Explosive devices and/or suspicious packages were sent to a number of major Democratic Party-linked figures this week, including Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, philanthropist and financier George Soros, former DNC chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), and former CIA chief John Brennan.

The offices of the San Diego Union-Tribune were also evacuated after "suspicious packages" were found, and a device was removed from the Time Warner center in Manhattan, home to CNN.

Early news stories drew immediate connections to aggressive and irresponsible rhetoric from the right, including from President Trump. The Guardian noted that Soros has long been the target of right-wing paranoia, with Trump claiming Soros paid protesters against the nomination of Justice Brett Kavanaugh. The New York Times story about the incidents was quick to draw a similar connection:

Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Obama, Mr. Soros and CNN have all figured prominently in conservative political attacks - many of which have been led by President Trump. He has often referred to major news organizations as "the enemy of the people," and has had a particular animus for CNN.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo - who also received a suspicious package that was quickly deemed "safe" by police - was asked if he had a message for Donald Trump.

"Bring down the heat. I want to bring down the rancor. There is an apparent political pattern to this," he said.

But if there's one thing history tells us about terrorism, it's that these stories often end up having very different narratives than what is first suspected in the heat of the moment. Facts that later emerge often leave us in a completely different place than we'd have expected.

Because of the 24-hour news cycle and our addiction to second-to-second updates from reporters, celebrities and politicians alike on social media, it's almost impossible not to speculate and point fingers right after we hear scary news. This is a form of journalistic malpractice that has gone sideways on more than a few of us in the business over the years.

The worst case was the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, in which reports after the attack said police were seeking two men of "Middle Eastern" appearance for questioning. The New York Times noted the bombing had taken place on the anniversary of Federal agents' assault on Waco.

But unnamed officials told them domestic right-wing groups lacked "the technical expertise to engage in bombings like the one today," and the paper speculated at length about Muslim connections.

CBS after the OKC bombing quoted a terrorism expert" who said the apparent intent to inflict as many casualties as possible was a "Middle Eastern trait." Columnist Cal Thomas pointed the finger at immigrants. Georgie Ann Geyer said the attack had the "earmark of the Islamic car-bombers of the Middle East."

Rampant speculation led to more threats and misbehavior, with Muslims around the country called baby-killers and worse. The furor didn't end until Janet Reno announced the attacks appeared "domestic in nature," and the arrest of Timothy McVeigh taught us to look inward when terror attacks take place.

When TWA flight 800 blew up over the Long Island Sound a year later, the Times reported that investigators were focused on "terrorism" and speculated the Boeing 747 could have been detonated by a Stinger missile, "such as the mujahidin used in Afghanistan." But that case remains unsolved.

Ten days after the TWA crash, a pipe bomb went off at the Atlanta Olympics. This led to rampant speculation that the guard who found the bomb, Richard Jewell, had planted the explosive himself.

Jewell became the focus of intense coverage by CNN, NBC, the New York Post and countless other outlets. A former Army explosives expert named Eric Rudolph was ultimately convicted of the crime, along with several abortion clinic bombings. Ironically, decades later, Sean Spicer seemed to blame the bombings on Islamic terrorists.

Social media has sped up rushes to judgment. After the Boston Marathon bombings, Reddit investigators pointed the finger at a (deceased, as it turned out) Brown University student named Sunil Tripathi. The New York Post under the headline BAG MEN put two other Middle Easterners on the front page, after their names and photos had circulated in online discussions.

More recently, an African-American gun-rights advocate named Mark Hughes became the subject of a public furor after a Dallas police Twitter account fingered him as a suspect in the sniper killings of five police officers.

If you're thinking the lesson in all these incidents is just to skip past the foreign suspects and go straight for the homegrown, flag-waving right-wing patriot, well, that doesn't always work out, either.

The infamous Anthrax letters sent in the wake of 9/11 to press outlets and a pair of Democratic Senators caused 17 to fall ill, and five to die. They were written to sound like they came from Islamic terrorists.

Domestic sleuths quickly decided the letters were a pose and shifted their focus to a former Army doctor named Steven Hatfill. Hatfill was a flamboyantly patriotic type who regaled acquaintances with stories of battling communists in youthful trips to then-Rhodesia (Zimbabwe today).

Members of the US Marine Corps Chemical/Biological Incident Response Force get ready to enter the
Longworth House building to sweep for Anthrax. The Longworth Office Building houses members of the US Congress.

Have you examined whether Mr. Z has connections to the biggest anthrax outbreak among humans ever recorded, the one that sickened more than 10,000 black farmers in Zimbabwe in 1978-80? There is evidence that the anthrax was released by the white Rhodesian Army fighting against black guerrillas, and Mr. Z has claimed that he participated in the white army's much-feared Selous Scouts...

Kristof didn't mention that the majority of soldiers in the Rhodesian army, and in Hatfill's unit, were black; or that many well-respected scientists who examined the evidence concluded that the Rhodesian anthrax outbreak emerged naturally when cattle herds went unvaccinated...

Worse, a lot of TV programs have national security consultants who are paid specifically to speculate before facts are in, in cases just like this. Same with analysts from think tanks, whose job at least partly is to sit at desks, waiting to supply calling reporters with quotes. This is how you'll get wildly divergent guesses about how terror incidents have "fingerprints" that "point to" this or that group, even before there's a suspect or any kind of evidence.

Just as bad is the penchant for non-press actors these days to engage in phony terror attacks in order to get eyeballs and clicks. We've seen a YouTuber pretend to throw acid at people in England, trying to surf on real fears about a real rise in acid attacks in Britain. There's a whole genre of staged "terror" attacks online.

***

There's no question that our current climate of vicious political rhetoric is out of hand, and that our president is significantly responsible. In the early stages of Trump's campaign in the summer of 2015, a pair of jackasses beat up a Hispanic homeless man in Boston. One of them was heard saying upon arrest, "Donald Trump was right, all of these illegals need to be deported."

Trump's infamous response - that his supporters are "very passionate" - told us even then what he was all about.

But in something on the scale of what's happening this week, waiting a day or two to freak out makes sense. History tells us perpetrators of such atrocities often count on media overreactions and stumbles.

Moreover, unless this turns out to be some wannabe Internet celebrity's unfunniest-ever idea of a Punk'd stunt - in which case said person should be dropped down to the bottom of the deepest salt mine we have - this series of incidents will certainly result in calls for sweeping political change. Something this upsetting will likely inspire radical security proposals that may alter all our futures on a fundamental level. Given that, let's at least know exactly what we're dealing with before the next round of our increasingly savage national argument commences.

(c) 2018 Matt Taibbi is Rolling Stone's chief political reporter, Matt Taibbi's predecessors include the likes of journalistic giants Hunter S. Thompson and P.J. O'Rourke. Taibbi's 2004 campaign journal Spanking the Donkey cemented his status as an incisive, irreverent, zero-bullshit reporter. His books include Griftopia: A Story of Bankers, Politicians, and the Most Audacious Power Grab in American History, The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion, Smells Like Dead Elephants: Dispatches from a Rotting Empire.

It's already started. They're messaging, texting, tweeting, and even calling into my radio/TV show. Breitbart is even bragging that they got it on CNN.

"This killing in Pittsburgh has nothing to do with Donald Trump. He's not an anti-Semite; his daughter converted to Judaism and his grandkids are Jews! How can you blame him for the 'mentally ill' guy [a phrase used to describe terrorists only when they're white]?"

But the shooter, by his own words-words that are almost entirely missing from most TV coverage-acted because of what both Trump and Newt Gingrich have said was the main election-year message of Trump and the entire Republican Party: Immigration by people of color.

As the terrorist himself posted on social media just a few hours before he walked into the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh with an AR-15, he was going to kill members of a congregation that supported the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS).

HIAS (whose slogan is "Welcome the stranger; Protect the refugee") had designated October 19 and 20 of this year as the "National Refugee Shabbat" and when they did so, the terrorist posted on a right-wing social media site, "Why hello there HIAS! You like to bring in hostile invaders to dwell among us? We appreciate the list of friends you have provided."

HIAS was founded in New York in 1881 to help resettle Jewish refugees, but in recent years has moved many of its efforts toward other refugees, including people from Africa, the Americas, and people who practice Islam. As HIAS's president, Mark Hetfield, told the New York Times, "We used to welcome refugees because they were Jewish. Today HIAS welcomes refugees because we are Jewish."

Dark skin and "Muslim" are triggers for bigots like the cowardly terrorist and his buddies on social media. In another post, presumably referencing HIAS, he wrote, "Open you [sic] Eyes! It's the filthy evil jews [sic] Bringing the Filthy evil Muslims into the Country!!"

HIAS used to have a link on its website to the 270 congregations in 32 states that were participating in the work to bring refugees into the United States (and elsewhere), although that link now just points back to their homepage (perhaps because the event is over, or maybe because of the terrorist's threat).

Noting the terrorist's pointing out that link to the congregations, which included Tree of Life in Pittsburgh, the Times of Israel reported, "To mark the organization's personal involvement, at the back of the hall, information on volunteer opportunities in the refugee and immigration committees of participating synagogues and HIAS materials were available for attendees to take home, including a bookmark with the words 'My People Were Refugees Too.'"

Apparently this festered with the terrorist, because just a few hours before he walked past those brochures and started murdering people at Tree of Life, he posted to a right-wing social media site, "HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people. I can't sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I'm going in."

And in he went, guns blazing.

So, Trump and Gingrich and Fox are giving all-day, all-the-time coverage to a ragtag band of Central American refugees, mostly women and children, who are traveling together on foot for their own mutual safety, lying that there are Arab terrorists and evil gang members among them. This white American terrorist gets increasingly agitated by it all, freaked out that more people of color (or even Muslims!) might be coming to our border to legally apply to asylum, and decides it's time to take out one of the groups associated with HIAS, who is helping refugees.

It's a straight line-through Fox and right-wing hate radio-from Trump's rhetoric about immigrants to the terrorist himself.

Certainly this terrorist had a history of hating Jews; he had repeatedly posted on one of his snowflake "safe places" for haters, "Kill all the Jews!" and "There is no MAGA as long as there is a kike infestation."

But this wasn't entirely an anti-Semitic attack, by the attacker's own words.

A few days after another white terrorist "history of mental illness," said the media) with Trump and Fox graphics and slogans all over his van attempted the largest political assassination in U.S. history, we now have the single most lethal attack on Jews in this country's history-in part because their synagogue supported helping immigrants coming into America.

And all of it being amped up, day after day, over and over again, by Trump.

This aspect of xenophobic immigrant-hating, along with the insanity of the U.S. allowing AR-15s and other weapons of war on our streets, must be discussed along with the horrors of anti-Semitism.

This is all one package brought to us by Trump, and it's beginning to eerily resemble a previous insecure man with little hands, single testicle, and a big mouth in the 1930s who warned his people about both immigrants and Jews.

Fascism is always a danger under capitalism, with its frequent crises and endemic white supremacy, but the phony "resistance" is only concerned about electing Democrats.

With last weekend's election of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, white men's parties now lead governments that preside over the two largest concentrations of Black people outside Africa. Both Bolsonaro and Donald Trump are widely described as fascists -- which is correct. But it does not follow that everyone who calls such men "fascists" is a friend of Black and other oppressed people and, therefore, worthy allies in a "united front" of "resistance."

Who are the fascists, and where do they come from? More precisely, what are they defending?

It is generally understood among the Left that fascists are the political products of capitalism in crisis, reactionaries that promise to restore order by purging the society of unwanted peoples and ideologies. Their targets depend on the particularities of the society in crisis: in Germany, it was the Jews and the Bolsheviks, enemies that Hitler conflated as one and the same. In the post-Reconstruction southern region of the United States, whites imposed the world's first totally racially regimented society, one that would serve as a model and inspiration for emerging fascists for generations to come. The Jim Crow order was heralded as a new day for the white working man, who would no longer have to compete with Black labor -- enslaved or free -- but instead join in the profits (and priceless white social and political privilege) from Black people's super-exploitation.

In Latin America, a native-born white elite lorded it over the surviving descendants of the original inhabitants and the millions of slaves imported to the "New World" by European colonialists -- especially to the colossus, Brazil. Although the post-slavery racial order was never as regimented as in the U.S. -- indeed, racial ambiguity was encouraged among the dark lower classes, to keep them divided -- the people at the top always knew they were "white" (Portuguese), and defended the racial hierarchy with horrific force, when necessary.

The New World and the old were united by globalizing capital as most of the planet was divided between the western European powers, with the fiercely racist U.S. unilaterally declaring a kind of sovereignty (Monroe Doctrine) over the south of the hemisphere, a region where the racial pedigrees of even the elites were suspect to North American eyes -- "mongrels," the white southern politicians called them.

At the Berlin Conference of 1884-85 the industrial capitalist powers divided the world among themselves, with their respective colonial empires reserved for the "home" country's super-exploitation -- globalization made formal. The newly unified German state stepped forward to claim its rightful portion of the spoils -- its White Right. In 1898, the United States, which had been represented in Berlin, seized Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines to become a full-fledged imperial power. Not long afterward, President Teddy Roosevelt sailed his "Great White Fleet " around the world to show that the U.S. was not only a great power, but a major defender of white "civilization."

The U.S. claimed to be late to the colonial game, but had in fact been catapulted to major economic power status on the backs of its super-exploited internal colony of slaves, whose bodies were mortgaged to securities traded throughout the developed capitalist world, as were the deeds to the fields they toiled.

Brazil was the last Latin American country to abolish slavery, in 1888. The elite tried to overwhelm the freed men and women with white immigrants, importing between 70,000 and 80,000 newcomers each year from 1870 to 1930, mainly Portuguese and Italians. Much of the same attempts at whitening the population occurred elsewhere in Latin America, as elites tried frantically to certify their membership in the global white club.

U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, an arch racist who segregated the federal civil service and praised the Klan-loving film "Birth of a Nation" as "writing history with lightning,"

sought to perfect the post-World War One international order by backing formation of a League of Nations. But Wilson's rhetoric on people's rights to "self-determination" was meant for white people only. Wilson gave no encouragement to the colonized people of Africa, Asia and the Americas; instead, he invaded and occupied Haiti and the Dominican Republic -- as was his right, as leader of a Great White Nation.

This global white ruling structure was built on a doctrine of white supremacy - or, as Marxists correctly maintain, the ideology of white supremacy evolved to justify the crimes of the western European colonizers and settlers against the rest of the world. Either way, that ideology was supreme on the planet -- a mature world system -- when fascists started calling themselves by that name, most notably in post-World War One Italy and Germany. Mussolini and Hitler wanted nothing less for their nations than what Britain and France had long enjoyed: a free hand in subjugating the "lesser races" of the world -- a white privilege that the U.S. had arrogated to itself, internally, and against its neighbors, at whim.

In a sense, the western Europeans and their settler states had forged an ideology of white "exceptionalism" over the centuries since the piratical European breakout of 1492. The Haitian Revolution of 1804 was a challenge to the white world order of a magnitude that would not be exceeded until 1917, with the Russian revolutionary declaration of the rights of all peoples to "free self-determination, including secession and formation of a separate state." The Soviet stance was seen as a declaration of war, not just on capitalism, but on white people's "exceptional" right to supremacy over darker peoples -- a revolutionary idea whose time would not come for most of the colonized peoples of Africa, Asia and the Caribbean for two generations.

Fascism would consume Europe, as Hitler pursued his super-white Aryan nation dream, a genocidal ambition derived directly from the centuries-long planetary colonization project of Britain, France, the Dutch, Spain, Portugal and other globe-trotting thieves.

White supremacy is deeply embedded in Euro-settler culture. It provides an implicit, if not explicit, explanation for Euro-American dominance in the world, and an excuse for the tens of millions slaughtered in reaching that zenith. The histories of Euro-American world conquest and capitalism are entwined -- that is, the history of capitalism begins in the holds of slave ships. It is impossible to separate these historical developments.

It is also near impossible to isolate "fascists" as if they are some peculiar and discreet strain of "ism." They are able to garner mass followings when the prevailing order is threatened -- and in the Euro-American world (including, of course, Latin America), that order is inherently white supremacist and capitalist.

Fascists always win power with the assent of strong sections of the ruling class, since those are the social forces that have the biggest stake in the old order. Such was the case with Hitler, Mussolini and, yes, Trump and Bolsonaro. Therefore, the question is not, What do we do about the miscreants Trump and Bolsonaro, but, How do we defeat this system -- the rule of capital, buttressed and justified by white supremacy -- and those elements of the ruling class and their minions that have empowered these ugly fascists? That means Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. and a host of political parties and business enterprises in Brazil. It means indicting the oligarchs at the top of late stage global capitalism and their protector, U.S. imperialism, which confronts growing resistance, worldwide.

Washington began intervening to get rid of the Workers Party government in Brazil, years ago. In other words, the U.S. government was fomenting fascism in Brazil (again) long before Trump got his hands on the levers of power. Bolsonaro and Trump did not march into their capital cities at the head of goose-stepping mobs, overrunning the old order. They came to save the old order -- or, at least, to salvage the white supremacist aspects of it, which is what their grassroots followers care about. The entire ruling class was rewarded with trillions in tax breaks and deregulation, once Trump was in office. All of the capitalist vultures in Brazil can expect the same -- while the nation's Black population braces for a reign of police and military terror, with leftists pushed underground or disappeared.

I have no problem labeling Trump a fascist, and Bolsonaro appears to have no problem being called one. My problem is with a phony "resistance" that defines fascism so narrowly that it applies, domestically, only to Donald Trump and his most crazed followers. For Democrats, the fascist label is mere political epithet, a demon-word hurled for election purposes. Even self-styled "progressive" Democrats will not break with a lawless U.S. "exceptionalism" that has killed upwards of 15 million people around the globe since World War Two -- six million in the Congo, alone, which makes Uncle Sam (Clinton, Bush, Obama, and now Trump) a bipartisan mass genocidal murderer on a par with Belgian King Leopold. Except that Leopold confined his genocides mainly to the Congo, while the U.S. superpower lays waste to non-white peoples worldwide.

During the whole colonial period, most of the Left in Europe treated Black, brown and yellow lives as if they didn't matter, all the while claiming to be the vanguard of humanity's struggle for dignity. Then the mass murdering monster that had been marauding the darker world for centuries, fattening Europe, turned inward to eat Europe alive. Fascism was perceived as a new and singular evil, rather than the logical outcome of capitalism+white supremacy.

In the wake of World War Two, Aime Cesaire, the poet and politician from Martinique, explained that Europe had incubated fascism in its colonies, where millions perished and whole cultures vanished for the sake of capital accumulation. He argued "that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack."

In the postwar U.S., white people couldn't recognize a fascist without his uniform - which is understandable, since much of the white population were themselves fascist, in that they endorsed a police state and enforced political and social subordination for Black people at home, and supported wars to suppress non-whites' right to self-determination, abroad. The Black liberation movement of the Sixties provoked a fascist white general response: Black mass incarceration, a system that "oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack," enmeshing millions of whites in the carceral state as collateral damage in the unceasing war on Blacks. The biggest incarceration state in the world must be, by definition, the world's biggest police state. If there is a fascist regime on the planet, this must be it -- otherwise, the only conclusion is that Black Americans are congenitally criminal, and deserve to be the most imprisoned people on earth.

(In fact, Native Americans, Maoris in New Zealand, and Roma in eastern Europe are locked up in proportions that rival Black U.S. incarceration -- as are Blacks in the UK, it has been argued. But this only confirms that white supremacy is an incubator of fascism, worldwide.)

So, where have all the anti-fascists been hiding, the last 50 years, as Black America was methodically tortured, destabilized and dismembered by the State? Did they cry "fascist" when Barack Obama broke all records in deporting undocumented people? Of course not -- no fascism there. They denounce Trump's anti-Muslim tirades, but did they mobilize an anti-war movement to halt Obama's proxy jihadist war against Syria that has left half a million dead? No, instead they applaud Trump when he bombs Syria and condemn Russia for defending a sovereign state from unprovoked attack by the U.S. and its allies. Do they care about international law? Never heard of it. They are not upset that the U.S. spent $5 billion to overthrow an elected government and install actual Nazis in power in Ukraine -- after which Hillary Clinton had the nerve to call Putin "Hitler." No, the "resistance" is mad at the Russians for...everything.

Is it disturbing to the "resistance" that Colombia, a CIA-nurtured narco-regime that is the most dangerous place in the world to be a union or peasant organizer, and where millions of Black and indigenous people have been displaced to fatten the profits of U.S. corporations, is about to join NATO? Truth be told, are they really angry about Bolsonaro getting elected in Brazil, except as a talking point to hammer Trump?

Any real resistance to fascism would defend freedom of speech and seek to broaden, rather than further restrict, popular access to media of all kinds. But much of the "resistance" cheers Facebook and Google censorship of material that might "sow division" in U.S. society -- including Black Agenda Report -- as if conformity with imperialism and institutional white supremacy is a bulwark against fascism.

We at BAR are always ready to join with genuine anti-fascists. But, outside of Black America, which endured the world's first fascist regime in the Jim Crow South, and continues to suffer under fascism's second, mass Black carceral incarnation, real anti-fascists are hard to find in the United States. The historical Black consensus on peace and social justice is constantly undermined by the pervasive presence in our communities of the Democratic Party, acting as an agent of its corporate masters. Under the Party's money-drenched influence, 80 percent of the Congressional Black Caucus voted in 2014 to continue the infamous 1033 Pentagon program that funnels military weaponry, gear and training to local police. And earlier this year, three quarters of the Black lawmakers in the U.S. House supported a bill that made police a protected class. Attacks on cops are to be treated as hate crimes.

Self-determination and socialism are the antidotes to fascism, a social pathology born in the bowels of white supremacist capitalism -- the only kind of capitalism that exists in the "West." (We'll find out what those Chinese capitalist-roaders are cooking up, in time, but U.S. imperialism is the main danger to humanity in this epoch.) These two topics are always on the agenda at the Black Is Back Coalition for Social Justice, Peace and Reparations, which holds its annual march on the White House and national conference, this weekend.

The Russia-Turkey-Germany-France summit in Istanbul today (October 27) is an extraordinary affair. The Kremlin has been deploying a wily strategy, downplaying the summit as just "comparing notes", and not a breakthrough. Yet Istanbul is a de facto breakthrough in itself - on superimposed layers. It signals the top two EU powers acquiescing that Russia is in control of Syria's future. It confers extra legitimacy to the Astana format (Russia, Turkey, Iran) on Syria, as well as adding new meaning to the efficacy of a quad.

The nominal Quad (US, Japan, India and Australia) is essentially a mechanism of Chinese containment already showing signs of derailment. In contrast, there's a Eurasian Quad that will be discussing not only the geopolitical chessboard in wider southwest Asia but also the supreme trans-Atlantic dilemma: how to deal with Washington's sanction obsession.

Istanbul, of course, won't "solve" the tragedy in Syria. President Putin is carefully maneuvering around President Erdogan's neo-Ottoman ambitions while the EU pair is not exactly in a strong negotiating position.

Putin has already appeased Saudi Arabia, and that's no mean feat. No more funding and weaponizing of any forms of Salafi-jihadism in Syria. The Arab League - with no Saudi objections - is even embarking on normalizing relations with Damascus.

Imran Khan seeking resolution for Yemen

Riyadh is now part of the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF), which will in fact be "renamed as the Russian-Chinese-Saudi Fund", as revealed by its director, Kirill Dmitriev, at the Future Investment Initiative, or "Davos in the Desert". The fund was originally set up in 2012 by RDIF and China Investment Corporation (CIS) to turbo-charge bilateral economic cooperation between Moscow and Beijing.

Davos in the Desert, by the way, yielded a bombshell that was virtually ignored by the 24/7 news-cycle dementia. Prime Minister Imran Khan, fresh from receiving a much-needed Saudi cash injection to his nation's economy, revealed that Pakistan is mediating a resolution for the tragedy in Yemen between Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Geopolitically, Moscow and Beijing - as well as Tehran - have kept a thunderous, strategic silence on the Pulp Fiction saga at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, which is pregnant with ramifications. In parallel, unlike US businessmen, Russian and Chinese executives duly attended Davos in the Desert.

And then, just out of the blue, the grisly Khashoggi story that kept the global news cycle hostage for three weeks simply vanished from the front pages, displaced by the US pipe bomb "suspicious package" mail campaign.

Bone Saw conundrum

Still, the Quad in Istanbul is directly linked to Pulp Fiction in Istanbul. After Erdogan masterfully played Death by a Thousand Leaks - and on top of it determined full Saudi responsibility for the killing and dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi - by now it's clear that a deal has virtually been struck with the House of Saud. The Chinese torture of leak after leak, deployed by Turkish media, magically vanished.

King Salman, Alzheimer's or not, had to send an ultra-high level emissary, Prince Khalid al-Faisal, the governor of Mecca and Medina, to Ankara for some heavy bargaining. Terms remain hazy: a heavily rumored $5 billion - or as much as $30 billion - Saudi investment package in Turkey may be part of it, as well as the end of the Saudi and UAE blockade of Qatar. Additionally, it's no accident the Trump administration suddenly backtracked and decided not to cut Iran off SWIFT.

And then there's Syria. Erdogan has prevailed on his demand that the House of Saud must cease for good weaponizing an array of Salafi-jihadi outfits - in parallel to Washington ending its collaboration with Syrian Kurds.

Erdogan is, geopolitically, sitting at the top of the world, at least his world. The gruesome audio-video soundtrack of the killing of Khashoggi - crucially examined by CIA head Gina Haspel in her whirlwind return flight - offers unbounded leverage.

No deal could possibly be clinched without direct Trump administration involvement. King Salman simply cannot afford to let his son Mohammed bin Salman (MBS, or Mohammed Bone Saw, as cynics prefer), fall. Neither can Trump, as MBS is the cornerstone of his Middle East strategy.

Prince Turki bin Faisal, a former close pal of Osama bin Laden, former head of Saudi intel and former sponsor of Jamal Khashoggi, maintains that whatever happens the House of Saud will rally behind MBS.

That may not be the case, according to a Western business source very close to the House of Saud, who told Asia Times, "the CIA never wanted MBS but Mohammed bin Nayef. He is still under house arrest and that was King Salman's fatal mistake. Mohammed bin Nayef is wise and against terrorism. He should be the next King and that may not be far away. MBS made a fatal mistake in arresting the sons of King Abdullah such as Mutaib. He has lost the National Guard, the clergy, the royal family and the military through the Yemen misadventure."

In all plausible scenarios the House of Saud is rotting from the inside. Erdogan-aligned Turkish media, incidentally, now is going no holds barred: it's the whole House of Saud that's gotta go.

Still, a US Deep State preference for Nayef over MBS presupposes nothing drastic should happen to the petrodollar. The question is how to tame the array of Saudi billionaire princes - some of them former, royally extorted "guests" at the Ritz-Carlton jail - who will double down on getting rid of MBS by any means necessary.

Salman does Russia-China

Major loose ends are not tied up - yet. As Alastair Crooke argues no one knows whether Erdogan will ever be able to extricate the Trump administration from relying on the Saudis and the Emiratis and instead support the Turkish Muslim Brotherhood model.

Some have claimed that the CIA knew MBS intel goons were planning to kidnap Khashoggi, but never warned the Washington Post writer.

Which brings us to Erdogan's chief aide Yigit Bulut's explosive claim that "Khashoggi's murder was staged to put Saudi Arabia and the king in a very difficult position and to surrender Saudi Arabia completely to the United States."

And that leads us to the potentially larger than life geopolitical game-changer. What did King Salman really discuss with President Putin when he went to Moscow almost a year ago? What if Russia - not to mention China - are the wily old king's "alliance" backup plan, as he figured the alliance with the US might finally be dwindling? What if Russia, China and Saudi Arabia soon start bypassing the petrodollar?

A case can be made that the House of Saud, slowly but surely, might have been steered - by the King, not MBS - towards a Russia-China strategic partnership, which means Eurasia integration. Significantly, King Salman called Putin, and not Trump, when Pulp Fiction in Istanbul started to calm down.

The roulette is still turning. MBS might as well be confirmed as The Bone Saw Killer. The House of Saud may once again save itself via its ability to buy its way out of anything. Alternatively, the whole Pulp Fiction may have been a convoluted psy-ops designed to frame MBS, pre-empt any possibility of closer Russia-China-Saudi cooperation, and place the House of Saud under unmistakable US control.

Istanbul has certainly not unveiled all its secrets.