Journal for the Study of Antisemitism

134 JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF ANTISEMITISM [ VOL. 1:95
he is a Jew and a Zionist. 118 One minute and fifty-five seconds into the
video, Pearl is shown with his throat slit. An unidentified man then decapitates
him. Pearl’s body, cut into ten pieces, was subsequently found in a
shallow grave. A copy of the video was delivered to the U.S. consulate on
February 21, 2002. On May 14, a 30-second clip of the beheading was
shown on CBS News in spite of appeals by the Pearl family and the Departments
of State and Justice to CBS to refrain from showing it. CBS News
reported obtaining the video from a dissident Saudi journalist who found it
on an anti-American Arabic website, where it was being used by jihadists as
a recruiting tool. 119
According to the 9/11 Commission Report, “No one exemplifies the
model of the terrorist entrepreneur more clearly than Khalid Sheikh
Mohammed (KSM), the principal architect of the 9/11 attacks.” 120 KSM
was arrested by the ISI in Pakistan on March 1, 2003 and has been in American
custody ever since. On March 10, 2007, KSM proudly declared at a
Combatant Status Review Tribunal Hearing at Guantánamo Bay:
I was the Operational Director for Sheikh Usama Bin Laden for the
organizing, planning, follow-up, and execution of the 9/11 Operation. . ..
I was the Military Operational Commander for all foreign operations
around the world under the direction of Sheikh Usama Bin Laden and Dr.
Ayman Al-Zawahiri. I was directly in charge, after the death of Sheikh
Abu Hafs Al-Masri Subhi Abu Sittah, of managing and following up on
the Cell for the Production of Biological Weapons, such as anthrax and
others, and following up on Dirty Bomb Operations on American soil.
I hereby admit and affirm without duress that I was a responsible
participant, principal planner, trainer, financier (via the Military Council
Treasury), executor, and/or a personal participant in the following:
KSM then listed twenty-nine major operations, not all of which were
brought to fruition. Far from being a confession of wrongdoing, his admission
was in reality a boastful claiming of credit. The third item on his list
was his statement about Daniel Pearl:
118. For an interpretation of what transpired immediately before and during the
shooting of the video, see Bernard-Henri Lévy, Who Killed Daniel Pearl? trans.
James X. Mitchell (Hoboken, NJ: Melville House, 2003), 34-43.
119. “Government urges CBS, Web site host to refrain from airing Pearl murder
video,” The News Media and the Law, Summer 2002, http://www.rcfp.org/news/
mag/26-3/sct-cbspearl.html.
120. The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on
Terrorists Attacks Upon the United States (Washington: U.S. Government Printing
House, 2004), 145.