4 (39:17):
Yeah, it feels like it's every people as unique, where
if you go into someone's territory, it's like, well, they
know it better than anybody. On top of it's that
realization that it's like it seems like world leaders have
just as much like knowledge as I do about how
to do a war, where I'm like, yeah, I like
the movie top Gun.

Speaker 3 (39:35):
Let's just do that.

Speaker 4 (39:36):
Let's just do like puw pew as opposed to like
the boring thing, you know, don't do the boring thing.
Don't like fund groups that that you want to you know, prevail, No, no,
you just we got all these cool little machines and stuff.
Let's send them in. Like it's everybody wants to do
pupu stuff.

Speaker 2 (39:53):
Yeah, everybody wants to do pupu stuff. Nobody actually knows
how to do pupu stuff. Yeah, it's I mean, the
best way to win a war is to avoid getting
involved entirely, and the next best way to win a
war is to sit on your ass while your opponent
bombs the country into ruins and then then come up

(40:16):
afterwards and be like still live, motherfucker. Those are, broadly speaking,
the two best strategies.

Speaker 4 (40:23):
Oh yeah, don't get into warst Like I've gone yeah.

Speaker 3 (40:27):
Over forty years now without getting into a war.

Speaker 2 (40:30):
Yeah not. You invaded any country, and there's been temptations, you.

Speaker 3 (40:33):
Know, Oh god, yeah, I've had every reason to, but
like I did.

Speaker 2 (40:37):
I invaded Belgian once kind of accidentally, but but I
wound up on a train to Germany the next night,
so it was okay. Speaking of invasions, why don't you
let these ads invade your mental state? And we're back.

(41:00):
So Saudi Arabia is carrying out horrific air strikes. By
August of twenty fifteen, it has become clear that things
are not trending towards a quick and easy win for
Mohammed ben Salmon and his coalition. In fact, several of
his Wanta Be coalition partners had backed out at the
last minute. These were guys he had relied on to
provide infantries because the Saudi Arabian army not great and

(41:23):
it's politically testy to send a bunch of your young
men into a meat grinder. He was really hoping some
other young men would do that job, and he winds
up being reliant on Sudanese war criminal mercenaries to do
a lot of the gruntwork for him, which is not
a great call for either a white variety of reasons.
As the summer reaches its apex the Leaderman's right quote,

(41:44):
a shift could be discerned from military and governmental to
civilian and economic targets including water and transport, infrastructure, food
production and distribution, roads and transport, clinics and hospitals, and
similar crucial civilian institutions. Right, so as soon as it
becomes like, oh, they're not just disappeared because we've started
bombing them and we don't actually know where to keep bombing,

(42:04):
Like I struck what we're supposed to be all the
military targets, and it doesn't seem to have harmed their military.
I guess we just start bombing where they keep the food.
I guess we start bombing the water treatment facilities. I
guess we start bombing the hospitals and schools, you know,
like that's where we go from There is like, well,
I guess I just have to destroy the whole society now, right, Yeah,

(42:26):
where's less popular?

Speaker 3 (42:28):
Right?

Speaker 2 (42:29):
But who these are more popular now that you're killing society.

Speaker 3 (42:32):
Yeah, let's make them victims. Now, let's just make them
like yeah yeah here.

Speaker 2 (42:38):
As opposed to what he should have done is just
set up an entire fake city, like fifty miles down
the road from the capitol and be like, hey, free gatorade.
You know, everybody gets a laptop at the nice city.
Why don't you guys just come to We're not fighting.
We got no desire to fight, you know, but you
know what, we have hamburgers.

Speaker 3 (42:58):
So like a blazing saddle.

Speaker 2 (43:00):
Yeah, exactly, exactly like that, you know, I feel like
that would work in a lot of wars. As opposed
to doing the whole invasion thing.

Speaker 4 (43:08):
I think we should at least try to do things
like paint tunnels on rocks and see if people run
into the rocks, you know.

Speaker 2 (43:16):
Yeah, yeah, what if we had just set up a
second Iraq and told everybody, look, you can stay living
under the old Iraq, but the new Iraq free cable.

Speaker 3 (43:26):
Yeah right, Iraq, come on over.

Speaker 2 (43:31):
Yeah yeah, yeah, suddenly said I doesn't even have a
country anymore. What's he going to do? You know exactly?
He'd actually have been very happy. It'd have been a
much happier man. He was tired of being the leader
of a rock at that point. So right as this
shift begins, as Saudi Arabia moves its bombing from trying

(43:51):
to strike in military targets to just trying to kill
civil society uh in Yemen, Muhammad b and Salma decides, well,
that's a good days work. I think, guy, I've earned
a vacation. Boy, a lot of work fucking up a war.
I'm gonna go party. You guys keep blowing up some
hospitals or something while I'm gone. Okay, So he gathers
a tight assortment of all of his best friends and

(44:13):
they leave the capital of Riod to party in the Maldeeps.
His people rent out the entire Vila resort, which had
fifty villas and a private coral reef of its own.
The hotel's regular employees were paid five thousand dollars each
for one month of work, on the condition that they
not bring their smartphones or talk to anyone else about
what they saw while they were there. Even with this

(44:34):
agreement in place, the prince's household brought its own servants
to manage the hotel instead, So none of these guys.
Most of these guys don't even get to work while
the prince is there because, as a spoiler, they're bringing
a shitload of drugs and prostitutes right to party in
them out. They're doing all the stuff you're not supposed
to do under Wavist Islam.

Speaker 4 (44:53):
It's wild how rich people are a different species yet
the same species too.

Speaker 3 (44:57):
Yeah, because you can do all that at a motel
s cheap, you can.

Speaker 2 (45:03):
So he invites this insane guest list.

Speaker 1 (45:06):
We have names.

Speaker 2 (45:08):
These are like his friends, these are people he's now
we do have some names. He invites one hundred and
fifty Brazilian in Russian supermodels. Each is scanned for STDs
and then taken to private lodgings on the island.

Speaker 5 (45:21):
Okay, yeah, yeah, okay.

Speaker 2 (45:25):
Per the Africa Report. To keep these demanding guests entertained,
there were concerts featuring the rapper Pitbull, Korean pop star PSI,
and Dutch DJ Afrojack.

Speaker 1 (45:35):
Mister Worldwide.

Speaker 3 (45:40):
He's paid, he's getting skimming paid.

Speaker 5 (45:43):
Yeah, buddy, diet I know to be not a good person.
Don't know anything about dbro Jack, but he's a DJ.
He's stereotyping, stereotyping, So sorry, DJs of the world.

Speaker 2 (45:58):
But mister world Wide, mister worldwide, Yeah that's right, baby, yeah,
mister worldwide. One hundred and fifty quote unquote supermodels and
Mohammed Ben Solomon and his best friends all partying on
an eye.

Speaker 5 (46:16):
Did they checked the talent for STDs or was that
just was that just the supermodels.

Speaker 2 (46:21):
They checked Pitbull for STDs, and the test came back.

Speaker 5 (46:24):
Yes, I'd like I'd like to think Korean pop star
side f.

Speaker 2 (46:32):
Yeah. It turns out Sigh was just for every cell
of his body was chlamydia. He's not even a person,
He's a sentient colony of chlamydia, which you know makes
sense based on this music. So while thousands die horrific
deaths from US bombs dropped by Saudi pilots, NBS and
his inner circle partied. My favorite detail from this blowout

(46:54):
was that one night NBS got up on stage during
DJ Afrojack set and took aver his turntables.

Speaker 3 (47:01):
Jesus, there's no way to do this good.

Speaker 2 (47:05):
He can't have been good.

Speaker 5 (47:06):
No, but like, you don't do that.

Speaker 2 (47:13):
What happened? The DJ gets pissed off. I'm gonna guess
everyone at the party's pissed off, and no one's allowed
to say anything. I'm gonna guess NBS is also coked
to the gills during this Right, these these guys are
flying in a mountain of Peruvian marching powder, and probably, yeah.

Speaker 4 (47:32):
It makes anybody SAYDJ like that's what does.

Speaker 2 (47:37):
That's what cocaine's for. Obviously, no amount of threatening hotel
staff is going to keep a party like this quiet
and doing this is not a good look for a
man who had just started a bloody war. That in
a man about a year or so, people are gonna
be talking about what Saudi Ribia is doing in Yemen
as a genocide. Right, So, after less than a week,
if I think what was meant to be like a

(47:57):
month of partying, NBS was forced to pull up stakes
and take his friends back home.

Speaker 3 (48:03):
Sorry, guys, we gotta go. I did a genocide.

Speaker 1 (48:06):
Uh, I.

Speaker 3 (48:09):
Know you guys.

Speaker 4 (48:11):
You guys can stay here, but listen, I'm not paying
anything anymore.

Speaker 1 (48:14):
I'm so sorry.

Speaker 5 (48:16):
Yeah, Bingham style, I'm so sorry, mister worldwide.

Speaker 1 (48:25):
We can rage later.

Speaker 5 (48:26):
I'm too busy committing mass murdered genoside.

Speaker 4 (48:31):
I feel like side they probably have contracts around that
where they're like, okay, they've done a genocide. You never
hear about, like I wish just once. I want to
hear about like James Taylor being at one of these.
It's never changed Taylor.

Speaker 2 (48:48):
Yeah, yeah, James Taylor, or uh fucking and and yeah,
sure you're in the Saudi royal family. Why not. Civilian
casualties mount as the war drags on. The coalition was
successful in pushing the Houthies back from their furthest gains
in southern Yemen, but no matter how much they bombed,

(49:09):
they couldn't make any headway against the capitol or any
of the other major cities the Houthis controlled. The Saudi
war effort was utterly reliant upon the US. The bombs
they dropped on the Houthis were made by Americans, as
were the planes flown by Saudi pilots. American political support
was also crucial to the Saudi war effort. NBS had
justified the brutality of this campaign by claiming Huthi resistance

(49:32):
would be smashed in a matter of weeks or months.
As it became increasingly clear this was a fantasy, resistance
began to crop up from within the halls of Saudi power.
Mohammed ban Naya sent his top aide in Chief of Staff,
Sad al Jabri, to DC to inform his American friends
that he knew the King's son was an idiot and
that the war in Yemen was a mistake. The feeling
one gets is that he was fishing for approval from

(49:54):
someone in the State Department. If he had an outright
power struggle with NBS.

Speaker 3 (49:58):
Right.

Speaker 2 (49:58):
Hey, I know this is dumb. This war is dumb.
You guys hate this too. Right, if there's a power struggle,
are you going to be on my side or are
you going to back Mohammed Ben Salmon?

Speaker 3 (50:08):
Right?

Speaker 2 (50:09):
And for his part, MBS doesn't sit on his ass
watching the war turn against him. He gets hard to
work finding foreign allies too, instead of heading straight to
the White House, though he looks closer to home at
the UAE. His most important early ally was Sheik Mohammad
Benzayad al Nayon generally agreed to be the guy calling
most of the shots and the Emirates we'll just call

(50:29):
him MBZ because everyone else does two and MBZ does
not like MBN.

Speaker 5 (50:35):
Right.

Speaker 2 (50:35):
A common story you'll come across is that, during one meeting,
MBZ told MBN that his father, the Dark Prince, was
so clumsy he proved Darwin was right, which is a
kind of blasphemer you can only get away with if
you're a shake. We're not even supposed to like Darwin
all that much.

Speaker 3 (50:50):
Like, what are you doing? Man?

Speaker 2 (50:53):
But Mbz's in charge of his own country. Basically, he
doesn't have to abide by the rules, and so he
starts connecting with MBS because they both hate MBN and
they both want to take this fucker down their courts
organize a camping trip in the desert where they become
fast friends, and they start to strategize a way to
take out Mohammad Ben Salmon's older cousin. Mbz's first act

(51:13):
in this new alliance was to start reaching out to
his American friends and talking up Mohammed Ben Salmon. This
is enough of a success that people in the Obama
White House start discussing the need for an MBS whisperer
to get close to the King's son in case he
winds up accruing more power. Like so many important things
during the Obama years, this fell through the cracks because
no one was interested or had time to do the job.

(51:35):
Ben Hubbard's book includes these very funny lines. John Kerry
was suggested to be MBS's friend, but was too busy.
Ash Carter, the Secretary of Defense, was MBS's natural counterpart,
but wasn't interested. Vice President Joe Biden was discussed but
deemed too old, so instead they picked no one to
do this important job. And so there's no one in.

Speaker 1 (51:56):
The Sorry, they were like, let's have jaw Uncarrie.

Speaker 2 (52:02):
John Carrey be this kid's print.

Speaker 3 (52:04):
I would love to watch Jean Carrey party with this guy. Yeah, yeah,
video games.

Speaker 2 (52:11):
Like John Carrey comes in with like a copy of
Halo and a six pack.

Speaker 4 (52:15):
He's like, hey bro, yeah, And again they settled on
No One and they're like, that's better than John Carrey
or or Joe Bidenery, like.

Speaker 5 (52:24):
John Kerrey or that that old guy you know.

Speaker 2 (52:30):
Not likes for a job as important as being this
kid's friend.

Speaker 1 (52:34):
Yeah, and then four seconds later they're like he should
be president.

Speaker 2 (52:39):
He could do that job.

Speaker 4 (52:41):
I'll say this, I saw John Carrey once at a
at a parade of Saint Patrick's Stay parade, and he
was he was walking in the parade and he wasn't
like a float or anything. It was just him walking
surrounded by like dudes protecting him. And I'll say this,
he was visible, blee drunk, So I think he would

(53:03):
have parties.

Speaker 1 (53:03):
All right, mister world, Why the.

Speaker 2 (53:08):
Coolest story about John Carrey I've ever heard?

Speaker 5 (53:11):
Sorry, John carry, I didn't know. I didn't know your game.

Speaker 2 (53:15):
Was unfamiliar with your that's good to know. Wow, we
could get get him on an island with Pitt Bull
in one hundred and fifty supermodels. See what he gets
up to.

Speaker 1 (53:26):
Gonna need your STD checks though, John Kerry.

Speaker 2 (53:29):
Yeah, no, you don't want to do that. You don't
want to know where he's been. So my favorite aspect
of this, just in terms of the overall competency of
the Obama administration and foreign policy, was this. They start
to get hints that, oh, this kid's going to be important.
We probably want him on our side. We should have
someone like be his friend, and then they have decided, Nah,

(53:50):
that's too hard, We'll have no one be his friend.
You know what administration does find someone to be Mohammed
Ben Salmon's friend is the Trump administration. They picked Jared Kushner,
and Kushner gets very close to NBS because they pay
attention to stuff like this. It's just one of these, like, yeah,
there are actual areas in which the Trump administration was

(54:11):
more competent than the Obama administration. One of them was
knowing which rich assholes to suck up to, which matters
when you're dealing with Saudi Arabia.

Speaker 4 (54:19):
It's still like, all right, I get it. That are
similar ages but you can't party with Kushner. That's like
partying with a haunted clock. It's just like there's nothing there.

Speaker 2 (54:29):
I mean, I can't imagine it's great to part with NBS. Yeah,
Kushner looks.

Speaker 5 (54:34):
Like the skeleton of a fish. Yeah, And they're like
that guy, that's the guy.

Speaker 4 (54:40):
Guy.

Speaker 5 (54:41):
I have the thought like once a month where I
think back to the time like early twenty sixteen, where
Trump's just like, yeah, Jared's gonna create peace in the
Middle East, that's what he's working on.

Speaker 1 (54:54):
Like, guy, this guy went to Jared.

Speaker 3 (55:00):
Oh Man.

Speaker 2 (55:02):
So, and this is where kind of the fact that
Mohammad ban Naief immediately goes to his friends in America
and in the Obama administration is like, look, if I
have a fight with this guy, do you have my back?
And they're kind of going to be like, we're not
going to get involved in any fights, right, Whereas Mahmad

(55:23):
Man Salmon's strategy is I'm going to start making allies
close to home, with people that with like that who
will actually back me right, who have power, who are
near us, and who will support me because they see
a benefit in it. I know the US isn't going
to take a side in this. I know when we
have a power struggle, they don't care. So I'm not
going to waste my time trying to get them on

(55:43):
my side. I'm going to get allies who will actually
support me. And so while MBN is trusting that, like, well,
I've spent my whole life building all these connections with
the security apparatus in the United States, Surely they'll back
me if push comes to shove, because they want me
in power. He learns the less, like, you actually can't
trust the US for anything, Bro, We're terrible friends. We

(56:04):
don't have your back, we don't have our own back, Like,
we're not gonna do shit for you, homie. And as
soon as this message comes out, because Carrie sends a
message to both Mohammed bin Salomon and mohammadan Nif that like,
we're not going to intervene in any power struggles between
Saudi princes, Mohammad bin Salomon takes this as a go
ahead or at least confirmation that no one's gonna stop

(56:26):
him from taking down his older cousin, and he uses
the fact that Nief had sent his aid al Jabri
to talk to the Americans as an excuse to get
al Jabri fired for trying to discredit King Solomon's son,
which leaves Nief isolated. He's now kicked out one of
Mohammad NIAF's chief supporters, right, and so now he's down
a man, the Africa Report summarizes. In September, Nif and

(56:48):
AlJabri learned on live TV of King Solomon's plans to
fire the latter, thereby depriving the Interior Minister of his
closest aid. A few weeks later, Nief was getting ready
to welcome the US Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Joseph Westfall,
when the diplomat was taken aside by MBS's team and Jedda.
The King's son told west Fall that he needed to
see him, reassuring him that he would have plenty of
time to meet with the Crown Prince afterwards. But that

(57:10):
is not the way things went. MBS dragged out the
Teta tet for so long that the two men were
unable to meet in the end. Right, he's separating him
now from his American friends. He's just kind of isolating
him as he slowly draws the noose tighter and tighter
around Mohammad bin Nayef. Now, some analysts suspect that the
wounds mbians suffered in that two thousand and nine assassination

(57:31):
attempt were more significant than previously admitted, and so that's
why he's not fighting back effectively or responding seriously to
what his younger cousin's doing. That he's got brain damage basically,
and he's gotten addicted to painkillers in the wake of
having this injury, and he's just not as functional as
he used to be. Right So, in addition to the
fact that he's being out maneuvered in part because he's

(57:53):
just taken too much damage getting to this point in
his career previously to hold up against someone like muham
and Ben Salomon, who's got his wits about him right
whether or like.

Speaker 4 (58:03):
Your powers in jeopardy, and he's like his ass's.

Speaker 2 (58:07):
Explode eloded right next to me. Can I have more vicotin?
So once the two men start fighting, it becomes rapidly
clear that the Crown Prince does not have the energy
or mental agility to outthink and outfight his rival. The
two appeared together at several public events where MBS talked
circles around his older cousin. At one twenty sixteen gathering,

(58:28):
he surprised a group of American officials by announcing Israel
is not our enemy. In the summer of twenty sixteen,
MBS was in a better position than he had been
the year before, not in terms of overseas ventures. The
war and Yemen had turned into a true quagmire by
this point, one that showed early signs of degenerating into
a humanitarian catastrophe. After a year of failed strikes on

(58:48):
military and then civilian infrastructure, the Huthi showed no signs
of breaking and still held to the capital city and
the key port city. Per that article in the Journal
of Genocide Studies quote when the Houthi still refused to surrender.
The next stage, beginning in the autumn of twenty sixteen,
was a full fledged economic war and sealing off of
the country. Sana Airport was closed off to all commercial

(59:09):
flights into persons requiring medical treatment abroad. Occasional blockades of
Al Hudaya Port were imposed, and the Central Bank of
Yemen was moved to Auden, which made money transfers to
Yemeni banks more difficult and caused the payments to government
workers to be halted. As Yemen imports over seventy percent
of its food needs, these STIPs were devastating. NBS had
now laid the groundwork for the worst famine of the

(59:30):
twenty first century. As the siege locked into place, he
opted for another vacation, this one on the French Riviera.
During a stay, at one point, oh yeah, yeah, no,
he's look famine starting out. The war is continuing to
go terribly. I'm hat jitting off to France to party.
He knows how to party. He's doing a tour of

(59:51):
the ports. And while he's in one port, he happens
across one hundred and thirty five meter long yacht, the Serene,
owned by a Russian vodka magnate named Yuri Scheffler. At
the time, Bill Gates was leasing the yacht for five
million dollars a week. He had fallen in love with
the boat and was planning to buy it, but Mohammed
Ben Salmon is not going to let him do that. Next,

(01:00:12):
per the yachting world website Luxury Launches dot Com quote,
NBS caught sight of the yacht. It wasn't docked for sale,
but that didn't matter. The Saudi Crown Prince was instantly captivated.
As Kevin Kanig tells it, the Saudi Prince didn't bother
with negotiations or back and forth discussions. Instead, he simply
sent an aid to speak with Scheffler and offered an
estimated five hundred and fifty million dollars on the spot.

(01:00:34):
The payment was made in a single wire transfer, and
depending on the source, the deal was closed within twenty
four to forty eight hours. Scheffler was told to pack
up and leave immediately. Now I do love that, Like, yeah,
he kind of fucks Bill Gates out of his dream yet.

Speaker 4 (01:00:50):
Yeah, and Bill Gates isn't there, Like God, damn it. Ye,
rich people are out of their minds. It's like the
only lifestyle where you could be at a party and
it's like, yeah, what's that guy do?

Speaker 3 (01:01:03):
He's an actor? What's that guy though? Of genocides mostides.

Speaker 5 (01:01:08):
I don't know what number freaked me out more five
million a week or five hundred and fifty million in
one wire transfer?

Speaker 2 (01:01:15):
Yeah, yeah, that's the guy. Has to be sweating bullets
getting every number like Jesus. Now, it's unclear to me
which of the yachts features NBS fell most in loved with.
It reportedly has two helipads, a dance room, an onboard submarine,
something called a snow room, which is I think just

(01:01:36):
a room where it snows so you can have snow.

Speaker 3 (01:01:40):
That's great.

Speaker 1 (01:01:41):
I mean just or a cocaine lounge.

Speaker 3 (01:01:44):
In New England.

Speaker 2 (01:01:45):
Man, Yeah, a piano lounge, a movie theater and multiple spas.
And I don't know if he even cared about any
of that. Is the primary draw that any of that?
Or is it just that Bill Gates wants it and
so like, oh, this must be the best yacht for
a rich jassalty own. I have to have it right.

Speaker 3 (01:02:02):
It's that.

Speaker 2 (01:02:03):
It's that. As NBS enjoyed that new yacht, smell, starvation
was running rampant in Yemen. By December of twenty sixteen.
Charity organization Save the Children estimated that a thousand children
were dying every week of starvation and preventable disease in Yemen.
Other humanitarian monitors began sounding alarms as twenty sixteen ended,
but Mohammed Ben Salomon showed no signs of change in course.

(01:02:25):
And that's part three. She mm hmm, what did we learn,
feeling Dave? Yeah, what did we learn.

Speaker 5 (01:02:34):
I mean, I learned a little thing about Pitbull.

Speaker 2 (01:02:37):
Yeah, we all learned something about mister Worldwide. That name
is literal. It includes at least the Maldives.

Speaker 4 (01:02:44):
I that doesn't surprise me, I guess. But I mostly
learned that if you're gonna put a bomb in your butt,
make it a big bomb, because it's all for nothing
if you just explode your own butt. I mean, that's
that's interesting, because it.

Speaker 2 (01:03:00):
All for nothing if you just explode your own butt.

Speaker 5 (01:03:03):
I just thought of when tape was going pew pew,
that a good A good combination of the pew pew
joke and the ass exploding joke would be to go, hey,
pew pew and the guy goes pew pew and he
goes no.

Speaker 2 (01:03:14):
Poo pooh. Sure, clearly I'm a child.

Speaker 3 (01:03:21):
Yeah, I'm there too.

Speaker 4 (01:03:23):
I mean, listen, you've just told a harrowing story with
a lot of genocide, and all I'm retaining is butt
bomb from this, so you know, yeah, that's more about me.

Speaker 5 (01:03:35):
Wow, Well, Dave, you got anything you want to plug
at the end here?

Speaker 1 (01:03:38):
Oh?

Speaker 2 (01:03:39):
Right?

Speaker 3 (01:03:40):
Oh geez, yeah, I do podcasts.

Speaker 5 (01:03:42):
Cool.

Speaker 4 (01:03:43):
There's a network called Gamefully Unemployed g A M. E
f U l O I unemployed where I talk about movies,
not uh not genocide as much I do. Also, I'm
the head writer for some More News, which is about news.
So just like Google some News or just Google News,
feel fine me, I'll be there. Uh And that's it

(01:04:06):
all right, Everybody.

Speaker 1 (01:04:08):
By James Stout's Book.

Speaker 2 (01:04:10):
By James Stout's book again, Good to Hell, I Love
You Bye.

Speaker 5 (01:04:20):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
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(01:04:41):
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