Kelley Vlahos wrote a great article yesterday on the Saudi government’s disgraceful sham trial that let the people most responsible for Jamal Khashoggi’s murder off the hook:

Meanwhile, there is not a lot of cheering for the five suspects sentenced to death today in Riyadh. People smell a rat and a cover up. Rightly so.

The sham trial’s outcome is the predictable result of an abusive authoritarian government that kills people with impunity. The men closest to the crown prince who were directly involved in the murder were never in any danger of being punished. Saud al-Qahtani, the crown prince’s right-hand man, has continued to serve as an adviser throughout this farcical process. The crown prince himself has denied that he ordered the killing, but no one believes that. The Trump administration has done whatever it can to shield the crown prince and the Saudi government, and an administration official was quoted yesterday making this risible statement:

“This is an important step in holding those responsible for this terrible crime accountable, and we encourage Saudi Arabia to continue with a fair and transparent judicial process,” the official said.

The administration’s willingness to go along with the Saudis’ farce is typical of their Saudi First policy. Not only do they fight to block every measure aimed at reining in Saudi crimes and abuses, but they also happily echo Riyadh’s propaganda. Trump keeps the weapons flowing so that the Saudis can slaughter Yemeni civilians, and he covers for them when they kill and torture their own citizens. The Saudi government knows that the administration will let them get away with anything because it has been letting them get away with murder for years.

The Saudi government doesn’t do fair and transparent judicial processes, and this trial was no exception. The names of the five men who were sentenced to die have not been released, the trial was closed, and the diplomats that attended the trial have been sworn to secrecy. Nothing could be less fair or more opaque than Saudi “justice.” Agnes Callamard, the U.N. special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, has denounced the trial and verdict in the strongest terms in a new op-ed:

To this point, the Saudi investigation and trial have been grossly inadequate, failing to meet even minimal international standards. Under international human rights law, the murder of Khashoggi, a Post contributing columnist, was an extrajudicial execution for which the state of Saudi Arabia is responsible. Yet at no point did the investigation or trial consider the responsibilities of the state.

The sham trial serves the same purpose as the Saudi coalition’s Joint Incidents Assessment Team (JIAT) that conducts worthless investigations of coalition war crimes: to create the illusion of accountability and oversight where there is absolutely none. These processes are meant to deflect blame away from the Saudi government by shifting blame to someone else or by blaming its own people for supposedly going “rogue.” They are designed to make sure that the full truth stays hidden and to protect the main guilty parties from the consequences of their actions. The sham trial is Riyadh’s way of pretending to answer their critics’ objections while spitting in our face. It is a “mockery of justice,” as many have already said, but that also describes the Saudi judicial system as a whole. The system that condemns and executes dozens of men on ludicrous terrorism charges because they participated in political protests was never going to deal justly with the murderers of a prominent regime critic, especially when it was obvious that the murder was ordered at the highest levels of the government. The Saudis conducted this trial in the hopes that they can make people forget about Khashoggi’s murder and the crown prince’s role in ordering it, but they will be proven wrong.