I grew up in Dhahran, lived in the South Compound of the University of Petroleum and Minerals. The North Compound was where the Saudi-born dean of the university lived with his wife and two daughters.
One night without warning or statement of any kind, a truckful of armed Saudi military showed up at the dean's door. They hauled him out of his house and into the truck as his wife and daughters looked on in horror.
The North Compound had quite a few Americans living in it -- some witnessed what was happening, but no one interfered. To interfere was to risk instant expulsion and loss of employment.
The dean was never seen again. He wasn't in prison; there were no records of any kind concerning the arrest. He just disappeared, forever.
His wfe and daughters continued to live in the house for years, until I left the country. I knew the daughters quite well, and they never spoke of their father. No one did. It was an accepted fact of life that beneath the cultured and calm pretense of Saudi Arabia lay an ocean of bloody violence. Unless one wished to go there, one did not speak of it.
Every kid knew about this Thing, this Silence, this Dark Pool Beneath. It cautioned everything we did. A young American boy like me could go anywhere and do anything, drive a car, drive a motorcycle (at eight years old!) -- but once in awhile, not very often, there would be an explosion of dangerous violence.
My friend Marco Porro was deemed to have hair too long by some mullahs in Khobar, so they shaved his head with gardening shears, removing part of his scalp in the process. His family left the country the next day, and they never returned.
The disappearance and dismemberment of a journalist sounds EXACTLY like many events I witnessed and heard of. I had many Arab friends, Westernized and Bedouin alike, and we all knew -- this is the Way Of Things.
Calm, loving, generous, kind, thoughtful, wise, and occasionally butcherous. Don't look down in the Dark Pool Beneath unless you want to go there, that was always the lesson.
Standard long-term royal autocracy, I suppose. Cultured internationally-minded primitivism.
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