Saudi Arabia Imprisons An American Citizen For 16 Years Over Critical Tweets

Free Speech

from the evil-empire-stuff dept

The Saudi government, led by crown prince Mohammed Bin Salman, doesn’t care to be criticized. It routinely punishes its own citizens for insulting the nation’s ruler. It occasionally murders and dismembers critics for refusing to be silenced. And now it’s prosecuting and imprisoning US citizens for exercising their First Amendment rights.

Last month, the Saudi government charged an American citizen currently residing in Saudi Arabia for “disrupting the public order” with social media posts criticizing the government’s handling of domestic matters like divorce and child custody. The US citizen, Carly Morris, was lured back to Saudi Arabia by her ex-husband, a Saudi citizen. Once there, her ex-husband basically kidnapped their daughter, converted her US citizenship to Saudi citizenship, and cut off all contact. Morris was free to leave, but she would have to leave her daughter behind despite a Saudi court granting her full custody. And now she’s possibly facing more than a decade in prison if the government decides to prosecute her.

What’s only theoretical (at this point) in Carly Morris’s case is the reality for US citizen Saad Ibrahim Almadi, a project manager who resides in Florida. Almadi isn’t an anti-Saudi activist. He’s just a regular guy who is understandably (and correctly) critical of the Saudi government and the crown prince. He just made the mistake of trying to visit his family in the country he had criticized a handful of times over the past several years. Here’s Josh Rogin, writing for the Washington Post.

Almadi is not a dissident or an activist; he is simply a project manager from Florida who decided to practice his right to free speech inside the United States. But last November, when he traveled to Riyadh to visit family, he was detained regarding 14 tweets posted on his account over the previous seven years. One of the cited tweets referenced Jamal Khashoggi, the Post contributing columnist who was murdered by Saudi agents in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul in 2018. Other tweets criticized the Saudi government’s policies and the corruption in the Saudi system.

“He had what I would call mild opinions about the government,” his son Ibrahim told me. “They took him from the airport.”

Seems like nothing a crown prince or an oil-rich nation would feel too concerned about. But MBS and his government not only took offense, but also ran him through a rigged justice system that ensure the bullshit charges would stick and take more than a decade of freedom from a man who criticized a foreign government while on his own soil, utilizing his enshrined First Amendment rights.

The charges are indeed bullshit. And they’re even more bullshit than the usual bullshit found in laws that criminalize criticizing the government.

Almadi was charged with harboring a terrorist ideology, trying to destabilize the kingdom, as well as supporting and funding terrorism.

All of that from a handful of critical tweets sent out over a period of seven years. Not only did the Saudi government hit him with these charges, it also rung him up for not surrendering himself to authorities for posting “criminal” tweets.

He was also charged with failing to report terrorism, a charge related to tweets Ibrahim sent on a separate account.

On October 3, Almadi was sentenced to 16 years in prison. He also received a 16-year travel ban. This means Almadi possibly won’t leave prison until he’s 87. And then he has to wait another sixteen years before he can return to United States.

The State Department claims it’s playing hardball with MBS to get Almadi released. But it’s going to take far more than “intensively raising concerns” about Almadi’s imprisonment with senior Saudi officials. This is a government that murdered and dismembered a critic in its own foreign embassy building. And “moving through the process” to determine whether Almadi is actually “wrongfully detained” is a useless waste of time that signals to the Saudi government that it could easily get away with something like this again, although it may mean slightly altering the criminal charges to better meet the State Department’s standards for allowing foreign governments to imprison US citizens.

The Saudi government has nothing to fear from the US government. Former president Donald Trump parroted and amplified the Saudi government’s denials about its involvement in Khashoggi’s murder, helping bury the story to ensure his arms deals with the kingdom remained intact. And the only strong language directed at the Saudi government by President Biden has been over the kingdom’s refusal to keep oil prices low. It’s no wonder the State Department can’t offer anything more than a promise to occasionally complain about this extraterritorial punishment of a US citizen for tweeting government criticism from US soil — an act that broke no local laws and did not take place while Almadi was in a country where such statements are illegal.

Filed Under: carly morris, free speech, mbs, saad ibrahim almadi, saudi arabia, tweets