So now it’s official: The U.S. government believes Wall Street Journal reporter Why did the U.S. government change its mind? It claims to have new information but won’t From my reading of Bernard-Henri Levy’s maddening, egotistical, convoluted but ultimately Now, if Saeed was undoubtedly Pearl’s kidnapper and if Mohammed was undoubtedly Pearl’s Here’s a problem for the Bush administration: If the collusion between ISI Meantime, I don’t know how much credence to give Levy’s theory that 1) Pearl was Levy could be right, although so much of his year-long investigation relies on speculation that On learning of Mohammad’s arrest in March of 2003, Levy writes: <\/P> But then Levy gets a look at the photo of a haggard, hairy, bleary-eyed Mohammed on the At the end of his book Levy asks himself if he’s made much progress. “Do I see things more So now it’s official: The U.S. government believes Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl’s executioner was Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the alleged chief organizer of the 9\/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Yet something about yesterday’s announcement smells fishy. As The Wall Street Journal noted in its news story yesterday: “Reports […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-398","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-main","7":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbvgEs-6q","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=398"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=398"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=398"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=398"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nMohammed<\/FONT><\/EM><\/B><\/A>, the alleged chief organizer of the 9\/11 terrorist attacks
\non the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Yet something about yesterday’s announcement
\nsmells fishy. As The Wall Street Journal noted in its news story yesterday: “Reports of Mr.
\nMohammed’s alleged role as Mr. Pearl’s killer surfaced several months ago, but officials
\nrepeatedly dismissed them.”<\/P>
\n
\nsay what it is. It won’t say whether Mohammed, who was captured in Pakistan last March and is
\nbeing held somewhere secret, had confessed, or where the new information came from, or how it
\nhad been corroborated. It claims that to say anything would compromise the war on
\nterrorism.<\/P>
\n
\nbrave and useful book,
\nKilled Daniel Pearl?,”<\/FONT><\/EM><\/B><\/A> at least one thing seems clear: Omar Sheikh
\nSaeed — the London-born terrorist who lured Pearl to Karachi for the kidnapping, who was
\ncaptured and then sentenced to death by a Pakistani court and who is now appealing his sentence
\n— was a double agent working simultaneously for al Qaeda and Pakistani intelligence. This, too, is
\nnot new, as Levy himself points out even as he goes to extraordinary lengths to show it (in vivid
\ndetail).<\/P>
\n
\nexecutioner, does that finally confirm what many observers, Levy among them, have been
\nsaying all along? That the Pakistani secret service known as the ISI (Inter Service Intelligence), or
\nat least a significant faction of it, and al Qaeda have been working together as two sides of
\nthe same jihadist coin? <\/P>
\n
\nand al Queda is officially acknowledged, it means the war in Iraq was misconceived from the very
\nbeginning; it means that Pakistan, a so-called U.S. ally, is where the Bush
\nadministration should have focussed the war on terrorism instead of Iraq; it means that the
\nU.S. government has either been lying all along or has been so incompetent that it cannot be
\nbelieved. Either way it seems discredited.<\/P>
\n
\nkidnapped and murdered not because he was an American journalist and a Jew, though both
\nreasons seem sufficient, and 2) not because he was investigating the al Qaeda-ISI connection and
\nknew too much, which hasn’t been proved, but 3) because he was investigating the possible
\ntransfer of Pakistan’s “nuclear know-how” to the Taliban in Afghanistan and knew too much, also
\nnot proved
\nStreet Journal.<\/P>
\n
\nyou have to share his leaps of faith. Further, for all Levy’s probing insight, for all the shoe leather
\nhe wore out retracing Pearl’s footsteps, staying in the Karachi hotel Pearl stayed in, visiting the
\ncell at the farm where Pearl was held and murdered, contacting the ISI and gaining entry to an al
\nQaeda madrasa stronghold forbidden to Westerners, even managing to question the “fixer” who
\nput Pearl in touch with Saeed, Levy never names Mohammad as the killer who personally slit
\nPearl’s throat except as a dismissive afterthought on page 449 of a 454-page book.<\/P>
\n
\nAccording to the latest news, he’s Pearl’s assassin. Him, the “Yemeni” who
\nheld the knife. There’s even an ex-CIA agent, Robert Baer, now a writer, who says: “That’s what
\nPearl was doing … looking for Mohammed … he was on Mohammed’s trail … well, Mohammed
\ndidn’t like it … Mohammed got revenge … Mohammed, with Omar, planned the kidnapping and
\nkilled him with his own hands. …” To me the idea is less than plausible. I can’t believe bin Laden’s
\nnumber-three man, chief of al-Qaida operations, this rather distinguished Kuwaiti intellectual,
\ncould have done the job himself.<\/BLOCKQUOTE>
\n
\nmorning of his arrest and he thinks “yes, why not … this<\/EM> Mohammed could have
\nkilled Daniel Pearl …” But that’s the extent of his belief. After all his analysis and all his
\nguesswork, Levy missed an essential part of the answer to his question: Who killed Daniel Pearl?
\nSo his warning that we’re in for another al Qaeda attack, this time a nuclear one, while not to be
\ndismissed, is less surprising than his myopia when it came to Mohammed. <\/P>
\n
\nclearly than at the very beginning of my investigation, when things seemed simpler? …” And he
\nreplies: “Sometimes I think yes. I hang on to my conclusions. I remind myself it’s not every day
\nyou find a killer [Saeed] who is both in the upper ranks of al-Qaida and agent of the ISI.” But
\notherwise, he’s not so sure of his progress. The world of the jihadists is made of mirrors and
\nmultiple identities, mirrors within mirrors and identities within identities. That is the
\none proof of which Levy and his readers can be certain.<\/P><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"