Soon after launching a brutal air and ground assault in Yemen, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia began devoting significant resources to a sophisticated public relations blitz in Washington, D.C.
The PR campaign is designed to maintain close ties with the U.S. even as the Saudi-led military incursion into the poorest Arab nation in the Middle East has killed nearly 6,000 people, almost half of them civilians.
Elements of the charm offensive include the launch of a pro-Saudi Arabia media portal operated by high-profile Republican campaign consultants; a special English-language website devoted to putting a positive spin on the latest developments in the Yemen war; glitzy dinners with American political and business elites; and a non-stop push to sway reporters and policymakers.
Graphic: The Intercept
Saudi Arabia’s relationship with the U.S. has come under particular strain in recent years as the government has not only launched the brutal war in Yemen, but has embarked on a wave of repression. Following the appointment of Salman bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud to the Saudi throne in January, the Kingdom sharply increased the number of people executed — often by beheading and crucifixion — for daring to protest or criticize the government or for crimes as minor as adultery or “witchcraft.” On November 17, a Saudi court sentenced Ashraf Fayadh, a famed poet, to death for “apostasy.”
There have also been reports that Saudi Arabia continues to be a leading driver of Sunni terror networks worldwide, including in Syria and Iraq. The Saudi Arabian government is currently supplying weapons to a Syrian rebel coalition that includes the Nusra Front, al Qaeda’s affiliate in the region. As the New York Times has reported, private donors in Saudi Arabia have also worked as fundraisers for the Islamic State, or ISIS. And there is a renewed, bipartisan push by lawmakers to declassify the 28 pages of the 9/11 Commission Report, a censored section that reportedly relates to Saudi state support for al Qaeda’s operation.
The Saudi Arabian embassy, which did not respond to a request for comment, has been particularly busy wooing Washington in recent months.
In September, the Kingdom helped sponsor opulent galas for Washington’s business elite at the Ritz Carlton and the Andrew Mellon Auditorium. The events were attended by King Salman, along with the chief executives of General Electric and Lockheed Martin, the chairman of Marriott International, and prominent think tank officials.
Kingdom-backed nonprofits have secured positive press through a number of channels. For instance, on September 21, Hussein Ibish, a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, a new think tank fully funded by the governments of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, penned an opinion column in the New York Times heralding “A Saudi-American Reset.” In the piece, Ibish minimized “two years of perceived slights and supposed snubs” and insisted that “the new contours of a revitalized but evolving partnership between the United States and Saudi Arabia are beginning to take shape.”
Ibish also predicted that Saudi Arabia was prepared to “intensify efforts to influence events in Syria.” In reality, the Kingdom ended its airstrikes in Syria that month as it has channeled military resources into the war in Yemen instead. The Times identified Ibish as a “contributing opinion writer” and a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute, but offered no hint about the institute’s financial backing.
The Saudi Embassy’s effort to shape media coverage is led by Qorvis, a consulting firm that has worked for the Saudi government since the months following the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Qorvis’ recent disclosures under the Foreign Agents Registration Act show that it created an entire website — operationrenewalofhope.com — to promote the Saudi-led war in Yemen. It also “researched potential grassroots supporters in select states” and provided an ongoing effort to reach out to reporters concerning the Yemen war.
Qorvis’ email blasts to the media have been coordinated with Saudi Arabia’s team of contracted lobbyists, including H.P. Goldfield, a lobbyist with the law firm Hogan Lovells and vice chairman of Albright Stonebridge Group.
In July, the Saudi Embassy announced the launch of Arabia Now, an “online hub for news related to the Kingdom,” according to a press release. Since then, the site has work to promote Saudi Arabia as a bastion for human rights and progress, with posts claiming that the Kingdom is the “most generous country in the world.” While Saudi Arabian war ships blocked humanitarian assistance to Yemen, the Arabia Now news hub claimed that “Saudi Arabia was the only country that responded to the humanitarian assistance appeal launched by the U.N. to help Yemen by extending a donation of $274 million.”
Targeted Victory filing with the Department of Justice Photo: Lee Fang
Arabia Now purchased promoted tweets in the D.C. area.
Recently filed disclosures show that Targeted Victory, a consulting firm founded by Zac Moffatt, a GOP strategist who served as digital director for Mitt Romney’s campaign, has helped to manage Arabia Now. Moffatt’s firm was brought on by Qorvis.
Qorvis has contracted other firms to gauge public opinion, including Tuluna USA, an online survey company, and American Directions Group, a phone survey company founded by a pollster who previously worked for Bill Clinton.
Qorvis also coordinated the payments of honorarium to prominent political figures. For instance, Mark Kennedy, a former Republican congressman from Minnesota, received $2,000 for a speech.
From April through September of this year, Qorvis billed the Saudi government for nearly $7 million, more than twice the amount charged the previous reporting cycle.
Perhaps not coincidentally, Saudi officials have regularly appeared on cable news programs and at Washington, D.C., think tank events to reassure American audiences that the Saudi-led campaign in Yemen is in U.S. interests.
In early October, Saudi officials hosted several events for policymakers around Washington.
Prince Sultan bin Khaled Al Faisal, a former Royal Saudi Naval Forces commander, spoke at an event in the Rayburn House Office Building.
Asked by The Intercept about reports of Saudi forces bombing a wedding party, Al Faisal said, “What I’m concerned about is the authenticity of the record. We have very, very expensive precision bombs. Do you think that we would use high precision bombs to target weddings or to target schools?”
After his remarks on Capitol Hill, a small crowd of young congressional staffers lined up next to the podium, waiting to take selfies with the Saudi prince.
Photo: Yemenis search for survivors at the site of a Saudi airstrike against Houthi rebels near Sanaa Airport on March 26, 2015, which killed at least 13 people.
Related:
Lockheed Martin, Boeing Rally Around Saudi Arabia, Wave Off Humanitarian Concerns
U.S. Senators Hem and Haw on Saudi Arabia’s Human Rights Abuses
Saudi Arabia Continues Hiring Spree of American Lobbyists, Public Relations Experts
Let me get this straight, I don’t want to appear unpatriotic: As I understand it, the Headchoppers in Saudi Arabia are our good friends while the Headchoppers of the Islamic State are evil. That means the good Headchoppers bomb Yemen to stop the bad Headchoppers from taking over. We give the good Headchoppers weapons to use against the bad Headchoppers, which assumes we know the difference. Oh, right! The good Headchoppers are feted in Washington by fellow Warmongers, while bad Headchoppers are terrorists. Did I pass the Loyalty Test?
Given that you equated the prodemocracy forces in Yemen with the extremist, antidemocracy forces that the Sauds funnelled American money and arms to in Syria before the US realized that the rogues that they’d been using were just as willing to overthrow American backed governments as those Ameica wanted overthrown, yes, I’d say you passed the loyalty test.
Keep up the good work on the West’s favourite Medieval Kingdom (a.k.a. dictatorship).
We have to be careful, though, on the relation between Saudi/GCC states and ISIS, Al Qaeda and the like. While they may share the same general ideological field – “Wahhabism, Salafism, Takfirism” – they are in fact bitter, mortal enemies of one another. A better way of seeing this is to see the “terrorist” groups as seeking to “restore” Saudi Arabia to its fundamental roots, corrupted by the present regime; while Saudi policy has long been to export its own dissidents abroad, beginning with Afghanistan. The former will continue to receive indirect private support so long as they steer away from the Saudi/GCC “Homeland”, while the latter as relatively weak states gets an indirect arm of foreign policy, as seen in Syria.
Americans have known for a very long time that the Saudis are square in the middle of financing terrorism, both in America and in the Middle East. No amount of their money or lobbying by the D.C. scum can cover up that fact.
wait a minute. Why are Edelman and Podesta that you reported previously not mentioned?
Wait a minute. A few weeks ago you reported that Edelman and Podesta, both with close ties to democrats and the Clintons, were hired by Saudi, as PR consultants, to influence editorial content in US media in favor of Saudis. Why are they not mentioned here?
I think we need to consider whether there is simply some kind of moral event horizon here, a place beyond which no concept of morality can apply. Who is a hero in a country like that? Surely the one who, in a spirit of mercy, goes into a nursery and slits fifty throats to spare fifty children the misery of living. Their psychopaths are the best among them. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”, a Christian precept to be sure, a courtesy like giving mercy to a zombie-bit friend. Our noble ancestors did much the same, flying over Dresden and dropping blockbuster after blockbuster as fast as they could shovel them out the plane, until the whole city was one sorry little Nazi fire. Should we condemn them for giving people a chance? They were beyond the event horizon… but they fixed that.
How can people tell us that we ought to accept as many Muslims into our countries as want to come here, hope they live with us in peace, pretend they aren’t associated with misery and terror? Is Saudi Arabia the work of one man? Do they leave all that behind? I think if we want to stay on the right side of the event horizon, we need to build a wall between civilization and Islam! I’m not saying they can’t come … sure they can come. Once they’ve torn up their Korans and pissed on them and renounced the unrenounceable religion, then they can come. Maybe even the occasional “not an atheist” artist who has drawn a death sentence. But not every H1B they need at Facebook to avoid giving an American on the job training. That crookedness comes at too high a cost.
To find out why the Saudis need a vigorous PR campaign, go to youtube and search “Saudi Arabia funding terrorism”.
That regime in Saudi Arabia is going down soon, along with every other government on earth!
robertsrevolution.net
In a parallel universe where ethics are enshrined in a Constitution, these fuckers in Congress would be hanged. In ours, they take selfies with a vile, murderous, stone age barbarian in the hopes of receiving a donation to their next election campaign in trade for votes on sales of weapons to SA.
In my world these pig sucking Congressional criminals would be lined up in mass and shot for treason. After a short exercise in due process of course.
“After his remarks on Capitol Hill, a small crowd of young congressional staffers lined up next to the podium, waiting to take selfies with the Saudi prince.”
I can’t believe how f*cked up this is.
Welcome to ‘The New World Order’…
Could this be part of that ‘charm offensive’ but I noticed that this year is the first time that I had ever seen Saudi Arabia cities on the nightly news, weather’s webcam. And now, I see Mecca, Riyadh and an occasionally other cities basically every night. I had thought it was an attempt to normalize its image. It’s like saying, “Hey, we’re just one of the normal places. Nothing, either too strange or too abusive here. You can see for yourself.”
http://www.newsweek.com/2014/10/24/when-it-comes-beheadings-isis-has-nothing-over-saudi-arabia-277385.html
“The escalation of the war against the Islamic State was triggered by widespread revulsion at the gruesome beheading of two American journalists, relayed on YouTube. Since then, two British aid workers have met a similar grisly fate. And another American has been named as next in line by his terrorist captors.
Yet, for all the outrage these executions have engendered the world over, decapitations are routine in Saudi Arabia, America’s closest Arab ally, for crimes including political dissent—and the international press hardly seems to notice.”
Public relations indeed. 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers were Saudis.
This idea that the relations between the predatory fake USA and the
Saudi predators are under a
“particular strain” is only valid if
you have the ability to not see the elephant in the room.
What the Saudi hypocrites are doing is right in line with the
corporate domination of the planet and its lust for money
above all else
which is shared by the fake USA and its Wall Street Cathedral.
Any “strain” which may have appeared is a manifestation of envy
on the part of these lying predators.
https://www.facebook.com/notes/hidden-truth/the-jewish-roots-of-the-saudi-royal-family/277683585596093
Hmmm…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krD4hdGvGHM