For crying out loud, Mohammed Bin Salman (MBS) is hands down the most murderous thug operating on the middle eastern stage at the moment, and he's got a lot of competition for the title.

For instance, last month General al-Sisi apparently spent some of the $1.5 billion Washington sends him each year to run a show trial against 700 Egyptians who have been in jail the past five years for protesting his bloody 2013 coup against Egypt's first freely elected president, Mohamed Mursi.

Their sin, of course, was that they had exercised the right of free speech – which supposedly the Arab Spring had conferred upon them – in order to affiliate with the Muslim Brotherhood. The latter is the scourge of tyrants and greedy monarchs throughout the Islamic world; and is especially loathed by the House of Saud, which may explain a thing or two about the missing body parts of Mr. Khashoggi, who was also an outspoken brotherhood adherent.

In any event, 75 of these protesters are to be awarded the hangman's noose, and the rest a long stay in General al-Sisi's hospitality suites, which are widely understood to be not all that.