Report Concludes Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Personally Killed WSJ Reporter Danny Pearl
A long-term report on the murder of Danny Pearl has just been released. The WaPo describes the report this way.
A recently completed investigation of the killing of Daniel Pearl in Pakistan nine years ago makes public new evidence that a senior al-Qaeda operative executed the Wall Street Journal reporter.
Khalid Sheik Mohammed — the self-described mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, who is being held at the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba — said at a military hearing in 2007 that he killed Pearl. But there have been lingering doubts about his involvement, and the United States has not charged him with the crime.
According to the new report, which was prepared by faculty members and students at Georgetown University, U.S. officials have concluded that vascular technology, or vein matching, shows that the hand of the unseen man who killed Pearl on video is that of Mohammed. The report also says Mohammed told the FBI that a senior al-Qaeda operative advised him to take control of Pearl from his original kidnappers.
The 31,000-word report, published in conjunction with the Center for Public Integrity at www.publicintegrity.org, is among the most complete and graphic accounts of Pearl’s death. The 3 1/2-year investigation, called the Pearl Project, was led by Asra Q. Nomani, a former colleague of Pearl’s at the Journal, and Barbara Feinman Todd, director of the journalism program at Georgetown.
I’ll have more to say about the report in a bit–consider this a working thread in the mean time.
But I did want to point out the final conclusion of the report:
Pearl’s actual murderers will likely not stand trial for their crime. Federal officials decided in the summer of 2006 not to add the Pearl murder to charges against KSM in military tribunals because they concluded that would complicate plans to prosecute him and four alleged accomplices in the 9/11 attacks. KSM’s suspected accomplices aren’t expected to be charged, either. One nephew is being tried for the 9/11 attacks, and the whereabouts of the older nephew aren’t publicly known.
From the Epilogue:
Which is probably the real reason they’re not going to charge KSM in the killing.
The Pakistani convictions – where the US sat on so much info – make it very hard as well.
This does raise questions about handing out a death sentence to Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh and life sentences to the other three.
The BBC has a quick summary at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-12237023
Documents such as those showing that after waterboard #50 he confessed to kidnapping the Lindberg baby,
What plans? What prosecution?
I know bmaz disagrees, but I think it would be very difficult to convict KSM in a real court for 9/11. First, you have to have untainted evidence. Then you have to show he’s competant to stand trial. Then you have to be able to seat an impartial jury.
But if they can name him as Pearl’s murderer based on the video, they can legally hold him under tested lawuntil he’s sane enough to stand trial. Without any executive power bullcrap.
I wonder why Obama isn’t going that route. Do they have evidence to the contrary in those witheld documents?
Boxturtle (Can’t be too critical of KSM. After all, WE kill helpless prisoners via torture too)
I heard he was spotted on the grassy knoll too.
He looked great in that Polka Dot dress the night RFK was eliminated.
I’m glad you are going to be covering this.
I’ve only taken a quick skim through the first few pages. I’m a bit disappointed to see the reference waterboarding as something only “called” torture by some “human rights” activists. Torture is torture. I admit, though, that KSM is someone that it’s hard to care about being tortured as a victim – it’s only when you take the wider view of what torture does to everything – justice, courts, the truth, secrecy, manipulations of perceptions, coverups and the intrinsic ways it changes the torturers and their facilitators, including changes to a nation that decides to facilitate torture – that you can find it easier to to call torture what it is, no matter how repulsive the tortured.
I’m sure Pakistan is going to feel some ripples from this report. With some of what has come out in dribbles over the years, it’s ever more apparent why the US press and US government so thoroughly ignored the Pakistani trials of the men who were being convicted of a murder that impacted the whole nation. At the time, it was hard to believe that there was almost no information here in the states about those trials and their outcomes.
And then there’s the truth that died with the men who the report points to as having been likely “bumped off” bc of their inconvenient roles and information.
So one of the many inconvenient aspects is that this report will make it very hard for the Pakistani courts to ignore the appeals there. And that is a very ugly situation on so many different fronts.
I don’t know if the report is going to end up with holes or issues or its own slants, but this project is one of the few things to emerge from the “GWOT” that I can relate to – people who came together to work hard and try to honor sacrifice and find truth – not, like a Goldsmith, trying to make sure that they have a saleable story to make themselves look better than they were.
Not coming together to set up black sites and disinform a nation into war; not coming together to be a band of torturers; not coming together to engage in lies to or disinformation of courts around the world; but instead coming together to try to honor a special man and to try to honor what he respected. Even to the extent that I may well end up with problems re: the report (as my read of the distancing of waterboarding from torture makes me think I might) this is the kind of thing I expected more from America.
I guess Obama’s take will be to tsk tsk over why they didn’t just “look forward” but just like those who buried their pregnant daughters with mutiliated abdomens from having Special Forces bullets cut from them; those who bury a special father, son, husband who suffered horribly and needlessly when he had never done anything but try to find the truth – that death that is behind them is always, to some extent, in front of them.
Pearl is such a counterpoint to Obama and Bush. He was so selflessly interested in the truth and they are so self-interestedly interested in suppressing it.
Agreed.
It is hard for many people to care about the torture of KSM , but we should. KSM wasn’t the only victim of his torture. Marianne Pearl, the survivors of the victims of the 9/11 attacks, and KSM’s children are just some of the people suffering today because of the childishness and feelings of inadequacies of the Cheney-Bush gang. One of the points called out in the report is KSM’s desire for martyrdom (he claims to have killed Pearl personally to ensure that he would get the death penalty). He would have confessed to his crimes without the torture.
If we had more interrogators who understood the work of Sherwood Moran, he would have given us far more useful information about al Qaeda.
Related:
Obama administration expanding use of Guantánamo Bay: report
“Administration officials told the newspaper they were preparing military tribunal trials for several suspected terrorists at the prison, signaling a major policy shift for Obama in the face of high pressure from Congressional Republicans and numerous Democrats.”
LINK.
Can we charge someone for a crime committed in another country even against one of our citizens? What is international law on this anyway?
I think it is up to the jurisdiction in which the crime occurs for the crime to be prosecuted.
The government lies always, always.
Withholding any judgment on content for now, but the technique and genre influences of the investigative report are certainly interesting.
Like many others I suspect, I am just beginning the reading of the report (page 17 thusfar), so I don’t have any opinions to express just yet.
However, I would make note that I’m starting the reading with some questions already in my mind:
Does the friendship between Asra Nomani and Daniel Pearl introduce bias into the report’s conclusions?
Do the report’s authors establish the credibility of their work by providing the source material or are we dependent on their interpretation of that material to inform us of the “facts”?
I had already felt my skeptical antennae quivering in reading Spencer’s article over at Wired where “vein identification” was implied as a convincing scientific method to make case that KSM himself had indeed murdered Daniel Pearl.
I’m am not suggesting that the report’s conclusions are inaccurate. Just that I’m starting my journey with what I hope is a healthy scepticism.
And btw, why do I use 2 different spellings of these words:
I dunno. *g*
vein identification can be reliable science, however, what complicates the issue in this case is the acceptability of photographic evidence as being conclusive, assuming a rigorous trial process
evidence from the pakistani trials are available in the public domain in pakistan and i do not see why the US administration is reluctant to publicise that unles it has reservations about judicial processes that existed in pakistan at that time
the real issue is that justice has been rendered impossible because of the shenanigans that bush-cheney administration indulged in, creating a quagmire that is very difficult to get across
btw, both sceptic and skeptic are vaid but sceptic reflects its classical greek root while the latter is a phonetic adaptation
vein identification can be reliable science
Just because you say so, I suppose?
no, science is not anybody’s say so, but vein identification can be valid under certain circumstances and those provisos do matter but never on photographic evidence
Either way, skeptic or sceptic, it’s transliteration from Greek, so neither reflects that origin more strongly than the other. The k form is more common in U.S. English, the c form in British.
They reported on the teevee this morning that they had definite high tech evidence that he was the actual killer of Pearl, because they recognized a vein in his hand.
Um…am I missing something? I’ve never heard of someone being deemed a killer with that kind of “evidence”. What are they talking about?
I thought his chronic eczema is what gave him away. They didn’t call him Ashie Kaleed for nothing, you know.
Eczema, or freckles, or age spots?
Take your pick, any one of those will do, and anything else you can throw in there. I’m glad this crop of college students are learning to think critically. I can rest assured that our future is in good hands.
Not to overstate the case, but more & more evidence is accumulating that the whole of U.S. civil society has become corrupted after 9/11.
Or maybe it was already corrupted before but it wasn’t so obvious.
In any event, you’d think that after sooo many years, the USG could come up with sumptin better than vein matching. Geez, what an unimaginative crew.
Agreed. I don’t get why they feel the need to come up with this nonsense. They could just as easily say it’s him because he’s a swarthy and hirsute Muslim Arab who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and The Genius of The Crowd that is the American Public would say…..hang the bastard.
What wonderful satire. Those George Washington students are some kind of sleuths, aren’t they?
Bwahahahaha.
1. No doubt students are easier to buy off than faculty members, so the report was done on the cheap by the USG.
2. “Vein matching.” Now I’m a CSI addict & I never heard of this. In fact the more I watch the TV, the greater my doubts about all this physical evidence become. I doubt that any of that stuff (fingerprints, iris matches, & now vein matching) is really scientific. Just so embedded in ‘legal’ lore that it would be impossible to dislodge.
I have been brainwashed from over 4 decades ago into the lore that fingerprints are unique. However, I’ve never seen a study that supports that hypothesis analytically. I looked at enough fingerprints in my days as a RA in medical research to realize that, if there are repeats, they probably are rare. But have come to doubt the ‘strong’ hypothesis that they are unique.
Let alone this new invention of vein matching.
I am guessing you sort of have a question about fingerprints, try these:
http://www.truthinjustice.org/fingerprint-myth.htm
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/156139.html
Alternatively, they can just run those prints through some CSI ‘algorihms’ and get a perfect match every time.
(In a room full of people your prints will most likely be unique to that group, but you will likely have a twin when compared to the country at large.)
Whaddya know. The Wikipedia now has an article on Vein Matching.
Makes some sense to me, because veins form not by some genetic design, but on an ad hoc basis (e.g., varicose veins).
Bob in AZ
A wilderness of mirrors to say the least.
They have proof he did it. But they can never divulge that info. Confidential ya know. They also have proof Osama Bin Hidin is guilty of the 9/11 attacks that they are also pinning on Mohammed, but they can never divulge that info. Top secret. Next week, they are coming to take away your children for crimes against humanity. They have proof, but they can never show you because it’s top secret. Sensing a pattern here.
OT… It would seem that PM Cameron is willing to ‘Look Back’…
Cameron puts pressure on Blair over Iraq letters…
Cammie’s doing that in the hopes that folks will excuse his taking away their National Health Service if he successfully pins all of the UK’s role in Iraq on Tony Blair, when what he won’t say is that the Tories were up to their necks in it, too.
But, PW… Cameron can skate scot-free with the Poodle holding the whole bag of doo-doo…! ;-)
spot on
there were more labour dissenters against walking into iraq but none from the tory side of the aisle, cameron included
cameron is more interested in clocking political mileage while he faces difficult times – he doesn’t appreciate being unpopular but the the uk electorate has already delivered its judgement on blair and has no time for him – chilcott enquiry raised more questions that it answered but nobody doubts blair is a liar – he’s popularly known as Bliar
Not only has everything changed since 9/11 but 9/11 was told to the American people was a story so full of holes you can sail the entire US navy through them. Even Al Qaeda is a CIA creation as is “international terrorism”.
Is there blowback? Like people acting out when all their relatives are blown up at a wedding? You betcha? Is there blowback when some US corporation comes into some country or village and trashes everything, poisons the environment with industrial waste, sets up death squads to kill those who don’t accept their hegemonic practices? You betcha.
What terrorism there is out there is a RESPONSE to our nasty behavior around the world. But in reality these oppressed people hardly even think about “big attacks” and for all practical purposes they pose a threat far less than cross the street.
But the idea of terrorism is sure handy to strike fear into people and get tax dollars for oppressive police state gear and actions and to whittle away at our freedoms.
Do you know anyone afraid of dying in a terrorist act?
Do you know anyone afraid of dying in a terrorist act?
Nope. But I know plenty who are anxiously awaiting the Rapture, and support any actions required to bring it about.
By the way, great comments, I agree with everything you said.
EW, something additional for your Torture Timeline (starting at page 62 of the 87 page report PDF):
(My Bold)
There is more interesting stuff continuing on from page 62 through page 63.
Question: Why October 16, 2003? Why was Condi Rice calling then?
If KSM’s waterboarding torture of at least 183 times was completed in March 2003, and it would seem likely that the Daniel Pearl murder was a part of that torture interrogation, why the delay until October 2003 to notify Mariane Pearl?
(My Bold)
The Pearl murder confession by KSM as part of the waterboarding torture seems to be confirmed on pages 64-65 of the 87 page report:
(My Bold again)
So, again, why the delay from March 2003 until October 2003 in Condi Rice’s announcement?
Thanks for taking this up, Marcie.
David Ray Griffin in his first 9/11 book, The New Pearl Harbor, took up the Danny Pearl case and presented evidence that the USG had Pearl killed because he was getting too close to information that could have proved embarrassing.
Funny how 911 conspiracy seems to explain all the data, not least the KSM case.
Ronald
S
In light googling around, I haven’t found any reference at all to vein matching as a potential or developing forensic technique.
Outside of this story, it’s always discussed as a developing biometric security and identification technique.
Off topic:
David Cameron’s spin chief Andy Coulson quits
In the NPR interview with Nomani yesterday, she referred to waterboarding as “a controversial technique”.
since when have we revoked the geneva conventions to accept torture being merely controversial?
Everyone who thinks this Kaleed Shake Yomomma trial business is a farce and more Kabuki theater to make the War On Terror appear legitimate, raise your hand.
My hand is raised, by the way.
also, i use my language carefully and i said ‘can be’, not ‘is’ to take into account the provisional conditionalities that operate for validation – it never is forensic because vein architecture changes with lifestyle
Now “Borat” is going to play “Sadam Hussein”…and that’s not made up…hahaha
Rice’s October 2003 call to Marianne Pearl is intriguing. It’s hard, given the scope of the administration’s doings then, to assign probability to the many possibilities.
What jumps to mind for me was that fall 2003 was when they were turning from “Saddam’s dead-enders” to ramping up the idea of al Qaeda in Iraq, and institutionalizing the torture there. It was beginning to dawn on a significant part of the U.S. public right around then, a year out from the elections, that there were and never had been any nuclear weapons (or nw program related activities) in Iraq.
But the timing could have to do with events and relationships in Pakistan, with issues related to trials, with pressure from friends and allies of the Pearls, or…?
In Sept of 2003, Bernard-Henri Levy’s book (who killed Daniel Pearl) was out and getting press, after the fiasco trials and coverups in Pakistan. Musharef had made his noises that Pearl was too inquisitive, implying that he deserved what he got and that journalists should back off of looking into the ISI ties to al-Qaeda dn 9/11.
Levy’s book was putting the Pakistan/ISI possible role in Pearl’s murder more and more into the conversation. Giving the family “inside” information that would also be leaked judiciously might have been of a part and plan to redirect the conversation from ISI. With an election coming up in a year, things not going great, etc. – if the Levy book had stirred a lot of media interest into really highlighting what had been going on with the Pak handling of trials and suspects (secret trials used to effect, as they will always be) the Bush/Musharef ties would begin to be questioned as well.
So, if your really dirty ally who has held a hyped and faked trial in secret to try to keep awkward questions from being asked already has “convicted” the “actual murdere” of an American citizen and journalist, and a book comes out just hammering on all the dirty aspects that are being sat on, and you have your torture experiment and a lot of evidence that the FBI has deliberately sat on etc. that would tie KSM specifically to the murder and via directions from al-Qaeda, not ISI – – but you can’t do anything about it bc your dirty friend wants the guy he framed for the actual murder quietly killed off and the US wants the same (isn’t even trying to interrogate him post-conviction) – – you’ve got a complex mess.
You can’t (unless you wanted to do the right and legal thing, as opposed to the pro-war and political thing) publically “out” the info that the Pakistan trials were nonsense. OTOH – damnit, there’s a book out there getting press that is doing just that. And what you’d really like to do is redirect the conversation to “your” talking point, of al-Qaeda vs. ISI. But while ISI/Musharef would likely be just as happy, NOW (the fall 2003 now v the 2002 trials then), with that redirection, the trials are a done deal and they don’t want to make Saeed Sheikh and his (and other witnesses) information made available or walk any of that cat back.
And bringing KSM out of a black site to pursue the claims of his role by then probably has a lot of issues – including the issue of his permanently disappeared nephew, as well as torture, as well as the US role (in addition to ISI’s) in sitting on evidence and covering up to assist the execution of the Pak trials.
All going into a big re-election, locate a permanent military base in Iraq push.
One guess might be that someone’s idea of the best that could be done with it all would be to assume that no Americans are going to worry over all the details and issues of ISI and trials over in Pakistan that the US press barely bothered to mention, IF the WH can just redirect the talking point to Al-Qaeda and the “success” of the US “terrorist detention” programs. So contact the family and spread around leaks that ehanced interrogation has helped “solve” the Pearl murder and that it is all about al-Qaeda, sotto voce leaks of KSM/al-Qaeda KSM/al-Qaeda to the US press who didn’t ever want to work hard enough (or take the risks) to cover the complicated ISI/Pak ties – that might be all it would take to use the quiet leaks and contacts to redirect the public conversation away from Levy (he’s a Frenchy after all) and his allegations.
It pretty much worked that way. At a guess, I’d say that was only one contact going on at the time – that there was a relatively thought through series of leaks and maybe even some journos specifically told that the family knew the inside truth on the fact that it wasn’t ISI who ordered the killing, with the hope that they would be contacted.
Or not.
Just one of the things the timing could suggest.