March 3, 2026 • 59 mins
On August 19th, 2016 Saudi national and college student Abdulrahman Sameer Noorah was charged with first degree manslaughter for fatally hitting a 15 year old girl named Fallon Smart with his car in Portland, Oregon. Two weeks before his trial, he disappeared from the United States. Federal agents suspect he escaped with the help of the Saudi Arabian government -- and it seems he's not the only one. In fact, over the years, it seems dozens of Saudi nationals accused of various crimes in the US and Canada have illegally escaped prosecution, and will likely never see jail time or justice. And the US government hasn't done much to address this ongoing pattern of conspiracy. Tune in to learn more in this Classic episode.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Fellow conspiracy realist, we are returning to you with a
pretty sensitive real life conspiracy that we first explored in
twenty twenty. Guys, riddle me this. Have you ever got
the vague spidey sense that some people are above the law?
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Yeah? What are you talking about? Man?
Speaker 1 (00:21):
Rule is not a stick for us. I can't get
away with a I can't get out of a fine
for a late book at the library. But as we
learned in tonight's classic episode back in twenty sixteen, uh,
there were serious crimes committed by Saudi nationals and for
(00:43):
one reason or another, they got to pass the kind
of stuff that would put you under the prison.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
Yeah, well not.
Speaker 3 (00:49):
Look look at all the pardons flying around. I mean, yes,
there are people are above the law, and it's all
about who you know and what you know. What you've
got on me, And by me, I mean the government
or the individual that's you know, giving that pass. But
I just don't believe in rule of law anymore.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
Guys.
Speaker 3 (01:07):
I'm sorry, I know that's such a bummer thing to say,
but it is tough.
Speaker 4 (01:11):
Yeah, especially in this episode, as we're about to describe.
When you have a child who gets hit by a car.
There should probably be consequences for the driver of that car.
Speaker 5 (01:22):
Yeah, yeah, oh yeah, that's what we thought until we
dove in. So please join us for our classic episode,
why does the United States let Saudi fugitives flee the country?
Speaker 6 (01:37):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies, history is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 4 (02:01):
Hello, welcome back to the show.
Speaker 2 (02:02):
My name is Matt, my name is Noel.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
They call me Ben. We're joined as always with our
super producer Paul. Mission Control decads. Most importantly, you are you,
You are here, and that makes this stuff they don't
want you to know. Which off air is still working
on a title for this one. I don't know what
we'll end up with, but I was pitching it to
the Gang as the episode where we start a fight
(02:26):
with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. What are we talking about?
There are so many there's so many beef points between
the US and Saudi Arabia or the world in the Kingdom.
Here's this GUO. Today's episode may be a sensitive subject
to many in the audience. It touches on several ongoing
legal cases which will many of which will likely not
(02:50):
be resolved for one reason or another. You might not
be aware of this one, but it is an international conspiracy.
It's at least a decade old, probably older. It continues
as we record today, and there's not a solution. Really,
it is set to continue in the future. The best
way for us to get into this story is to
(03:11):
explore it through a specific recent example in Oregon that
just hit a crisis point in twenty nineteen, but it
begins in twenty sixteen. So here are the facts.
Speaker 3 (03:24):
Yes, on August nineteenth of twenty sixteen, Abdul Rahman Samir
Norah was charged with first degree manslaughter for fatally hitting
a fifteen year old girl named Fallon Smart with his
car in Portland. The charge was technically elevated manslaughter. We've
talked about the weirdness but behind these types of kind
(03:47):
of delineations of styles.
Speaker 2 (03:49):
Of murder, but yeah, elevated manslaughter.
Speaker 3 (03:51):
Alleges that Nourra caused Smart's death unlawfully and recklessly under
circumstances manifesting extreme indifferent to the value of human life.
Whooh okay, Smart was crossing legally in front of traffic
when neurra illegally swerved into the left turn lane and
(04:12):
hit her at fifty five to sixty miles per hour.
Nourra was driving on a suspended license, did not stop
after running over this person, and police said that he
later returned to the scene, which I guess the indication
there is just kind of wanton disregard for you know,
(04:35):
consequences perhaps, but we'll see.
Speaker 4 (04:37):
Well, I mean he's going back to see what happened, right, Oh.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
Yeah, But also like there's a got it. You know,
that's a luxury.
Speaker 3 (04:44):
I would say, like if I was gonna flee, I
would fully flee.
Speaker 2 (04:48):
I wouldn't be like, oh.
Speaker 3 (04:49):
Dude, do let's go back and see what happened.
Speaker 2 (04:51):
So that's a little bit interesting.
Speaker 1 (04:53):
Yeah, he was likely this is my speculation, he was
likely instructed by someone to return and assured that things
would ultimately be okay. He had been in the US
for some time. He first visited the country in twenty
fourteen from his native Saudi Arabia, was on a student visa.
(05:14):
As you know, many people traveled to the US on
a student visa. He was studying at Portland Community College.
The Saudi Arabian government, through its consulate, retained private attorneys,
one of whom will occur later in this story, Ginger Mooney.
And they cut his bail was I think initially said
(05:37):
it a million dollars. So they cut one hundred thousand
dollars check for his bail. He was put on pre
trial supervision kind of like house arrest, ankle, monitor, the bracelet,
the whole nine, and his passport was taken. That's important
because typically in the world of legal international travel, there
(05:58):
is only one living person right now who can travel
without a passport. That is the Queen of England. Weird story,
It's true. We have a I think we have a
video about it somewhere brain stuff or stuff they don't
want you to know. So here's where our law and
order music starts kicking in. Two weeks before his trial,
(06:18):
which was scheduled for June twenty seventeen, Nora disappears. A
black suv is seen pulling into the home where he's
staying at. He was staying at a with a host
family along with a cousin he was very close to.
We know that he was driven to a gravel lot
about two miles away, and we know this because he
(06:38):
still had his tracking monitor on his ankle. So the
FEDS followed that signal to the gravel lot and found
that someone had sliced the monitor off and just discarded it.
They're also cell phone, laptop stuff involved here. From there,
federal authorities in the US believed nor who is, by
(07:00):
the way, just twenty one at this point. He's a
young kid. He was given a fake or illicit passport,
and he was flown somehow out of the US, likely
on a private plane.
Speaker 4 (07:12):
And you may be wondering, Wow, this guy must be
really important this for that to go down, or he
must be extremely rich to be able to get someone
to do that. Either someone did that for him or
he did it on his own accord. It's very strange,
just the fact that a precaution would be taken, like
(07:34):
a pretty extreme precaution, taking a passport, making sure, okay,
this person is not going to leave, and then to
be able to have an organized group of people to
assist in getting this person out of the country. There's
something deeper going on. It feels like a movie, like
like some kind of spy movie or a caper.
Speaker 1 (07:52):
Right, absolutely absolutely, because look, you know, I complained about
this off air earlier. I can't get away with overdue
library fees, you know what I mean, Like I have
consequences for that. How did this guy give the Feds
the slip and get out of the country. What's happening?
(08:14):
The thing is, federal prosecutors, without disclosing all of the
specifics of their information other than what we've just mentioned,
federal prosecutors are certain that the Saudi Arabian government itself
conspired to remove Nora before he could face any actual
jail time for killing this child. And you know, for
(08:37):
the record, it doesn't seem like it was premeditated murder.
It feels like it was a horrific accidental tragedy.
Speaker 4 (08:46):
But that doesn't lick.
Speaker 3 (08:49):
Yeah, And you know, I joked about the lines that
we make in the law between different types of killing,
and obviously some of them exists for a reason, premeditated
versus an accident, a tragedy, something that you participated in
but perhaps did not actually intend to do. I understand that,
but this is also you know, there's a level of
wantonness and a level of disregard for human life on
(09:12):
display here that is very troubling.
Speaker 2 (09:15):
At the very least.
Speaker 1 (09:16):
Yeah, the authorities noted, like the local police in Portland
noted that at the time, Norah seemed markedly indifferent to
the fact that there was someone dead because of his driving.
But we have to be careful with that kind of
emotional attribution because he could have just been in shock. Also,
(09:38):
you know what I mean. Here's the thing. You've probably
heard of extradition treaties. You don't have to be a
legal expert to know what they are. Extradition treaties are
agreements that countries make, or that agreements that either individual
countries make bilaterally, or there are agreements that coalitions like
(10:01):
the EU will make for EU member states. Not every
country has an extradition treaty with every other country, which
is how some people are able to fake their deaths
and get away and live in a non extradition country,
and when the authorities find out that they've committed pseudo side,
(10:23):
which is the correct word, it doesn't matter if those
people are faking their death because you can't get them
back to your country to face their crimes. The US
and Saudi Arabia do not have an extradition treaty, so
it is highly unlikely that Nora would be arrested inside
the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for this crime in the US,
(10:44):
and it is virtually impossible. It would be unprecedented for
the Kingdom to actually send one of one of their
own citizens to the US to serve time in the
US prison system. Currently, the FEDS say they don't know
(11:05):
specifically where ig Nora is in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. So,
in short, all the details aside, the main takeaway is this,
he killed a child, a fifteen year old, and he
got away with it. And it gets worse, boy.
Speaker 2 (11:24):
Does it ever.
Speaker 4 (11:25):
And as we said, this took place in Portland, Oregon,
and there's a journalist there working for The Oregonian also
known as Oregon Live. His name is Shane Dixon Kavanaugh,
and he's been looking into this pretty extensively. There are
many many articles you can read on the websites there
(11:47):
to learn about this, and he has found that it
appears that this isn't just a one off, This isn't
an exception to the rule. This seems to be a
much larger issue, a pattern of people getting away with
terrible things in the United States and being sent back
to Saudi Arabia somehow right.
Speaker 1 (12:08):
I like that you point out this as an iteration
of a pattern. That's our that this is our conspiracy
for today. How many people as the government of Saudi
Arabia removed from justice? And perhaps more importantly and more disturbingly,
why aren't the FEDS doing anything about it? This is
(12:30):
a question will answer after a word from our sponsor.
Here's where it gets crazy. So Kavanaugh, if you're listening,
thank you for doing this amazing work. I was as
profoundly impressed. Kavanaugh has made a series that is ongoing
(12:55):
called Fleeing Justice, which is available now at Oregonlive dot com.
In his investigation, he bread crumbed together dozens of cases
of Saudi Arabian nationals, typically young college students, illegally fleeing
the US and Canada after being charged with serious crimes.
(13:17):
And we're not talking about stuff like late fees at
Blockbuster or libraries or something.
Speaker 4 (13:24):
Is that a crime? Late fees at Blockbuster? Because if so,
I am a criminal.
Speaker 1 (13:28):
I still think about that, Like, how different would the
world be? Maybe I should have paid those late fees?
Speaker 3 (13:33):
Well, what happens when the company like dissolves? I mean
there is technically one remaining active blockbuster. But ben to
your earlier point, the public library, they are relentless. They
will come after you, they will like you know, dos you,
and it's very scary to be on the wrong side
of the public library system.
Speaker 1 (13:52):
Yeah, the word on the street is that librarians trained
under the most elite hounding four in the US, which
is of course, people who want to talk to you
about your car's extended warranty. They're pretty much the Seal
Team six of bugging you. But I'm jiddy, but look,
(14:13):
you know, we're trying to inject levity into this because
these individuals were charged with, not convicted, but charged with
things like manslaughter, rape, more kinds of sexual assault, illegal
possession of firearms, possession of graphic depictions of child abuse,
(14:34):
and charges of like encouraging soliciting disseminating that kind of material.
Kavanaugh found these and then he also found he was
the one who originally reported this story that we just
shared with you at the top of the show. He
also found a pattern of state level interference from the
(14:55):
Kingdom of Saudi Arabia with each of these cases, and
then he found that this has been an open secret
among federal authorities for at least a decade. I would
argue probably more like everybody's just not getting it, just
wasn't getting reported near as often until Kavanaugh started digging it.
Speaker 3 (15:14):
Yes, and for the record, I've always been a big
fan of The Oregonian and the reporting they've done. A
show that I worked on that I mentioned cup too.
Now we actually had Phil Stanford, who once wrote for
The Oregonian on the show, and they've definitely done good
work in investigative journalism over the years. This series from
Cavanaugh began when he learned about this particular case involving Nora. Cavanaugh,
(15:40):
through tons of deep dive of research, was able to
conclude and this is a quote from the piece. Despite
unknowns in the ongoing investigation, officials with the US Department
of Homeland Security and US Marshall Service are all but
certain who helped orchestrate the remarkable escape the Kingdom of
(16:01):
Saudi Arabia, and therein lies a pattern. This is this
is no longer in the quote that the Saudi government
paid bail hired attorneys to defend nearly all of these
young men, most of whom were international college students at
the time, and in each case they were able to
extract them before they were forced to face prosecution or
(16:25):
complete jail sentences. Some were traced back to Saudi Arabia
even after surrendering their passports to US authorities. And to
your point, Ben, that's crazy. That's a level of like
like cheat code, you know, boss move that most are
not capable of and definitely requires some kind of level
(16:46):
of collusion on the part of our government.
Speaker 2 (16:49):
I'm just putting that out there.
Speaker 4 (16:51):
And then they realized, you know, there are several cases
in Oregon. You know, if you imagine Kevanaugh working there
at a paper that's based in city, He's looking at
cases that are happening around him, right, and then he
and his team discover that, oh no, it's not just Oregon.
There's other cases like this in Montana, in Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Utah, Washington, Wisconsin,
(17:13):
and they're realizing, oh my god, this is happening across
the US and beyond.
Speaker 1 (17:19):
They also find two cases in Nova Scotia, Saudi students
and two separate incidents had skipped bail and they had
disappeared after being accused of sexual assault. I think it's
fair to say disappeared because they end up back at
the Kingdom. That's what happens. They may go somewhere else,
(17:40):
to some other country after that, but they go back
to their home country in Saudi Arabia. To your point, Matt,
In Oregon, Kavanaugh's team found seven cases they could verify
involving Saudi nationals who vanished before they face trial or
completed the jail sentence. These were two people accused of rape,
(18:03):
a pair of suspected hit and run drivers, one of
whom was Nuraw. One man accused of having depictions of
child abuse on his computer, sexual assault charges. One man
accused of carrying a loaded illegal firearm and that's like
that one is the lightest crime that guy. All of
(18:23):
these people were young men studying at colleges or universities
in Oregon with assistants from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
at the time of their arrest. I want to give
a comparison here, and we'll make sure that we're not
just picking on Saudi Arabia before this episode is over,
so spoiler alert, but I want to make a comparison, folks,
(18:46):
conspiracy realists, Imagine that you went on a trip with
Matt Noll Mischig control of myself, and we were I
don't know, we're backpacking around crow Waitia, or we're doing
for some reason doing a tour in China wishes or horses.
(19:07):
They let us in and then I don't want to
accuse us of heinous crimes. But let's say one of
us commits heinous crime. You know what.
Speaker 4 (19:17):
Let's say I guess to say an accidental death.
Speaker 1 (19:20):
Yes, let's say we get in a bar fight. We
get in a bar fight and don't mean to kill somebody,
but one of us kills somebody, and the government or
government of Croatia or the government of China rightly says
you're under arrest. But then if we were like these
(19:41):
nationals in today's episode, what would happen is that the
government of the US, let's just say the government of Podcasting,
the government of Podcasting, then would find a smart spycraft
way to contact us right and communicate with us through
a juice or clandestine means, and then they would essentially say, Matt,
(20:04):
if you're if you're the person who accidentally threw the
fatal punch, then they would essentially say, Okay, we're gonna
post your bail. Right, you're on house arrest. Cool at
twelve forty three pm on you know this Tuesday. Just
walk outside, stop at the threshold of your door so
(20:24):
the ankle monitor doesn't ping. And then when the car
pulls up, hop in, don't ask any questions, and then
you get you get they'll hand you a US a
real looking US passport that says like real guy, last
name or something, you know, and it's got a picture
on it, and then boom, you're in the US. You'll
you'll never get to go to Zagreb or Croatia or
(20:48):
Beijing or China again. But you'll also never serve a
day in jail. That doesn't that doesn't happen to the
average person in the planet, and it shouldn't, right, Like,
is that not crazy? That's insane to me?
Speaker 4 (21:02):
It is crazy, And it's almost it's very similar to
what we've discussed before when a spy who was operating
under diplomatic immunity or something is operating in a different country. Right,
doesn't it feel like that?
Speaker 2 (21:15):
Yes, I mean, I know.
Speaker 3 (21:18):
We're gonna get there, but it's just it's galling to me.
It's like this, this doesn't happen in a vacuum, you know,
I mean there's somebody helping the process along the way.
Speaker 2 (21:28):
Is it sanctioned? Is it completely under the table? Uh?
Speaker 3 (21:32):
Just to keep the relationship, you know, nice and tidy
with this country that we depend on.
Speaker 4 (21:38):
These are these are good questions, nol uh we we
we need to delve further though.
Speaker 1 (21:44):
The answer is no disgusting.
Speaker 4 (21:47):
Yeah, there you go, there you go.
Speaker 1 (21:49):
That's that's that's the spoiler I'll give now. We we
didn't want to go down too far down the rabbit hole. Again.
You can read reports by Pro Public, you can report
reports by the Orgonian and a couple of other high
quality outlets about this. But just to give you this scope,
(22:10):
like we want to name some of these people. So
picture Kavanaugh again picking up the breadcrumbs, putting the pieces together. Here.
In addition to Nara, he found multiple people, as we said,
like round twenty, there's Mohammed Zurabi al Zoabi. He's one
of the Nova Scotia folks. In twenty eighteen he disappeared.
(22:32):
He was facing numerous charges of sexual assault and forcible
confinement of a woman over a series of incidences occurring
between twenty fifteen and twenty seventeen.
Speaker 4 (22:44):
There's Sammi Solomon al Mezzani. He was in Montana. This
is in twenty seventeen. He was accused of raping his
roommate after the pair return home from a downtown music
festival in That was in July of twenty seventeen.
Speaker 3 (23:02):
Next, we have Mukrin Majah al Balawi and this took
place in Washington in twenty sixteen. He was accused of
beating and stabbing a man during an altercation in February
of twenty sixteen.
Speaker 1 (23:17):
And then there's Salad Abdulahti, who in Washington in twenty
sixteen disappeared. He had forcibly confined someone unlawful imprisonment it
was called, and had forces to perform sex acts upon him.
Speaker 2 (23:34):
Oh, I got I'm assuming Ben.
Speaker 3 (23:37):
So many of these are from the Pacific Northwest because
of the reporting from the Oregonian.
Speaker 6 (23:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (23:42):
Yeah, I've listed out the seven cases, but eventually, just
for the sake of time, I stopped. And I want
to again recommend that people check out Kavanaugh's work on
this because it's super easy to rabbit hole. You'll see,
like I've got links arranged where you can see this
story in the particulars of each of these cases. You'll
(24:05):
also see other ones that haven't been reported or maybe
collected in this series for one reason or another. But
there are cases that occur in other places in Milwaukee
and so on. In Oregon. Saud Ali Algoayz, he disappeared
in twenty sixteen. He's the illegal firearm guy. He currently
(24:27):
has a couple of outstanding warrants in a couple of counties.
I am going to be honest to me, having a
non registered firearm feels lighter, you know what I mean.
Speaker 4 (24:45):
And next we've got Suliman Ali Ala Guayiz. This is
again in Oregon. This guy was charged with third degree assault.
He's also charged with driving under the influence of something
that was intoxicating him. There are other charges laid against him,
and that was in twenty sixteen.
Speaker 3 (25:02):
They have been related, Saud and Suliman same exact last name,
or Ali al Guaz.
Speaker 4 (25:09):
You know, I do not know if they are officially related,
but we're gonna get into some troubling relations a little
bit later in the episode got It.
Speaker 3 (25:21):
Next we have Faisal Alta leb and this was in
Montana in twenty sixteen, and the charge here was sexual assault.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
And then we have abdulah ziz hamad Aldis in Oregon
twenty fifteen, accused of sexually assaulting a class bait after
applying her with marijuana and booze.
Speaker 3 (25:43):
And then we have Walid Ali al Harti and this
was also an Oregon in twenty fifteen, and this was
possession of child pornography. I mean, these charges run the
gamut of Oh my god, so so wide ranging.
Speaker 1 (26:00):
And as we said, the list goes on. There is
value in naming specific people here so that we're not
just saying this number of folks, right, are part of
this pattern or iterations thereof. And you're right, they run
the gamut, but there is one thing they have in common,
(26:22):
which is that these people did not and will not
pay for their crimes. They exist in a different level
of justice. Then you know, most of us listening along
today unless you are one of the people named and
you happen to be listening to this episode, in which case,
feel free to reach out conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 3 (26:42):
Yeah, and we're talking about this almost in terms of
like you know, extraction or some kind of you know, heist,
but it's it's in none of these cases was there
an actual breaking out.
Speaker 2 (26:54):
You know, these were all done more or.
Speaker 3 (26:56):
Less using the tree additional means of paying bail and
using lawyers and all of that. So on paper, it
could easily be justified that this was done through the
proper channels. But as we'll see, there's nothing proper about
any of this.
Speaker 4 (27:15):
I hear what you're saying, all but when we're talking
about proper channels, a proper channel is not escaping the
country illegally. That's that's why, that's why it's.
Speaker 3 (27:25):
So trup no a million percent. I'm just saying, like
you know, paper trail wise. You know, they they paid
the bail, they got them out, and then they fled.
Speaker 4 (27:36):
You know, well they yeah, they they skipped bail. I think, right,
that's how you would.
Speaker 1 (27:41):
Yeah, yeah, they skipped bail. And it's got to be
got to be irritating to the skip tracers because there
you can trace some of these some of these individuals
pretty pretty easily. You just cannot do anything about it.
So yeah, it's they go through the proper channels up
(28:01):
to a point. And we'll see the uh, we'll see
the response of the the Saudi government to some of
these crazy accusations. A little later in the show, it
is important again to be objective, to be fair, we
have to note that these individuals were accused, they were suspected,
(28:22):
they were arrested or dieted. But uh, there hasn't been,
to your point, no, an actual jail break, you know,
like that prison escape show that was so popular a
few years ago. There it wasn't like a tank rolled
through or someone dressed as I'm just thinking, how cool
this is a movie. Soone dressed as a prison guard
(28:44):
like takes off their mission impossible mask face and it's
top cruise or something. It's like, we're getting you out
of the States. Nothing like that, Nothing like that, but
close enough, a real world version of it.
Speaker 3 (28:57):
Yeah, and and there's there's there's a lot of really
great reporting on this to your point, Ben. And according
to Sebastian Rotella and Tim Golden, who right for Pro Publica,
they had this to say about the whole situation.
Speaker 2 (29:09):
Quote.
Speaker 3 (29:10):
Successive American administrations have avoided confronting the government in Riyad
out of concern that doing so might jeopardize US interests,
particularly Saudi cooperation in the fight against Islamist terrorism.
Speaker 1 (29:24):
So they knew. They knew about this. Again, it just
did very little to prevent it. In Mission control, Paul
Michigan Control brought up a great point. He was asking
me off air. He said, Okay, well, why is this happening?
And that's in a nutshell? And when we told him,
(29:47):
his next response was counter terrorism. Weren't the majority of
the terrorists involved in the events of September eleventh Saudi nationals?
And that's correct, so to be fair. A spokesperson for
the Saudi embassy in Washington named Fahad Nazer said that quote,
(30:10):
only a small fraction of Saudi students in the US
have gotten into any legal trouble, and that Saudi officials
have strictly adhered to all US laws in helping them.
He goes on to say the notion that the Saudi
government actively helps citizens of a justice after they've been
implicated in legal wrongdoing in the US is simply not true.
(30:34):
I put a little sass on that quote because it
feels categorical and explicit. But it seems that that quote
itself is at the very least misleading. Maybe the people
who are assisting in these escapes are kind of like hackers.
The hacker armies in China. Maybe they're just not officially
(30:57):
condoned by the government and they just feel patriotic hmmm,
or he's lying.
Speaker 3 (31:03):
Well that's the thing though, Like I mean, when you
get into all this like pr speak and again, this
idea of strictly adhering to all US laws, there's a
dot dot dot there where it's up to a point,
like like you said, you can certainly say we strictly
adhere to all US laws and then we didn't until
(31:23):
the point where we stopped doing that thing.
Speaker 4 (31:25):
Well, again, you'd have to prove that it's Saudi officials
who are doing any taking any of these actions to
get citizens out.
Speaker 2 (31:34):
Ah.
Speaker 4 (31:34):
Yeah, I mean that's plausible deniability, right, yeah, I mean,
you're it's a tough thing unless you've got solid evidence
to to say, hey, Saudi Arabia, you have government officials
taking people out of the country and we know it.
You'd have to have serious evidence in order to make
(31:55):
that accusation.
Speaker 2 (31:56):
And well, maybe we don't have that.
Speaker 3 (31:59):
We do have have a disturbing trend, an upward trend
that we can measure, and it would seem that the
problem of US students fleeing prosecution has increased largely in
proportion to the Saudi student population in the United States,
increasing that population having been only five thousand in two
(32:22):
thousand and five and then about a decade later exploding
to more than eighty thousand. And that's according to the
Department of Homeland Security. The Saudi government has sponsored most
of these students under a scholarship program created by the
late King Abdullah, a three billion, mind you dollar scholarship program.
Speaker 1 (32:41):
Yeah, so maybe it's maybe it's just a numbers game question.
There are so many more apples that maybe are incident
of bad apples just increases, right. The FBI, State Department, Ice,
the rest of the Alphabet Boys, all the Alphabet Soup
members have confirmed to your point, Matt, that Saudi intelligence
(33:05):
officials do monitor Saudi nationals in the United States, and
they confirm this as part of their kind of routine
security checks. You know what I mean. It's not a
big operation snow white break into an embassy or something.
This is standard operating procedure. So what they saw the
intelligence officials doing, was the Saudi intelligence officials doing was
(33:29):
looking for signs of possible radicalization, right, looking for signs
of denigration against the Kingdom, stuff like that. Just keeping
an eye on these people, because again, that is part
and parcel of they what they do, right, I mean,
even like, if you're a US citizen and you travel
(33:51):
to a foreign country, you're going to be living there
for a while, it's also highly recommended that you check
in with the embassy or the consulate in case something happens. Right, again,
the US Consulate is not for the average US citizen.
The US Consulate is not going to go to these lengths,
you know what I mean, they're going they're not gonna
(34:14):
spirit your way or what do we say in the
troubled team industry. They're not going to go out Yeah
the situation, yeah, you put yourself in. But they found
something else when they were looking at this. The officials
found that the Saudi intelligence agents were also not just
keeping tabs on the college kids, but intervening where they
(34:36):
felt necessary, up to and including assisting them in escaping
criminal consequences that will put the average US citizen pretty
much under the jail. Like celebrities, the very wealthy, and
politicians obviously have a function under a different justice system,
but the average US citizen would be going to prison
(34:56):
for a lot of this stuff. So can can you
guess why Uncle Sam has not been doing a damn
thing about this for more than ten years? We'll tell
you after a word from our sponsor, we're back and
(35:19):
we hope that you have returned as well. We left
you with a question, uh, and we shouldn't have left
you without a dope. Beat the step two Here it is,
can you guess why Uncle Sam has not been doing
anything about it? Wait for folks, if you're listening along
at home and you already know the answer, please say
(35:41):
it with us there.
Speaker 2 (35:47):
It's just the greatest, you know, the most.
Speaker 4 (35:51):
Good, Yeah, for all? And what do we mean the
greater good?
Speaker 3 (35:56):
We upset the Apple cards? What we mean we've got these? Well,
I mean, I don't know. It just means that we
don't want to It's like, if you compare it's like
a cost benefit analysis.
Speaker 2 (36:08):
We always talk about, like if we do.
Speaker 3 (36:09):
We really want to die on this hill of going
to war with the Saudi government over these like misbehaving students,
which in the grand scheme of things, you know, Uncle
Sam could easily argue not that big a deal when
you compare it to like the overall picture of.
Speaker 4 (36:26):
Things, and we've actually, we've got a quote from someone
who seems to know what they're talking about, a former
FBI agent named Jeffrey Danik. He was the FBI's assistant
legal attache in Riyad from twenty ten to twenty twelve.
And this is why he thinks these students are somehow
(36:47):
getting back to Saudi Arabia while the FBI and other
intelligence agencies are aware. He says, it's not that the
issue of Saudi fugitives from the US wasn't important. It's
that the security relationship was so much more important on
counter terrorism, on protecting the US and its partners, on
opposing Iran. The Saudis were invaluable allies.
Speaker 1 (37:11):
So yeah, this argument is a greater good argument. It's
a cost benefit analysis argument. Not everybody is making the
same argument. For the people who would speak, whether on
record or anonymously, there were people were saying, look, if
this came across my desk at the time, I would
(37:32):
have no problem approaching whomever my contact was in the
Kingdom regarding this issue, even if it's a painful one
to bring up. But then you'll have people from other
US agencies who are saying, look, I have to. I
have to build relationships with my partners on these projects
(37:54):
on counter terrorism. I have to ask sensitive questions, to
do a lot of digging, and I have to have
a poor and I have to have trust. And if
I'm there to talk with these folks about something concerning
geopolitics or national security and I bring up, hey, where
are these college kids? Then I will be shut down.
(38:16):
And not only will I have an unsuccessful conversation or
interaction that day, but I will never have I will
never recover from pressing this point. And this The problem
with this is that both sides are valid. But if
(38:37):
we wanted to be hyperbolic then and engage in some
like bleeding headlines, then we would say something like the
US has made a conscious decision to sacrifice some of
its civilians. I mean, that's a terrible thing to say,
and it is misleading, and it's an appeal to emotion
(38:59):
and so on. But this kind of stuff also, these
kind of decisions don't occur in a vacuum. There are
other things that happen, like the US protecting opium fields
in Afghanistan, you know what I mean, Like they're you
could say that they're enabling opioid addiction and heroin addiction
in the US also shout out to the cost of
(39:23):
doing business argument. I think you guys saw that the Yeah,
makers of oxyconton just got slapped with attacks.
Speaker 4 (39:31):
And they're shutting down. I've been My understanding is produce
going away.
Speaker 3 (39:35):
Yeah, But I mean the argument you could make there
is like this family, the Sacklers, you know, and these executives,
they're basically just retiring. It's not like they're actually having
to answer for their crimes, and it's not like they're
actually going to see any Are they going to be
in the poorhouse now because of these things that have happened?
Speaker 2 (39:54):
Absolutely not. And Ben the thing that.
Speaker 3 (39:57):
This makes me think of, and we constantly running up
into things that make me think this is, at the
end of the day, we as a government, and many governments,
so many just don't have any moral high ground, don't
have any like moral soapbox to stand on ever, because at.
Speaker 2 (40:16):
The end of the day, there's so many of.
Speaker 3 (40:18):
These little calculations that involve knowingly allowing terrible things to happen,
terrible people to continue doing terrible things under our watch,
and yet we try, our politicians try to take some
kind of moral stance and say we are the you know,
law and order candidate or party or whatever, and it's.
Speaker 1 (40:37):
All bull I agree. I mean, look, honestly, a great
deal of the concept of morality is a pr spin
that is sold to a population, which I know sounds
brutal and cold. And I'm not saying that the people
(40:58):
expressing those values do not themselves believe in them. I
think often they do. But those are also tremendous rationalizations.
Countries do not have friends, Countries have interests. Right when
you get to that level, we know that. We know, however,
that single individuals can and do make a difference, such
(41:19):
as the reporters we've cited in today's episode. This reporting
led to action in Congress, which I'm happy to report
US Senator Ron Wyden from Oregon introduced something he called
the Saudi Fugitives Declassification Act of twenty nineteen. This is
(41:40):
not aimed at prosecuting these nationals because legally, again due
to extradition treaties, the ball is in the Kingdom's court.
Speaker 2 (41:49):
Like it.
Speaker 1 (41:51):
Would spark a war if the US sent someone in
to extract a Saudi national. That is one of the
dumbest things that the US could possibly do. And I
know lately it seems like our international actions are based
on answering that question, what is the dumbest thing we
do next?
Speaker 4 (42:12):
But this has been a long time, that's been having
for a while.
Speaker 1 (42:15):
That's true, that's true.
Speaker 2 (42:16):
But this is not.
Speaker 1 (42:19):
Something in the cards, is what I'm saying. So the
Fugitives to Classification Act is made to compel the US
federal government to publicly disclose what it knows about Saudi
Arabia's suspected role in helping citizens escape prosecutions. So we're
(42:41):
government employees. If you're a US citizen, technically they all
work for you. So this is a bill by one
of your employees that is telling some of your other
employees to give us more details about the job they're
supposed to be doing for you. And that's going to
run into a lot of loopholes because when anytime counter
(43:04):
terrorism comes up there there's going to be a lot
of redaction of stuff. Right, we can only imagine.
Speaker 4 (43:11):
Yeah, you know, we talked earlier about needing serious evidence
to be able to outright publicly accuse the Saudi Arabian
government of taking these actions, right, and really, what to me.
This bill reads as, hey, if you actually know that
this is happening, show us the evidence and lay it
out on the table somewhere so we can so we
(43:33):
can really show that this is what's happening. And again,
Ron Wyden, Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon is like you said, Ben,
as an employee of the people of Oregon. It seems
like he's doing it for those people who like if
we're talking about that fifteen year old the very start
of this episode who was killed in that hit and
run accident, hopefully that's what it would mean.
Speaker 3 (43:56):
Is there something special about Oregon in the Pacific Northwest
that's led to so many of these cases happening there?
Or is this just kind of like a microcosm of
the bigger picture.
Speaker 1 (44:05):
It's an interesting question. I would say that to a
degree it's a microcosm bigger picture, and to a degree
it's based on it. It's in the Northwest. Could you
ask this question earlier? To a degree, it's the the
maybe the nature of how the initial incidents were reported
(44:26):
and then discovered and corelated. But make no mistake, this
is not the Northwest specific, Yeah, nor as we'll find
is it a US specific thing. Nor, as we all know,
do bills always become laws. There are tons of everybody
remembers that song, right, I love that one. So it's
(44:48):
right up there with the that conspiracy animation that played
once on Saturday at Night Live, which I think you
guys remember. But the but the the thing is, this
bill was signed into law. The current presidential administration signed
it late last year, toward the end of last year.
Now the question is will it be enforced? But we
(45:11):
have to be we have to be honest. This is
this is an issue that is not restricted to college students.
It is not restricted to the United States, It is
not restricted to Saudi Arabia. I would say this is
one of the cases we talked about off here, Like
consider the case of someone named maid abdulah Ziz al Salad.
(45:34):
So in twenty fifteen, this guy, who was a member
of the royal family is living in Beverly Hills, and
he and a lot of people, a lot of really
well off folks from the Gulf will have a mansion
in Beverly Hills. Just like how you know, you know
you've really made it in the financial elite when you
have a dope house in London. So this guy became
(45:57):
the subject of a civil suit not a criminals in
Los Angeles when three women claimed he hired them as
housekeepers and then forcibly confined them for three days to
this crazy drug sex partying montage at his Beverly Hills mansion,
(46:18):
like assaulted them, held them captive. Got really weird with
King Jeoffrey style or what's that other guy, Ramsey Bolton. Yeah, yeah,
he was.
Speaker 2 (46:27):
More just into torturing people.
Speaker 3 (46:29):
I think Geoffrey might be a more well, they were
both pretty into torturing people and excess.
Speaker 2 (46:34):
You're spot on, Ben.
Speaker 1 (46:36):
So we do want to say we're going to share
some of the stuff that this fellow was accused of doing.
Speaker 2 (46:45):
He was.
Speaker 1 (46:48):
Did weird things. It wasn't like the typical I hate
to say it that way, but it wasn't like what
you would always think of when you think of sexual assault.
It wasn't just that like try to force these people
to perform sexual acts on him. But he also did
(47:08):
stuff like take off his clothes and like rub himself
on literally everybody else in the mansion, these these poor women,
his security guards, like people who are just by the pool,
And he was saying stuff like lick me, lick my
whole body.
Speaker 6 (47:24):
And.
Speaker 1 (47:27):
Maybe it's just the fact that no one has ever
said no to him. Then he ordered his entire staff
to get naked by the pool and said vulgar things
to him, and one woman protested, and that's when he
told her this.
Speaker 3 (47:41):
Yeah, he said, you're not a woman, you're nobody. I'm
a prince and I'll do what I want and nobody
will do anything to me. So clearly an ingrained attitude.
And then he you know, triggery stuff here, folks, if
you haven't already kind of warned it, but trigger warning.
(48:01):
He tried to urinate on people, make them watch another
man perform a sex act on him. And you know,
this is a person that has not and most assuredly
will not be prosecuted.
Speaker 4 (48:20):
And this, of course, isn't the only case we're looking at.
There's so many here we're not going to name them.
But let's look at the case of Prince Saud bin
Abdullah Ziz bin Asir al Saud, who in twenty ten
was convicted of murdering his servant Bandar Abdullah Ziz, with
whom he had been carrying on a sexual relationship. It
(48:41):
was pretty terrible. Bendar was beaten strangled until he died.
It was described as a drunken rage that the Prince
had entered into when this occurred, and the Prince, believing
that he would have some kind of diplomatic immunity, wasn't
necessarily afraid of any reaper cushions. However, the UK did
(49:02):
move forward with custody. They took him in and attempted
prosecution right right.
Speaker 1 (49:08):
And this case is interesting because there's a question of
whether or not the Prince actually wanted to return to
Saudi Arabia after what was revealed in the court proceedings,
because publicly revealing that he was in a same sex
(49:29):
relationship of any sort could make him could make him
liable for the crime of homosexuality in Saudi Arabia, which
could lead to the death penalty, So he would want to,
you know, if his life is on the line. He
may have needed to seek asylum in the UK after
(49:50):
serving his sentence, because the UK has non medieval laws.
In twenty thirteen, however, the Prince was in an extraordinary move,
returned to Saudi Arabia to a prison, ostensibly to serve
out a sentence. Again, that's extraordinary. We will see what
(50:10):
actually happens. The laws are just different. And this is
making another this is creating another problem in the US
that we have to talk about toward the end. These
cases in the US, which are terrible, have led to
Islamophobic anti Muslim forces. Right, they've taken this stuff up
(50:32):
and they're stereotyping somehow all people from Saudi Arabia are
all people from the Islamic world as exactly like the
criminals in question here, which is terrible. It's one of
the worst things to take away from this. Ginger Mooney,
who we mentioned at the beginning, served as defense attorney
for several individuals in the Oregon cases. She's received death threats,
(50:55):
anti Muslim propaganda. She had to temporarily close her practice.
People are using this as a way to sow religious
persecution and division, which is unclean. But the point is
here that it doesn't. It doesn't seem it's religion that matters.
It just seems like money and things like counter terrorism
or geopolitical relationships weigh heavily on the scales of justice.
(51:19):
Go back to Afghanistan and look at how much trouble
members of the military got into when they refused to
allow child abuser warlords to function as normal, you know
what I mean. They got discharged, I believe in some
cases because they would find like literal children chained up
(51:41):
to be abused by people who are like police chiefs,
and they were told not to do anything about it.
I mean, that's that's what's happening. It's a series of
compromises to a greater good and sometimes and you know what,
in terms of counter terrorism, it seems like the end
goal just keeps moving, right, there's no a finish line.
(52:02):
It's not like other nations are necessarily different. We have
the case of an sacle us here in the US,
wife of a US diplomat struck and killed a teenager,
a nineteen year old in the United Kingdom while driving
on the wrong side of the road. Is not going
to get in trouble for it whatsoever.
Speaker 4 (52:22):
When you're important and you're wealthy, it really is a
different system.
Speaker 1 (52:28):
And it's Prince Andrew, Yeah, Prince andrews.
Speaker 4 (52:31):
Oh, yes, I really didn't want to think about him today.
Speaker 2 (52:37):
Sam.
Speaker 1 (52:37):
It's been sorry guys, but that's I mean, that's where
we're at. And now we want to pass the torch
to you. What do you think let us know. I mean,
is it Noel Matt, is it overly cynical or negative
to say that this is probably going to continue? What
do you guys think?
Speaker 3 (52:57):
I mean, it's I think realistic based on the patterns
that we've seen, based on how difficult it is to
actually enforce this stuff because of the complicity of.
Speaker 2 (53:11):
Folks in power on our side.
Speaker 4 (53:13):
Well, I mean in folks in power everywhere. It's complicity
across the globe. When there when there's power and strategic
advantage to being friends, right we we we talked about
that numerous times. There are no friends in politics in
this way, but there are, there are strategies, they are allies.
There are dominoes. They can be set up, and they
(53:34):
are levers they can be pulled. And when when that
is so important, specifically the relationship between the United States
and Saudi Arabia, you know, because of resources, because of
position where they where they are, the historic wealth that
exists in the kingdom. I mean, what are you going
to do? Like you said, Ben, you can't send in
(53:55):
a team to extract someone. You can really do anything
besides take a flashlight and shine it on the stuff
that we know, and hopefully, good God, hopefully that bill
goes through and at least it will be a known thing.
But even then people have to care enough to care.
Speaker 1 (54:17):
Yeah, I you know. And one thing that we didn't
get to, an excellent point you raised, Noal, is that
there has to be complicity on the US side. I
would argue, not just the high level stuff. Obviously people
made a cost benefit analysis there, but but someone has
to monitor the planes flying in and out right, someone
works at the airport, you know, someone greenlit this stuff.
Speaker 3 (54:41):
I mean, I remember being on a grounded flight one
time because of like you know, runway trouble or I
don't remember exactly what it was.
Speaker 2 (54:48):
Maybe there was a mechanical thing.
Speaker 3 (54:50):
But I got off the plane to like get a snack,
and they wouldn't let me back on the plane.
Speaker 2 (54:56):
Like until they reboard it.
Speaker 3 (54:57):
Like there are serious guidelines and like regulations that go
into who can and cannot get back onto planes, you know,
a procedural kind of situation that is you know, held
to ironclad by these folks.
Speaker 4 (55:12):
So, but we're talking about private flights, right, We're talking
about well, like a you know a handful of people
that are on a.
Speaker 2 (55:20):
Plane, No that's a good point. I didn't even think
about it.
Speaker 1 (55:22):
Six so six oh, no, I don't have this specific
to the plane actually right now unless this Declassification Act
shakes something loose. The official word is we're not sure how.
We're not sure about those specifics of how people are
getting out. We haven't been able to find a specific plane,
(55:44):
a specific airport, a specific routes.
Speaker 4 (55:47):
But yeah, but I mean that's kind of the point.
If it's a smaller plane on a smaller airport. I mean,
the amount of complicity that would be necessary from a
government agency I think would be minimum.
Speaker 2 (55:57):
Now you're spot on there, Matt, I can.
Speaker 1 (56:00):
I've got yeah, I agree. I do have to give
one shout out so it's not just a terrible negative ending.
I do have to give one shout out to the
time that the US said, yes, we will invade your
country and we will snatch people up and take them back.
It's not Saudi Arabia, it's the Netherlands. It's the Invade
(56:21):
the Hague Act. Do you guys remember this one?
Speaker 4 (56:24):
Invade the Hague.
Speaker 1 (56:25):
The American Service Members Protection Act of two thousand and
two authorizes the use of military force to liberate any
American or citizen of the US allied country being held
at the International Criminal Court.
Speaker 2 (56:41):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (56:42):
So the idea is that in that case, the US
will invade and will extract an individual. But I think
that's meant to protect various VIPs in the US from
war crime accusations.
Speaker 4 (56:55):
Yeah, oh my god, that is heinous though.
Speaker 1 (56:57):
Yeah. So the Netherlands technically is number one as far
as extractions. But now we want to hear from you.
Let us know it is this calculation brutal, cold though
it may be, is it ultimately correct? Is there something
else should that should be done? What should what should
(57:20):
federal authorities say to the families?
Speaker 4 (57:23):
Right?
Speaker 1 (57:23):
And what does this mean for the future. You can
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(57:44):
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Mail shows and these voicemails are a big part of that.
Speaker 4 (58:09):
That's right. And check out YouTube YouTube dot com slash
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Speaker 1 (58:24):
We have more episodes on the way. We're still working
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Speaker 4 (58:35):
Yeah, I know mine are still going right now. My
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Speaker 1 (58:41):
So we have some surprises for you on the way.
Do tune in. But hey, you might be saying, I
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(59:02):
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Speaker 3 (59:14):
We are conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
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Stuff they don't want you to know is a production
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Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Fellow conspiracy realist, we are returning to you with a
pretty sensitive real life conspiracy that we first explored in
twenty twenty. Guys, riddle me this. Have you ever got
the vague spidey sense that some people are above the law?
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Yeah? What are you talking about? Man?
Speaker 1 (00:21):
Rule is not a stick for us. I can't get
away with a I can't get out of a fine
for a late book at the library. But as we
learned in tonight's classic episode back in twenty sixteen, uh,
there were serious crimes committed by Saudi nationals and for
(00:43):
one reason or another, they got to pass the kind
of stuff that would put you under the prison.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
Yeah, well not.
Speaker 3 (00:49):
Look look at all the pardons flying around. I mean, yes,
there are people are above the law, and it's all
about who you know and what you know. What you've
got on me, And by me, I mean the government
or the individual that's you know, giving that pass. But
I just don't believe in rule of law anymore.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
Guys.
Speaker 3 (01:07):
I'm sorry, I know that's such a bummer thing to say,
but it is tough.
Speaker 4 (01:11):
Yeah, especially in this episode, as we're about to describe.
When you have a child who gets hit by a car.
There should probably be consequences for the driver of that car.
Speaker 5 (01:22):
Yeah, yeah, oh yeah, that's what we thought until we
dove in. So please join us for our classic episode,
why does the United States let Saudi fugitives flee the country?
Speaker 6 (01:37):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies, history is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 4 (02:01):
Hello, welcome back to the show.
Speaker 2 (02:02):
My name is Matt, my name is Noel.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
They call me Ben. We're joined as always with our
super producer Paul. Mission Control decads. Most importantly, you are you,
You are here, and that makes this stuff they don't
want you to know. Which off air is still working
on a title for this one. I don't know what
we'll end up with, but I was pitching it to
the Gang as the episode where we start a fight
(02:26):
with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. What are we talking about?
There are so many there's so many beef points between
the US and Saudi Arabia or the world in the Kingdom.
Here's this GUO. Today's episode may be a sensitive subject
to many in the audience. It touches on several ongoing
legal cases which will many of which will likely not
(02:50):
be resolved for one reason or another. You might not
be aware of this one, but it is an international conspiracy.
It's at least a decade old, probably older. It continues
as we record today, and there's not a solution. Really,
it is set to continue in the future. The best
way for us to get into this story is to
(03:11):
explore it through a specific recent example in Oregon that
just hit a crisis point in twenty nineteen, but it
begins in twenty sixteen. So here are the facts.
Speaker 3 (03:24):
Yes, on August nineteenth of twenty sixteen, Abdul Rahman Samir
Norah was charged with first degree manslaughter for fatally hitting
a fifteen year old girl named Fallon Smart with his
car in Portland. The charge was technically elevated manslaughter. We've
talked about the weirdness but behind these types of kind
(03:47):
of delineations of styles.
Speaker 2 (03:49):
Of murder, but yeah, elevated manslaughter.
Speaker 3 (03:51):
Alleges that Nourra caused Smart's death unlawfully and recklessly under
circumstances manifesting extreme indifferent to the value of human life.
Whooh okay, Smart was crossing legally in front of traffic
when neurra illegally swerved into the left turn lane and
(04:12):
hit her at fifty five to sixty miles per hour.
Nourra was driving on a suspended license, did not stop
after running over this person, and police said that he
later returned to the scene, which I guess the indication
there is just kind of wanton disregard for you know,
(04:35):
consequences perhaps, but we'll see.
Speaker 4 (04:37):
Well, I mean he's going back to see what happened, right, Oh.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
Yeah, But also like there's a got it. You know,
that's a luxury.
Speaker 3 (04:44):
I would say, like if I was gonna flee, I
would fully flee.
Speaker 2 (04:48):
I wouldn't be like, oh.
Speaker 3 (04:49):
Dude, do let's go back and see what happened.
Speaker 2 (04:51):
So that's a little bit interesting.
Speaker 1 (04:53):
Yeah, he was likely this is my speculation, he was
likely instructed by someone to return and assured that things
would ultimately be okay. He had been in the US
for some time. He first visited the country in twenty
fourteen from his native Saudi Arabia, was on a student visa.
(05:14):
As you know, many people traveled to the US on
a student visa. He was studying at Portland Community College.
The Saudi Arabian government, through its consulate, retained private attorneys,
one of whom will occur later in this story, Ginger Mooney.
And they cut his bail was I think initially said
(05:37):
it a million dollars. So they cut one hundred thousand
dollars check for his bail. He was put on pre
trial supervision kind of like house arrest, ankle, monitor, the bracelet,
the whole nine, and his passport was taken. That's important
because typically in the world of legal international travel, there
(05:58):
is only one living person right now who can travel
without a passport. That is the Queen of England. Weird story,
It's true. We have a I think we have a
video about it somewhere brain stuff or stuff they don't
want you to know. So here's where our law and
order music starts kicking in. Two weeks before his trial,
(06:18):
which was scheduled for June twenty seventeen, Nora disappears. A
black suv is seen pulling into the home where he's
staying at. He was staying at a with a host
family along with a cousin he was very close to.
We know that he was driven to a gravel lot
about two miles away, and we know this because he
(06:38):
still had his tracking monitor on his ankle. So the
FEDS followed that signal to the gravel lot and found
that someone had sliced the monitor off and just discarded it.
They're also cell phone, laptop stuff involved here. From there,
federal authorities in the US believed nor who is, by
(07:00):
the way, just twenty one at this point. He's a
young kid. He was given a fake or illicit passport,
and he was flown somehow out of the US, likely
on a private plane.
Speaker 4 (07:12):
And you may be wondering, Wow, this guy must be
really important this for that to go down, or he
must be extremely rich to be able to get someone
to do that. Either someone did that for him or
he did it on his own accord. It's very strange,
just the fact that a precaution would be taken, like
(07:34):
a pretty extreme precaution, taking a passport, making sure, okay,
this person is not going to leave, and then to
be able to have an organized group of people to
assist in getting this person out of the country. There's
something deeper going on. It feels like a movie, like
like some kind of spy movie or a caper.
Speaker 1 (07:52):
Right, absolutely absolutely, because look, you know, I complained about
this off air earlier. I can't get away with overdue
library fees, you know what I mean, Like I have
consequences for that. How did this guy give the Feds
the slip and get out of the country. What's happening?
(08:14):
The thing is, federal prosecutors, without disclosing all of the
specifics of their information other than what we've just mentioned,
federal prosecutors are certain that the Saudi Arabian government itself
conspired to remove Nora before he could face any actual
jail time for killing this child. And you know, for
(08:37):
the record, it doesn't seem like it was premeditated murder.
It feels like it was a horrific accidental tragedy.
Speaker 4 (08:46):
But that doesn't lick.
Speaker 3 (08:49):
Yeah, And you know, I joked about the lines that
we make in the law between different types of killing,
and obviously some of them exists for a reason, premeditated
versus an accident, a tragedy, something that you participated in
but perhaps did not actually intend to do. I understand that,
but this is also you know, there's a level of
wantonness and a level of disregard for human life on
(09:12):
display here that is very troubling.
Speaker 2 (09:15):
At the very least.
Speaker 1 (09:16):
Yeah, the authorities noted, like the local police in Portland
noted that at the time, Norah seemed markedly indifferent to
the fact that there was someone dead because of his driving.
But we have to be careful with that kind of
emotional attribution because he could have just been in shock. Also,
(09:38):
you know what I mean. Here's the thing. You've probably
heard of extradition treaties. You don't have to be a
legal expert to know what they are. Extradition treaties are
agreements that countries make, or that agreements that either individual
countries make bilaterally, or there are agreements that coalitions like
(10:01):
the EU will make for EU member states. Not every
country has an extradition treaty with every other country, which
is how some people are able to fake their deaths
and get away and live in a non extradition country,
and when the authorities find out that they've committed pseudo side,
(10:23):
which is the correct word, it doesn't matter if those
people are faking their death because you can't get them
back to your country to face their crimes. The US
and Saudi Arabia do not have an extradition treaty, so
it is highly unlikely that Nora would be arrested inside
the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for this crime in the US,
(10:44):
and it is virtually impossible. It would be unprecedented for
the Kingdom to actually send one of one of their
own citizens to the US to serve time in the
US prison system. Currently, the FEDS say they don't know
(11:05):
specifically where ig Nora is in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. So,
in short, all the details aside, the main takeaway is this,
he killed a child, a fifteen year old, and he
got away with it. And it gets worse, boy.
Speaker 2 (11:24):
Does it ever.
Speaker 4 (11:25):
And as we said, this took place in Portland, Oregon,
and there's a journalist there working for The Oregonian also
known as Oregon Live. His name is Shane Dixon Kavanaugh,
and he's been looking into this pretty extensively. There are
many many articles you can read on the websites there
(11:47):
to learn about this, and he has found that it
appears that this isn't just a one off, This isn't
an exception to the rule. This seems to be a
much larger issue, a pattern of people getting away with
terrible things in the United States and being sent back
to Saudi Arabia somehow right.
Speaker 1 (12:08):
I like that you point out this as an iteration
of a pattern. That's our that this is our conspiracy
for today. How many people as the government of Saudi
Arabia removed from justice? And perhaps more importantly and more disturbingly,
why aren't the FEDS doing anything about it? This is
(12:30):
a question will answer after a word from our sponsor.
Here's where it gets crazy. So Kavanaugh, if you're listening,
thank you for doing this amazing work. I was as
profoundly impressed. Kavanaugh has made a series that is ongoing
(12:55):
called Fleeing Justice, which is available now at Oregonlive dot com.
In his investigation, he bread crumbed together dozens of cases
of Saudi Arabian nationals, typically young college students, illegally fleeing
the US and Canada after being charged with serious crimes.
(13:17):
And we're not talking about stuff like late fees at
Blockbuster or libraries or something.
Speaker 4 (13:24):
Is that a crime? Late fees at Blockbuster? Because if so,
I am a criminal.
Speaker 1 (13:28):
I still think about that, Like, how different would the
world be? Maybe I should have paid those late fees?
Speaker 3 (13:33):
Well, what happens when the company like dissolves? I mean
there is technically one remaining active blockbuster. But ben to
your earlier point, the public library, they are relentless. They
will come after you, they will like you know, dos you,
and it's very scary to be on the wrong side
of the public library system.
Speaker 1 (13:52):
Yeah, the word on the street is that librarians trained
under the most elite hounding four in the US, which
is of course, people who want to talk to you
about your car's extended warranty. They're pretty much the Seal
Team six of bugging you. But I'm jiddy, but look,
(14:13):
you know, we're trying to inject levity into this because
these individuals were charged with, not convicted, but charged with
things like manslaughter, rape, more kinds of sexual assault, illegal
possession of firearms, possession of graphic depictions of child abuse,
(14:34):
and charges of like encouraging soliciting disseminating that kind of material.
Kavanaugh found these and then he also found he was
the one who originally reported this story that we just
shared with you at the top of the show. He
also found a pattern of state level interference from the
(14:55):
Kingdom of Saudi Arabia with each of these cases, and
then he found that this has been an open secret
among federal authorities for at least a decade. I would
argue probably more like everybody's just not getting it, just
wasn't getting reported near as often until Kavanaugh started digging it.
Speaker 3 (15:14):
Yes, and for the record, I've always been a big
fan of The Oregonian and the reporting they've done. A
show that I worked on that I mentioned cup too.
Now we actually had Phil Stanford, who once wrote for
The Oregonian on the show, and they've definitely done good
work in investigative journalism over the years. This series from
Cavanaugh began when he learned about this particular case involving Nora. Cavanaugh,
(15:40):
through tons of deep dive of research, was able to
conclude and this is a quote from the piece. Despite
unknowns in the ongoing investigation, officials with the US Department
of Homeland Security and US Marshall Service are all but
certain who helped orchestrate the remarkable escape the Kingdom of
(16:01):
Saudi Arabia, and therein lies a pattern. This is this
is no longer in the quote that the Saudi government
paid bail hired attorneys to defend nearly all of these
young men, most of whom were international college students at
the time, and in each case they were able to
extract them before they were forced to face prosecution or
(16:25):
complete jail sentences. Some were traced back to Saudi Arabia
even after surrendering their passports to US authorities. And to
your point, Ben, that's crazy. That's a level of like
like cheat code, you know, boss move that most are
not capable of and definitely requires some kind of level
(16:46):
of collusion on the part of our government.
Speaker 2 (16:49):
I'm just putting that out there.
Speaker 4 (16:51):
And then they realized, you know, there are several cases
in Oregon. You know, if you imagine Kevanaugh working there
at a paper that's based in city, He's looking at
cases that are happening around him, right, and then he
and his team discover that, oh no, it's not just Oregon.
There's other cases like this in Montana, in Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Utah, Washington, Wisconsin,
(17:13):
and they're realizing, oh my god, this is happening across
the US and beyond.
Speaker 1 (17:19):
They also find two cases in Nova Scotia, Saudi students
and two separate incidents had skipped bail and they had
disappeared after being accused of sexual assault. I think it's
fair to say disappeared because they end up back at
the Kingdom. That's what happens. They may go somewhere else,
(17:40):
to some other country after that, but they go back
to their home country in Saudi Arabia. To your point, Matt,
In Oregon, Kavanaugh's team found seven cases they could verify
involving Saudi nationals who vanished before they face trial or
completed the jail sentence. These were two people accused of rape,
(18:03):
a pair of suspected hit and run drivers, one of
whom was Nuraw. One man accused of having depictions of
child abuse on his computer, sexual assault charges. One man
accused of carrying a loaded illegal firearm and that's like
that one is the lightest crime that guy. All of
(18:23):
these people were young men studying at colleges or universities
in Oregon with assistants from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
at the time of their arrest. I want to give
a comparison here, and we'll make sure that we're not
just picking on Saudi Arabia before this episode is over,
so spoiler alert, but I want to make a comparison, folks,
(18:46):
conspiracy realists, Imagine that you went on a trip with
Matt Noll Mischig control of myself, and we were I
don't know, we're backpacking around crow Waitia, or we're doing
for some reason doing a tour in China wishes or horses.
(19:07):
They let us in and then I don't want to
accuse us of heinous crimes. But let's say one of
us commits heinous crime. You know what.
Speaker 4 (19:17):
Let's say I guess to say an accidental death.
Speaker 1 (19:20):
Yes, let's say we get in a bar fight. We
get in a bar fight and don't mean to kill somebody,
but one of us kills somebody, and the government or
government of Croatia or the government of China rightly says
you're under arrest. But then if we were like these
(19:41):
nationals in today's episode, what would happen is that the
government of the US, let's just say the government of Podcasting,
the government of Podcasting, then would find a smart spycraft
way to contact us right and communicate with us through
a juice or clandestine means, and then they would essentially say, Matt,
(20:04):
if you're if you're the person who accidentally threw the
fatal punch, then they would essentially say, Okay, we're gonna
post your bail. Right, you're on house arrest. Cool at
twelve forty three pm on you know this Tuesday. Just
walk outside, stop at the threshold of your door so
(20:24):
the ankle monitor doesn't ping. And then when the car
pulls up, hop in, don't ask any questions, and then
you get you get they'll hand you a US a
real looking US passport that says like real guy, last
name or something, you know, and it's got a picture
on it, and then boom, you're in the US. You'll
you'll never get to go to Zagreb or Croatia or
(20:48):
Beijing or China again. But you'll also never serve a
day in jail. That doesn't that doesn't happen to the
average person in the planet, and it shouldn't, right, Like,
is that not crazy? That's insane to me?
Speaker 4 (21:02):
It is crazy, And it's almost it's very similar to
what we've discussed before when a spy who was operating
under diplomatic immunity or something is operating in a different country. Right,
doesn't it feel like that?
Speaker 2 (21:15):
Yes, I mean, I know.
Speaker 3 (21:18):
We're gonna get there, but it's just it's galling to me.
It's like this, this doesn't happen in a vacuum, you know,
I mean there's somebody helping the process along the way.
Speaker 2 (21:28):
Is it sanctioned? Is it completely under the table? Uh?
Speaker 3 (21:32):
Just to keep the relationship, you know, nice and tidy
with this country that we depend on.
Speaker 4 (21:38):
These are these are good questions, nol uh we we
we need to delve further though.
Speaker 1 (21:44):
The answer is no disgusting.
Speaker 4 (21:47):
Yeah, there you go, there you go.
Speaker 1 (21:49):
That's that's that's the spoiler I'll give now. We we
didn't want to go down too far down the rabbit hole. Again.
You can read reports by Pro Public, you can report
reports by the Orgonian and a couple of other high
quality outlets about this. But just to give you this scope,
(22:10):
like we want to name some of these people. So
picture Kavanaugh again picking up the breadcrumbs, putting the pieces together. Here.
In addition to Nara, he found multiple people, as we said,
like round twenty, there's Mohammed Zurabi al Zoabi. He's one
of the Nova Scotia folks. In twenty eighteen he disappeared.
(22:32):
He was facing numerous charges of sexual assault and forcible
confinement of a woman over a series of incidences occurring
between twenty fifteen and twenty seventeen.
Speaker 4 (22:44):
There's Sammi Solomon al Mezzani. He was in Montana. This
is in twenty seventeen. He was accused of raping his
roommate after the pair return home from a downtown music
festival in That was in July of twenty seventeen.
Speaker 3 (23:02):
Next, we have Mukrin Majah al Balawi and this took
place in Washington in twenty sixteen. He was accused of
beating and stabbing a man during an altercation in February
of twenty sixteen.
Speaker 1 (23:17):
And then there's Salad Abdulahti, who in Washington in twenty
sixteen disappeared. He had forcibly confined someone unlawful imprisonment it
was called, and had forces to perform sex acts upon him.
Speaker 2 (23:34):
Oh, I got I'm assuming Ben.
Speaker 3 (23:37):
So many of these are from the Pacific Northwest because
of the reporting from the Oregonian.
Speaker 6 (23:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (23:42):
Yeah, I've listed out the seven cases, but eventually, just
for the sake of time, I stopped. And I want
to again recommend that people check out Kavanaugh's work on
this because it's super easy to rabbit hole. You'll see,
like I've got links arranged where you can see this
story in the particulars of each of these cases. You'll
(24:05):
also see other ones that haven't been reported or maybe
collected in this series for one reason or another. But
there are cases that occur in other places in Milwaukee
and so on. In Oregon. Saud Ali Algoayz, he disappeared
in twenty sixteen. He's the illegal firearm guy. He currently
(24:27):
has a couple of outstanding warrants in a couple of counties.
I am going to be honest to me, having a
non registered firearm feels lighter, you know what I mean.
Speaker 4 (24:45):
And next we've got Suliman Ali Ala Guayiz. This is
again in Oregon. This guy was charged with third degree assault.
He's also charged with driving under the influence of something
that was intoxicating him. There are other charges laid against him,
and that was in twenty sixteen.
Speaker 3 (25:02):
They have been related, Saud and Suliman same exact last name,
or Ali al Guaz.
Speaker 4 (25:09):
You know, I do not know if they are officially related,
but we're gonna get into some troubling relations a little
bit later in the episode got It.
Speaker 3 (25:21):
Next we have Faisal Alta leb and this was in
Montana in twenty sixteen, and the charge here was sexual assault.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
And then we have abdulah ziz hamad Aldis in Oregon
twenty fifteen, accused of sexually assaulting a class bait after
applying her with marijuana and booze.
Speaker 3 (25:43):
And then we have Walid Ali al Harti and this
was also an Oregon in twenty fifteen, and this was
possession of child pornography. I mean, these charges run the
gamut of Oh my god, so so wide ranging.
Speaker 1 (26:00):
And as we said, the list goes on. There is
value in naming specific people here so that we're not
just saying this number of folks, right, are part of
this pattern or iterations thereof. And you're right, they run
the gamut, but there is one thing they have in common,
(26:22):
which is that these people did not and will not
pay for their crimes. They exist in a different level
of justice. Then you know, most of us listening along
today unless you are one of the people named and
you happen to be listening to this episode, in which case,
feel free to reach out conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 3 (26:42):
Yeah, and we're talking about this almost in terms of
like you know, extraction or some kind of you know, heist,
but it's it's in none of these cases was there
an actual breaking out.
Speaker 2 (26:54):
You know, these were all done more or.
Speaker 3 (26:56):
Less using the tree additional means of paying bail and
using lawyers and all of that. So on paper, it
could easily be justified that this was done through the
proper channels. But as we'll see, there's nothing proper about
any of this.
Speaker 4 (27:15):
I hear what you're saying, all but when we're talking
about proper channels, a proper channel is not escaping the
country illegally. That's that's why, that's why it's.
Speaker 3 (27:25):
So trup no a million percent. I'm just saying, like
you know, paper trail wise. You know, they they paid
the bail, they got them out, and then they fled.
Speaker 4 (27:36):
You know, well they yeah, they they skipped bail. I think, right,
that's how you would.
Speaker 1 (27:41):
Yeah, yeah, they skipped bail. And it's got to be
got to be irritating to the skip tracers because there
you can trace some of these some of these individuals
pretty pretty easily. You just cannot do anything about it.
So yeah, it's they go through the proper channels up
(28:01):
to a point. And we'll see the uh, we'll see
the response of the the Saudi government to some of
these crazy accusations. A little later in the show, it
is important again to be objective, to be fair, we
have to note that these individuals were accused, they were suspected,
(28:22):
they were arrested or dieted. But uh, there hasn't been,
to your point, no, an actual jail break, you know,
like that prison escape show that was so popular a
few years ago. There it wasn't like a tank rolled
through or someone dressed as I'm just thinking, how cool
this is a movie. Soone dressed as a prison guard
(28:44):
like takes off their mission impossible mask face and it's
top cruise or something. It's like, we're getting you out
of the States. Nothing like that, Nothing like that, but
close enough, a real world version of it.
Speaker 3 (28:57):
Yeah, and and there's there's there's a lot of really
great reporting on this to your point, Ben. And according
to Sebastian Rotella and Tim Golden, who right for Pro Publica,
they had this to say about the whole situation.
Speaker 2 (29:09):
Quote.
Speaker 3 (29:10):
Successive American administrations have avoided confronting the government in Riyad
out of concern that doing so might jeopardize US interests,
particularly Saudi cooperation in the fight against Islamist terrorism.
Speaker 1 (29:24):
So they knew. They knew about this. Again, it just
did very little to prevent it. In Mission control, Paul
Michigan Control brought up a great point. He was asking
me off air. He said, Okay, well, why is this happening?
And that's in a nutshell? And when we told him,
(29:47):
his next response was counter terrorism. Weren't the majority of
the terrorists involved in the events of September eleventh Saudi nationals?
And that's correct, so to be fair. A spokesperson for
the Saudi embassy in Washington named Fahad Nazer said that quote,
(30:10):
only a small fraction of Saudi students in the US
have gotten into any legal trouble, and that Saudi officials
have strictly adhered to all US laws in helping them.
He goes on to say the notion that the Saudi
government actively helps citizens of a justice after they've been
implicated in legal wrongdoing in the US is simply not true.
(30:34):
I put a little sass on that quote because it
feels categorical and explicit. But it seems that that quote
itself is at the very least misleading. Maybe the people
who are assisting in these escapes are kind of like hackers.
The hacker armies in China. Maybe they're just not officially
(30:57):
condoned by the government and they just feel patriotic hmmm,
or he's lying.
Speaker 3 (31:03):
Well that's the thing though, Like I mean, when you
get into all this like pr speak and again, this
idea of strictly adhering to all US laws, there's a
dot dot dot there where it's up to a point,
like like you said, you can certainly say we strictly
adhere to all US laws and then we didn't until
(31:23):
the point where we stopped doing that thing.
Speaker 4 (31:25):
Well, again, you'd have to prove that it's Saudi officials
who are doing any taking any of these actions to
get citizens out.
Speaker 2 (31:34):
Ah.
Speaker 4 (31:34):
Yeah, I mean that's plausible deniability, right, yeah, I mean,
you're it's a tough thing unless you've got solid evidence
to to say, hey, Saudi Arabia, you have government officials
taking people out of the country and we know it.
You'd have to have serious evidence in order to make
(31:55):
that accusation.
Speaker 2 (31:56):
And well, maybe we don't have that.
Speaker 3 (31:59):
We do have have a disturbing trend, an upward trend
that we can measure, and it would seem that the
problem of US students fleeing prosecution has increased largely in
proportion to the Saudi student population in the United States,
increasing that population having been only five thousand in two
(32:22):
thousand and five and then about a decade later exploding
to more than eighty thousand. And that's according to the
Department of Homeland Security. The Saudi government has sponsored most
of these students under a scholarship program created by the
late King Abdullah, a three billion, mind you dollar scholarship program.
Speaker 1 (32:41):
Yeah, so maybe it's maybe it's just a numbers game question.
There are so many more apples that maybe are incident
of bad apples just increases, right. The FBI, State Department, Ice,
the rest of the Alphabet Boys, all the Alphabet Soup
members have confirmed to your point, Matt, that Saudi intelligence
(33:05):
officials do monitor Saudi nationals in the United States, and
they confirm this as part of their kind of routine
security checks. You know what I mean. It's not a
big operation snow white break into an embassy or something.
This is standard operating procedure. So what they saw the
intelligence officials doing, was the Saudi intelligence officials doing was
(33:29):
looking for signs of possible radicalization, right, looking for signs
of denigration against the Kingdom, stuff like that. Just keeping
an eye on these people, because again, that is part
and parcel of they what they do, right, I mean,
even like, if you're a US citizen and you travel
(33:51):
to a foreign country, you're going to be living there
for a while, it's also highly recommended that you check
in with the embassy or the consulate in case something happens. Right, again,
the US Consulate is not for the average US citizen.
The US Consulate is not going to go to these lengths,
you know what I mean, they're going they're not gonna
(34:14):
spirit your way or what do we say in the
troubled team industry. They're not going to go out Yeah
the situation, yeah, you put yourself in. But they found
something else when they were looking at this. The officials
found that the Saudi intelligence agents were also not just
keeping tabs on the college kids, but intervening where they
(34:36):
felt necessary, up to and including assisting them in escaping
criminal consequences that will put the average US citizen pretty
much under the jail. Like celebrities, the very wealthy, and
politicians obviously have a function under a different justice system,
but the average US citizen would be going to prison
(34:56):
for a lot of this stuff. So can can you
guess why Uncle Sam has not been doing a damn
thing about this for more than ten years? We'll tell
you after a word from our sponsor, we're back and
(35:19):
we hope that you have returned as well. We left
you with a question, uh, and we shouldn't have left
you without a dope. Beat the step two Here it is,
can you guess why Uncle Sam has not been doing
anything about it? Wait for folks, if you're listening along
at home and you already know the answer, please say
(35:41):
it with us there.
Speaker 2 (35:47):
It's just the greatest, you know, the most.
Speaker 4 (35:51):
Good, Yeah, for all? And what do we mean the
greater good?
Speaker 3 (35:56):
We upset the Apple cards? What we mean we've got these? Well,
I mean, I don't know. It just means that we
don't want to It's like, if you compare it's like
a cost benefit analysis.
Speaker 2 (36:08):
We always talk about, like if we do.
Speaker 3 (36:09):
We really want to die on this hill of going
to war with the Saudi government over these like misbehaving students,
which in the grand scheme of things, you know, Uncle
Sam could easily argue not that big a deal when
you compare it to like the overall picture of.
Speaker 4 (36:26):
Things, and we've actually, we've got a quote from someone
who seems to know what they're talking about, a former
FBI agent named Jeffrey Danik. He was the FBI's assistant
legal attache in Riyad from twenty ten to twenty twelve.
And this is why he thinks these students are somehow
(36:47):
getting back to Saudi Arabia while the FBI and other
intelligence agencies are aware. He says, it's not that the
issue of Saudi fugitives from the US wasn't important. It's
that the security relationship was so much more important on
counter terrorism, on protecting the US and its partners, on
opposing Iran. The Saudis were invaluable allies.
Speaker 1 (37:11):
So yeah, this argument is a greater good argument. It's
a cost benefit analysis argument. Not everybody is making the
same argument. For the people who would speak, whether on
record or anonymously, there were people were saying, look, if
this came across my desk at the time, I would
(37:32):
have no problem approaching whomever my contact was in the
Kingdom regarding this issue, even if it's a painful one
to bring up. But then you'll have people from other
US agencies who are saying, look, I have to. I
have to build relationships with my partners on these projects
(37:54):
on counter terrorism. I have to ask sensitive questions, to
do a lot of digging, and I have to have
a poor and I have to have trust. And if
I'm there to talk with these folks about something concerning
geopolitics or national security and I bring up, hey, where
are these college kids? Then I will be shut down.
(38:16):
And not only will I have an unsuccessful conversation or
interaction that day, but I will never have I will
never recover from pressing this point. And this The problem
with this is that both sides are valid. But if
(38:37):
we wanted to be hyperbolic then and engage in some
like bleeding headlines, then we would say something like the
US has made a conscious decision to sacrifice some of
its civilians. I mean, that's a terrible thing to say,
and it is misleading, and it's an appeal to emotion
(38:59):
and so on. But this kind of stuff also, these
kind of decisions don't occur in a vacuum. There are
other things that happen, like the US protecting opium fields
in Afghanistan, you know what I mean, Like they're you
could say that they're enabling opioid addiction and heroin addiction
in the US also shout out to the cost of
(39:23):
doing business argument. I think you guys saw that the Yeah,
makers of oxyconton just got slapped with attacks.
Speaker 4 (39:31):
And they're shutting down. I've been My understanding is produce
going away.
Speaker 3 (39:35):
Yeah, But I mean the argument you could make there
is like this family, the Sacklers, you know, and these executives,
they're basically just retiring. It's not like they're actually having
to answer for their crimes, and it's not like they're
actually going to see any Are they going to be
in the poorhouse now because of these things that have happened?
Speaker 2 (39:54):
Absolutely not. And Ben the thing that.
Speaker 3 (39:57):
This makes me think of, and we constantly running up
into things that make me think this is, at the
end of the day, we as a government, and many governments,
so many just don't have any moral high ground, don't
have any like moral soapbox to stand on ever, because at.
Speaker 2 (40:16):
The end of the day, there's so many of.
Speaker 3 (40:18):
These little calculations that involve knowingly allowing terrible things to happen,
terrible people to continue doing terrible things under our watch,
and yet we try, our politicians try to take some
kind of moral stance and say we are the you know,
law and order candidate or party or whatever, and it's.
Speaker 1 (40:37):
All bull I agree. I mean, look, honestly, a great
deal of the concept of morality is a pr spin
that is sold to a population, which I know sounds
brutal and cold. And I'm not saying that the people
(40:58):
expressing those values do not themselves believe in them. I
think often they do. But those are also tremendous rationalizations.
Countries do not have friends, Countries have interests. Right when
you get to that level, we know that. We know, however,
that single individuals can and do make a difference, such
(41:19):
as the reporters we've cited in today's episode. This reporting
led to action in Congress, which I'm happy to report
US Senator Ron Wyden from Oregon introduced something he called
the Saudi Fugitives Declassification Act of twenty nineteen. This is
(41:40):
not aimed at prosecuting these nationals because legally, again due
to extradition treaties, the ball is in the Kingdom's court.
Speaker 2 (41:49):
Like it.
Speaker 1 (41:51):
Would spark a war if the US sent someone in
to extract a Saudi national. That is one of the
dumbest things that the US could possibly do. And I
know lately it seems like our international actions are based
on answering that question, what is the dumbest thing we
do next?
Speaker 4 (42:12):
But this has been a long time, that's been having
for a while.
Speaker 1 (42:15):
That's true, that's true.
Speaker 2 (42:16):
But this is not.
Speaker 1 (42:19):
Something in the cards, is what I'm saying. So the
Fugitives to Classification Act is made to compel the US
federal government to publicly disclose what it knows about Saudi
Arabia's suspected role in helping citizens escape prosecutions. So we're
(42:41):
government employees. If you're a US citizen, technically they all
work for you. So this is a bill by one
of your employees that is telling some of your other
employees to give us more details about the job they're
supposed to be doing for you. And that's going to
run into a lot of loopholes because when anytime counter
(43:04):
terrorism comes up there there's going to be a lot
of redaction of stuff. Right, we can only imagine.
Speaker 4 (43:11):
Yeah, you know, we talked earlier about needing serious evidence
to be able to outright publicly accuse the Saudi Arabian
government of taking these actions, right, and really, what to me.
This bill reads as, hey, if you actually know that
this is happening, show us the evidence and lay it
out on the table somewhere so we can so we
(43:33):
can really show that this is what's happening. And again,
Ron Wyden, Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon is like you said, Ben,
as an employee of the people of Oregon. It seems
like he's doing it for those people who like if
we're talking about that fifteen year old the very start
of this episode who was killed in that hit and
run accident, hopefully that's what it would mean.
Speaker 3 (43:56):
Is there something special about Oregon in the Pacific Northwest
that's led to so many of these cases happening there?
Or is this just kind of like a microcosm of
the bigger picture.
Speaker 1 (44:05):
It's an interesting question. I would say that to a
degree it's a microcosm bigger picture, and to a degree
it's based on it. It's in the Northwest. Could you
ask this question earlier? To a degree, it's the the
maybe the nature of how the initial incidents were reported
(44:26):
and then discovered and corelated. But make no mistake, this
is not the Northwest specific, Yeah, nor as we'll find
is it a US specific thing. Nor, as we all know,
do bills always become laws. There are tons of everybody
remembers that song, right, I love that one. So it's
(44:48):
right up there with the that conspiracy animation that played
once on Saturday at Night Live, which I think you
guys remember. But the but the the thing is, this
bill was signed into law. The current presidential administration signed
it late last year, toward the end of last year.
Now the question is will it be enforced? But we
(45:11):
have to be we have to be honest. This is
this is an issue that is not restricted to college students.
It is not restricted to the United States, It is
not restricted to Saudi Arabia. I would say this is
one of the cases we talked about off here, Like
consider the case of someone named maid abdulah Ziz al Salad.
(45:34):
So in twenty fifteen, this guy, who was a member
of the royal family is living in Beverly Hills, and
he and a lot of people, a lot of really
well off folks from the Gulf will have a mansion
in Beverly Hills. Just like how you know, you know
you've really made it in the financial elite when you
have a dope house in London. So this guy became
(45:57):
the subject of a civil suit not a criminals in
Los Angeles when three women claimed he hired them as
housekeepers and then forcibly confined them for three days to
this crazy drug sex partying montage at his Beverly Hills mansion,
(46:18):
like assaulted them, held them captive. Got really weird with
King Jeoffrey style or what's that other guy, Ramsey Bolton. Yeah, yeah,
he was.
Speaker 2 (46:27):
More just into torturing people.
Speaker 3 (46:29):
I think Geoffrey might be a more well, they were
both pretty into torturing people and excess.
Speaker 2 (46:34):
You're spot on, Ben.
Speaker 1 (46:36):
So we do want to say we're going to share
some of the stuff that this fellow was accused of doing.
Speaker 2 (46:45):
He was.
Speaker 1 (46:48):
Did weird things. It wasn't like the typical I hate
to say it that way, but it wasn't like what
you would always think of when you think of sexual assault.
It wasn't just that like try to force these people
to perform sexual acts on him. But he also did
(47:08):
stuff like take off his clothes and like rub himself
on literally everybody else in the mansion, these these poor women,
his security guards, like people who are just by the pool,
And he was saying stuff like lick me, lick my
whole body.
Speaker 6 (47:24):
And.
Speaker 1 (47:27):
Maybe it's just the fact that no one has ever
said no to him. Then he ordered his entire staff
to get naked by the pool and said vulgar things
to him, and one woman protested, and that's when he
told her this.
Speaker 3 (47:41):
Yeah, he said, you're not a woman, you're nobody. I'm
a prince and I'll do what I want and nobody
will do anything to me. So clearly an ingrained attitude.
And then he you know, triggery stuff here, folks, if
you haven't already kind of warned it, but trigger warning.
(48:01):
He tried to urinate on people, make them watch another
man perform a sex act on him. And you know,
this is a person that has not and most assuredly
will not be prosecuted.
Speaker 4 (48:20):
And this, of course, isn't the only case we're looking at.
There's so many here we're not going to name them.
But let's look at the case of Prince Saud bin
Abdullah Ziz bin Asir al Saud, who in twenty ten
was convicted of murdering his servant Bandar Abdullah Ziz, with
whom he had been carrying on a sexual relationship. It
(48:41):
was pretty terrible. Bendar was beaten strangled until he died.
It was described as a drunken rage that the Prince
had entered into when this occurred, and the Prince, believing
that he would have some kind of diplomatic immunity, wasn't
necessarily afraid of any reaper cushions. However, the UK did
(49:02):
move forward with custody. They took him in and attempted
prosecution right right.
Speaker 1 (49:08):
And this case is interesting because there's a question of
whether or not the Prince actually wanted to return to
Saudi Arabia after what was revealed in the court proceedings,
because publicly revealing that he was in a same sex
(49:29):
relationship of any sort could make him could make him
liable for the crime of homosexuality in Saudi Arabia, which
could lead to the death penalty, So he would want to,
you know, if his life is on the line. He
may have needed to seek asylum in the UK after
(49:50):
serving his sentence, because the UK has non medieval laws.
In twenty thirteen, however, the Prince was in an extraordinary move,
returned to Saudi Arabia to a prison, ostensibly to serve
out a sentence. Again, that's extraordinary. We will see what
(50:10):
actually happens. The laws are just different. And this is
making another this is creating another problem in the US
that we have to talk about toward the end. These
cases in the US, which are terrible, have led to
Islamophobic anti Muslim forces. Right, they've taken this stuff up
(50:32):
and they're stereotyping somehow all people from Saudi Arabia are
all people from the Islamic world as exactly like the
criminals in question here, which is terrible. It's one of
the worst things to take away from this. Ginger Mooney,
who we mentioned at the beginning, served as defense attorney
for several individuals in the Oregon cases. She's received death threats,
(50:55):
anti Muslim propaganda. She had to temporarily close her practice.
People are using this as a way to sow religious
persecution and division, which is unclean. But the point is
here that it doesn't. It doesn't seem it's religion that matters.
It just seems like money and things like counter terrorism
or geopolitical relationships weigh heavily on the scales of justice.
(51:19):
Go back to Afghanistan and look at how much trouble
members of the military got into when they refused to
allow child abuser warlords to function as normal, you know
what I mean. They got discharged, I believe in some
cases because they would find like literal children chained up
(51:41):
to be abused by people who are like police chiefs,
and they were told not to do anything about it.
I mean, that's that's what's happening. It's a series of
compromises to a greater good and sometimes and you know what,
in terms of counter terrorism, it seems like the end
goal just keeps moving, right, there's no a finish line.
(52:02):
It's not like other nations are necessarily different. We have
the case of an sacle us here in the US,
wife of a US diplomat struck and killed a teenager,
a nineteen year old in the United Kingdom while driving
on the wrong side of the road. Is not going
to get in trouble for it whatsoever.
Speaker 4 (52:22):
When you're important and you're wealthy, it really is a
different system.
Speaker 1 (52:28):
And it's Prince Andrew, Yeah, Prince andrews.
Speaker 4 (52:31):
Oh, yes, I really didn't want to think about him today.
Speaker 2 (52:37):
Sam.
Speaker 1 (52:37):
It's been sorry guys, but that's I mean, that's where
we're at. And now we want to pass the torch
to you. What do you think let us know. I mean,
is it Noel Matt, is it overly cynical or negative
to say that this is probably going to continue? What
do you guys think?
Speaker 3 (52:57):
I mean, it's I think realistic based on the patterns
that we've seen, based on how difficult it is to
actually enforce this stuff because of the complicity of.
Speaker 2 (53:11):
Folks in power on our side.
Speaker 4 (53:13):
Well, I mean in folks in power everywhere. It's complicity
across the globe. When there when there's power and strategic
advantage to being friends, right we we we talked about
that numerous times. There are no friends in politics in
this way, but there are, there are strategies, they are allies.
There are dominoes. They can be set up, and they
(53:34):
are levers they can be pulled. And when when that
is so important, specifically the relationship between the United States
and Saudi Arabia, you know, because of resources, because of
position where they where they are, the historic wealth that
exists in the kingdom. I mean, what are you going
to do? Like you said, Ben, you can't send in
(53:55):
a team to extract someone. You can really do anything
besides take a flashlight and shine it on the stuff
that we know, and hopefully, good God, hopefully that bill
goes through and at least it will be a known thing.
But even then people have to care enough to care.
Speaker 1 (54:17):
Yeah, I you know. And one thing that we didn't
get to, an excellent point you raised, Noal, is that
there has to be complicity on the US side. I
would argue, not just the high level stuff. Obviously people
made a cost benefit analysis there, but but someone has
to monitor the planes flying in and out right, someone
works at the airport, you know, someone greenlit this stuff.
Speaker 3 (54:41):
I mean, I remember being on a grounded flight one
time because of like you know, runway trouble or I
don't remember exactly what it was.
Speaker 2 (54:48):
Maybe there was a mechanical thing.
Speaker 3 (54:50):
But I got off the plane to like get a snack,
and they wouldn't let me back on the plane.
Speaker 2 (54:56):
Like until they reboard it.
Speaker 3 (54:57):
Like there are serious guidelines and like regulations that go
into who can and cannot get back onto planes, you know,
a procedural kind of situation that is you know, held
to ironclad by these folks.
Speaker 4 (55:12):
So, but we're talking about private flights, right, We're talking
about well, like a you know a handful of people
that are on a.
Speaker 2 (55:20):
Plane, No that's a good point. I didn't even think
about it.
Speaker 1 (55:22):
Six so six oh, no, I don't have this specific
to the plane actually right now unless this Declassification Act
shakes something loose. The official word is we're not sure how.
We're not sure about those specifics of how people are
getting out. We haven't been able to find a specific plane,
(55:44):
a specific airport, a specific routes.
Speaker 4 (55:47):
But yeah, but I mean that's kind of the point.
If it's a smaller plane on a smaller airport. I mean,
the amount of complicity that would be necessary from a
government agency I think would be minimum.
Speaker 2 (55:57):
Now you're spot on there, Matt, I can.
Speaker 1 (56:00):
I've got yeah, I agree. I do have to give
one shout out so it's not just a terrible negative ending.
I do have to give one shout out to the
time that the US said, yes, we will invade your
country and we will snatch people up and take them back.
It's not Saudi Arabia, it's the Netherlands. It's the Invade
(56:21):
the Hague Act. Do you guys remember this one?
Speaker 4 (56:24):
Invade the Hague.
Speaker 1 (56:25):
The American Service Members Protection Act of two thousand and
two authorizes the use of military force to liberate any
American or citizen of the US allied country being held
at the International Criminal Court.
Speaker 2 (56:41):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (56:42):
So the idea is that in that case, the US
will invade and will extract an individual. But I think
that's meant to protect various VIPs in the US from
war crime accusations.
Speaker 4 (56:55):
Yeah, oh my god, that is heinous though.
Speaker 1 (56:57):
Yeah. So the Netherlands technically is number one as far
as extractions. But now we want to hear from you.
Let us know it is this calculation brutal, cold though
it may be, is it ultimately correct? Is there something
else should that should be done? What should what should
(57:20):
federal authorities say to the families?
Speaker 4 (57:23):
Right?
Speaker 1 (57:23):
And what does this mean for the future. You can
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(57:44):
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Speaker 3 (58:05):
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Speaker 4 (58:09):
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Speaker 1 (58:24):
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(59:02):
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