December 09, 2018 "Information Clearing House" -    Donald Trump's commitment to "remain[ing] a steadfast partner of Saudi Arabia," despite the regime's gruesome torture and murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Turkey, is clearly symptomatic of the malignantly self-serving nature of US foreign policy, which has long propped up dictatorships and enabled atrocities around the world for the sake of profit and power.

However, many of Trump's most vocal critics on the Saudi file show signs of an equally dangerous pathological condition: a profound historical amnesia that permits some of the most prominent proponents of the US' own torturous and murderous policies to now parade as champions of human rights, without any apparent sense of irony.

Obama-era CIA Director John Brennan, for instance, has insisted that "the US should never turn a blind eye to this sort of inhumanity [referring to the murder of Khashoggi] … because this is a nation that remains faithful to its values" - a curiously self-righteous stance for a man who not only repeatedly turned a blind eye to the inhumanity of past and present CIA practices such as extraordinary rendition, torture, and drone assassination, but actively defended and (in the case of drone use) expanded them.