Government panel urges Biden to declassify report on Khashoggi murder

President Joe Biden has been advised to declassify the entirety of a US intelligence report on the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Mr Khashoggi, a native of Saudi Arabia who reported for The Washington Post, was murdered inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, in October of 2018. He had long been critical of the Saudi regime led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and a US intelligence report found that the crown prince was responsible for ordering the murder.

In June, several weeks before Mr Biden departed for a trip to Saudi Arabia, the Public Interest Declassification Board — a small group of experts appointed by presidents and congressional leaders to advocate for more transparency on matters of foreign policy — advised that Mr Biden should declassify the entirety of the report on the murder.

Despite that recommendation, however, the full report still has not been declassified. It is not clear at this point what information in the report has not yet been made public or how substantial that information is.

“It’s troubling that the government board tasked with reviewing whether documents need to remain classified comes back and says ‘no,’ but the government still sits on its hands,” Alex Abdo, a lawyer with the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University told the Wall Street Journal. “It points to one of the most significant problems with the classification process, which is that it gives the government almost limitless discretion to decide what to declassify.”

Public Interest Declassification Board has also recommended that the US government could also partially declassify two separate reports on foreign interferance in the 2020 election beyond what has already been made available to the public.

The board is made up of nine members, five appointed by presidents and the other four appointed by the majority and minority leaders of each chamber of Congress. Of the five current members appointed by presidents, four are Donald Trump appointees while one was appointed by Mr Biden.

The Wall Street Journal reported that the group was unanimous in its recommendation that the Khashoggi report could be declassified. Sen Chris Murphy of Connecticut first asked the board to review the classification status of the Khashoggi investigation back in 2020, before the Covid-19 pandemic caused a delay in the group’s work.

Mr Biden’s visit to Saudi Arabia, which came in the midst of an energy crisis prompted in part by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, marked a shift in policy from a president who had vowed on the campaign trail to hold the oil-rich nation accountable for its human rights abuses.

Though Mr Biden said that he confronted Mr bin Salman over the murder of Khashoggi during his visit to Saudi Arabia, the trip was nonetheless panned by groups like Human Rights Watch — which suggested that the visit “helped to rehabilitate the Saudi ruler’s international image”.

The US is not the only country that has seemingly failed to hold Saudi Arabia to account over its alleged human rights abuses. French President Emmanuel Macron also warmly greeted the Saudi leader during his visit to the European Union in July.