CIA Analyst: Trump Isn’t Selling Arms To Saudi Arabia
Sean Adl-Tabatabai
YourNewsWire.com
June 7, 2017
The alleged $110 arms deal between Saudi Arabia and the United States has not gone ahead under President Trump, according to a former CIA analyst.
Bruce Riedal claims that the Trump-Saudi arms deal is “fake news” aimed at distracting the public away from the truth that deals had already been struck between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia under the Obama administration.
“What the Saudis and the administration did is put together a notional package of the Saudi wish list of possible deals and portray that as a deal. Even then the numbers don’t add up. It’s fake news,” Riedal wrote in a column for the Brookings Institution.
Sputniknews.com reports: “There is no $110 billion deal,” he said. Prior to Brookings, Riedal worked at the CIA for 29 years and counseled four US presidents during his time on the White House National Security Council.
According to the Pentagon’s public materials reviewed by Sputnik, there is no pending deal or combination of agreements adding up to $110 billion between the US and Saudi Arabia.
Trump’s proposed sale of the THAAD missile defense system to Riyadh was actually something former President Barack Obama agreed to “in principle” back in 2015. The supposed sale of a fleet of 150 Black Hawk choppers is also “old news repackaged,” Riedal said. The Saudis have communicated interest in these purchases in recent years, but nothing has come of it. That’s still true today, according to Riedal.
Further, the four “multi-mission surface combat vessels” included in the supposed deal to boost Saudi Arabia’s naval capabilities are an international export version of a current US frigate. At this stage, the only thing Washington could export to Riyadh would be the ship’s blueprints, because the actual ships don’t exist yet, Riedal continued.
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