I Wonder Whether Daniel Pearl Would Still Be Alive If I Hadn’t Written That Story
By
Farah Stockman
Jan. 7,
2021
Nineteen
years have passed since Daniel Pearl, a gregarious Wall Street Journal
reporter, was beheaded on videotape in Pakistan. That’s enough time for his
then unborn baby to grow up and be admitted to college; enough time for
Angelina Jolie to play his widow in a movie; enough time for that movie — and
the era of the war on terror that it depicted — to fade from public memory.
Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in captivity (left) and Ahmed
Omar Saeed Sheikh.AP (2)
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But I can’t
forget. Daniel Pearl and I were both trying to interview the same reclusive
spiritual leader in Pakistan when he was kidnapped and killed. “Don’t worry,” a
spokesman for the spiritual leader assured me. “If anyone gets an interview, it
will be you.” But Mr. Pearl, a more seasoned journalist who served as The
Journal’s South Asia bureau chief at the time, found someone who promised to
arrange the coveted interview. He jumped into a taxi and disappeared.
Weeks
later, Mr. Pearl’s beheading shocked the world. That was the moment I realized
that this thing we do called journalism contained dangers I hadn’t contemplated
before. It was a fitting lesson for the era of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks,
which opened the country’s eyes to how easily it could become a victim. And so
it was upsetting to read recently that a Pakistani court ordered the release of
Omar Sheikh, the British-born militant who orchestrated the kidnapping of Mr.
Pearl. Mr. Sheikh had been sentenced to death in 2002, but the execution never
happened. Last year, a Pakistani court downgraded his conviction to a simple
abduction — punishable by seven years in prison, which he had already served.
The court
rulings open old wounds and illuminate a central question at the heart of the
war on terror that remains unresolved: Are there some crimes so terrible that
we must never let the perpetrators walk free, even if a judge orders it? The
United States opened the prison for suspected terrorists on Guantánamo Bay on
the premise that the “worst of the worst” were too dangerous to release,
regardless of the outcome of a trial. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the mastermind of
the Sept. 11 attacks — who confessed to beheading Mr. Pearl — has yet to go on
trial, more than 14 years after his arrival at Guantánamo Bay. Americans seem
to have made a problematic peace with the contradictions of believing in the
rule of law and indefinite detention at the same time.
The war on
terror’s legacy is arguably even more of a problem in Pakistan, where
intelligence agents have supported religious militants who attacked targets in
India and Afghanistan, only to arrest them when the global outcry over their
misdeeds grew too great. Pakistan has its own system of indefinite detention
and house arrest, where terrorists are kept far from the prying eyes of courts
and the media.
I didn’t
know much about any of this when I boarded a plane for Islamabad in the
adrenaline-filled days after the Sept. 11 attacks. I was a 27-year-old metro
reporter for The Boston Globe who believed that I could solve any mystery if I
just tried hard enough. I’d been at the paper for less than two years.
U.S.
officials proclaimed that the war on terror had to be fought in the streets of
Pakistan and Afghanistan and Iraq so that it wouldn’t reach New York and
Washington. “If you see something, say something,” we were told. Tips poured in
about innocent people. The American military ran headlong into enormous
military undertakings in Afghanistan and Iraq. American journalists scoured the
countryside of Pakistan and Afghanistan, searching for answers. But reporting
on the war on terror was not like reporting on other wars. This conflict had no
boundaries, no fixed rules, no uniforms, no end. It was difficult to know who
the enemies were.
I joined
the flood of American journalists who camped out at the Marriott Hotel in
Islamabad. A colleague introduced me to Rana Mubashir, a Pakistani journalist
who seemed to know every spy and police officer in town. I hired him to help me
navigate the country and trusted him with my life. He had a friend in
Waziristan, a semiautonomous tribal area considered off limits even for the
Pakistani military at the time. That friend — the son of a tribal chief — told
us that Osama bin Laden, the most wanted man in the world, had been spotted in
the area. So naturally, we travelled there and took a look around. We didn’t
find Osama bin Laden, but I learned a great deal about how unpopular Americans
were in Pakistan. People referred to Operation Enduring Freedom — the U.S.
bombing campaign in neighbouring Afghanistan — as Operation Endure Our Freedom.
We also
travelled to Lahore, a gorgeous old city on the border with India, where intelligence
agents kept a watchful eye on militants who did Pakistan’s dirty work abroad.
The terrorists who hijacked an Indian plane and landed it in Afghanistan had
ended up there. Mr. Mubashir made some calls. Before long, we were drinking tea
with an alleged hijacker and his handler at a hole-in-the-wall restaurant. (To
free the hostages of that hijacked plane, India released a jihadist who had
been imprisoned for kidnapping tourists: Omar Sheikh.)
I was still
in Pakistan when a Black British man on an airplane tried to light a bomb that
was hidden in his shoe, setting off another wave of panic. Mr. Mubashir got a
tip that the would-be shoe bomber had been a follower of a reclusive spiritual
leader in Lahore named Sheik Gilani. We poked around some religious
institutions that were said to be affiliated with him and left a letter
requesting an interview at his compound. I interviewed a Pakistani intelligence
source who claimed that Sheik Gilani was being investigated for possible ties
to the shoe bomber. I also found a person who lived near Mr. Gilani’s compound
who claimed to recognize the shoe bomber in a picture. But associates of the
spiritual leader vigorously denied any association, claiming it as a plot to
discredit him. I wrote the story and included the denial. After it ran, I kept
trying to follow it up with an interview. I heard that a Wall Street Journal
reporter was also working on a story. I had never met Daniel Pearl, but I
worried that he would scoop me.
Eventually,
my assignment ended. I flew home. It all seemed like a great adventure — until
Daniel Pearl disappeared. From my living room in the Boston area, I read news
reports from Pakistan with growing alarm: The spiritual leader had been
detained briefly and questioned about Mr. Pearl’s whereabouts. He denied any
involvement in Mr. Pearl’s disappearance and accused me and Mr. Pearl of being
spies.
It got
worse. Mr. Pearl’s kidnappers sent ransom notes demanding that Pakistani
prisoners in Guantánamo Bay be returned to Pakistan for trial: “If the
Americans keep our countrymen in better conditions we will better the
conditions of Mr. Pearl.”
After they
learned that Mr. Pearl was Jewish, they asserted falsely that he was a spy for
Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, and would be executed.
The police
swiftly located Omar Sheikh, who surrendered to a man he’d known for years:
Ijaz Shah, a powerful figure in military intelligence who now serves as
Pakistan’s minister for narcotics control. The military interrogated Mr. Sheikh
for more than a week before turning him over to the police. Then came the
shocking video of Mr. Pearl’s beheading, which sparked a global outcry. In
2002, a civilian counterterrorism court sentenced Mr. Sheikh to death. Ever
since, he has filed appeals. He claims to have played only a minor role in the
plot.
Little is
known about how Mr. Sheikh handed Mr. Pearl off to those who actually beheaded
him. But his claims to have played an insignificant role are laughable. “Omar
Sheikh was of course deeply involved,” Hassan Abbas, a former police officer in
Pakistan who is now a professor at the National Defense University, told me.
But the police in Karachi had also identified another man in military custody
who was considered just as guilty but had never been handed over for trial. For
that reason, among others, the legal case against Omar Sheikh is viewed as
flawed.
Asra
Nomani, a long-time friend and colleague of Mr. Pearl who had been hosting him
in Karachi the day he disappeared, spent years investigating his murder as part
of The Pearl Project at Georgetown University. She told me there is little
doubt that Omar Sheikh is responsible for the murder.
“Without
Omar Sheikh, Danny never would have been kidnapped and killed,” Ms. Nomani told
me.
Mr. Pearl
would have been suspicious of the other men involved in the plot who “walked
and talked like jihadis,” she said. But Mr. Sheikh, who had studied at the
London School of Economics, had gained his trust. Mr. Sheikh and Mr. Pearl had
even swapped messages about their wives, who were both pregnant at the time.
That’s why
Ms. Nomani and Mr. Pearl’s parents and older sister are fighting to keep Mr.
Sheikh in prison. I hope they succeed. But when it comes to militants in
Pakistan, nothing is what it seems. Even if he is let go, Mr. Sheikh will
almost certainly not walk free. He’ll disappear into that netherworld of secret
military detention, safe houses and house arrests that has swallowed up so many
religious militants in Pakistan. Courts are no more prepared to bring
terrorists to justice today than they were in 2001. The rise in extrajudicial
killings of terrorists — with drones and special forces soldiers — serves as
naked admission that courts around the world can’t handle these cases without
shining light on things that spies would rather keep hidden.
Nineteen
years after that trip to Pakistan, I’ve become more cautious. I know now that
there are some mysteries I can never solve. There are days when I wonder
whether Daniel Pearl would still be alive if I hadn’t written that story. Or
would Omar Sheikh have simply found another ruse to lure him in? I feel bad
that the spiritual leader got caught up in the case. He appears to have had
nothing to do with the shoe bomber, after all. I think back to all the things
that were done that cannot be undone, in the name of a war that has sullied us
all.
Original
Headline: I’m Haunted by Daniel Pearl’s Murder
Source: The New York Times
URL:
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