This is Eli Lake and you are listening to the re-education.

My guest today is Brian Kutoulos, the Vice President for Policy at the Middle East Institute.

And the topic is what to do about an ally like Saudi Arabia. Nearly four years ago in Istanbul, a writer and activist named Jamal Khashoggi walked into the Saudi consulate and never came out.

He was murdered, lured to the building by agents for Saudi Arabia's crown prince Mohammed bin Salman.

After he was killed, a team then began to carve up his remains as part of a cover-up.

But the hit team miscalculated.

Turkish intelligence was monitoring the consulate, and the Turks began to leak out intercepts,

photographs, and videos, which made it clear that the Saudi consulate, and the Turks began to leak out intercepts, photographs, and videos,

which made it clear that the Saudi consulate in Turkey's largest city was now a crime scene.

For most of his career, Jamal Khashoggi was an advisor to the Saudi government,

and close with former intelligence chief Prince Turkey-Al-Faisal.

But after the ascension of Muhammad bin Salman, Khashoggi was on the outs.

He fled his country for the United States, where he became a legal resident, and wrote a

monthly column for the Washington Post.

In the pages of that newspaper, Khashoggi was a tough critic of the crown prince.

Murdering political critics on foreign soil is the kind of rogue behavior that we expect from American adversaries like Russia,

China, or Iran. And yet here was America's oldest Arab ally behaving in the exact same way.

Bad enough, but the Saudis made things worse by constantly changing

their story about Khashoggi, only to be exposed by the Turkish leaks. First, the Saudis said

they had no clue what had happened to Khashoggi. Then he died in a fight with consulate personnel.

Over a period of weeks, the Saudis were forced to reluctantly acknowledge that this

critic was murdered. This was a full-on diplomatic crisis. We made clear to them that we take this

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