NYT’s Ben Hubbard Analyzes U.S.-Saudi Relations

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: And yet who knows, because we keep seeing them. I mean, for instance, you have been covering it for a very long time. And you believe you were hacked and tech experts told you that you were probably hacked by them. And we know also that it’s even difficult now to speak truth to power as a journalist. Take Bryan Fogel, the documentary producer of “The Dissident,” a film about Jamal Khashoggi’s death, a forensic investigative look at this, and he can’t get a global platform to release it, because of their want to have deals with Saudi Arabia. Talk to me about that part of this equation now, because they clearly have an intimidating effect on media and on business leaders.

BEN HUBBARD, AUTHOR, “MBS: THE RISE TO POWER OF MOHAMMED BIN SALMAN”: Yes, I mean, they definitely have a lot of heft that they can use. And I think that’s one of the reasons that the release of this report was so interesting. I mean, this is very much in an arena where the Saudis cannot do much to push back. There’s no way that they could have stopped this process from moving forward, not in Congress, not in the White House. They couldn’t have done anything to prevent this report from coming out. And so I think that, in a way, I don’t want to say puts them in their place, but it sort of puts them on warning. I think that, if I were sitting in Riyadh right now, I would be sort of looking over a lot of these things that I have been involved in, recognizing the amount of damage that they have done to the standing of my country, to the reputation of the crown prince, and the way that they have overshadowed a lot of the, I think, positive changes that are actually taking place inside the kingdom. I mean, who talks about these things anymore?Giving women the right to drive, loosening some of the some of the social restrictions, changing religious rhetoric, I mean, all of these kinds of human rights issues, all of the hacking, the social media manipulation, and then these kind of efforts to go after and silence dissidents, the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, all of that has completely overshadowed everything that I think the leadership in Saudi Arabia right now would like to be known for. And so I think that’s all got to be part of their calculation. Whether they think that they continue — they can continue to get away with this stuff, I don’t know. I mean, I think that I would have — a lesson that I would have drawn from that would have been, well, this is damaging my reputation. And if I want to have the standing in the world that I believe that I should have, then I might have to change my ways.