daniel pearl

reported dead via tape from FBI

Where is this news coming from?

[quote]Originally posted by Scott H.:
<strong>Where is this news coming from?</strong><hr></blockquote>

CNN is saying "sources".

<a href="http://media.guardian.co.uk/presspublishing/story/0,7495,649969,00.html" target="_blank">This is all I could find.</a>

Face it. He's probably dead. We did nothing to stop this. More fodder for the fire. Nothing worse than inexperienced, greedy terrorists...

[quote]Originally posted by Scott H.:
<strong>Where is this news coming from?</strong><hr></blockquote>

cbs just had a special news report saying that the fbi has not confirmed hes dead, but that the tape verifies his death. they kinda contradict themselves, but the news anchor basically said that the fbi blatently stated that he was dead.

Apparently the US government has a video tape that leads them to conclude he's dead. They aren't going to discuss it in any detail until they've finished family notification.

Well? ... ? I hope the US has some balls to "take care of" the ones who did this.

[quote]Originally posted by Scott H.:
<strong>Well? ... ? I hope the US has some balls to "take care of" the ones who did this.</strong><hr></blockquote>

more bombing...?

Wall Street Journal statement:

[quote] Statement by Peter R. Kann, publisher of The Wall Street Journal, and Paul E. Steiger, managing editor of The Wall Street Journal, on the death of Daniel Pearl

We now believe, based on reports from the U.S. State Department and police officials of the Pakistani province of Sind, that Danny Pearl was killed by his captors.

We are heartbroken at his death. Danny was an outstanding colleague, a great reporter, and a dear friend of many at the Journal.

His murder is an act of barbarism that makes a mockery of everything Danny's kidnappers claimed to believe in. They claimed to be Pakistani nationalists, but their actions must surely bring shame to all true Pakistani patriots.

We will, in coming months, find ways, public and private, to celebrate the great work and good works Danny did. But today is a day to grieve. This loss is, of course, most painful for Danny's family, in this country and elsewhere. We ask our colleagues in the press to respect their privacy, and to permit them to grieve undisturbed. The Wall Street Journal is a public institution, but the Pearls are private citizens. We hope also that our colleagues, too, will be permitted some time and space to begin the very difficult process of making peace with this profound loss.
<hr></blockquote>

[quote]Originally posted by _ alliance _:
<strong>

more bombing...? </strong><hr></blockquote>

No. More likely precision sniping.

[quote]Originally posted by glurx:
<strong>

No. More likely precision sniping.</strong><hr></blockquote>

and why werent they doing that before...? <img src="confused.gif" border="0">

Well then all i can say is Pakistan has a lot of work ahead to capture these guys so they face charges. Can the US extradite them? I don't know if they have jurisdiction.

[quote]Originally posted by _ alliance _:
<strong>

and why werent they doing that before...? :confused: </strong><hr></blockquote>

I don't think the people responsible have been identified and located.

[quote]Originally posted by glurx:
<strong>

I don't think the people responsible have been identified and located.</strong><hr></blockquote>

but...they are now...?

[quote]Originally posted by _ alliance _:
<strong>

but...they are now...?</strong><hr></blockquote>

Pakistan has arrested some people and are searching for others. <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2002/02/21/pearl.htm" target="_blank">This article</a> has more:

[quote] A 21-year-old Islamic militant charged in the kidnapping of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl told a judge Thursday that the journalist was seized because he was "anti-Islam and a Jew," his lawyer said.


In a closed door deposition, Fahad Naseem, 21, admitted sending e-mails announcing Pearl's kidnapping on orders of British-born suspect Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, according to defense attorney Khawaja Naveed Ahmed.
<hr></blockquote>

[quote]Originally posted by glurx:
[QB][/QB]<hr></blockquote>

yes, but i hope u realize that that will never end the problem...
there are always more waiting when 1 or 2 go down.

Ah if only we could nuke the entire Middle East. Make the world a lot safer.

So on one hand, bombing is a mistake to everyone, on the other, prosecuting the individuals is futile. So do we just roll over? Any ideas? Anything constructive to say?

[quote]Originally posted by _ alliance _:
<strong>

more bombing...? </strong><hr></blockquote>

Yea that's what I'm suggesting. Because as we all know that's the US's only responce to things like this is to bomb. Flatten Karachi! Make them pay! usa! USA! USA!

Sometimes I wonder how a human being can do that to another...

I know the hip thing to do nowadays is to not negotiate with terrorists, but couldn't his life have been spared? I mean the kidnappers had requests... It's always difficult to deal with such issues, but IMO the life of one person is infinitely more important than a few terrorists in your custody. Some will say it was a necessary sacrifice for the sake of the greater cause, but I doubt his pregnant wife will think the same...

[quote]Originally posted by SYN:
<strong>...but IMO the life of one person is infinitely more important than a few terrorists in your custody...</strong><hr></blockquote>

I guess you don't know the history here. The guy they arrested for this was released by India to free some jet full of people some time ago. So in the end that action allowed this terrorist to kidnap the next person. If the US had released some terrorist to get Pearl back who would they have killed in their next terrorist act?

<a href="http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id=105001681" target="_blank">http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id=105001681</a>

from a <a href="http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20020222/ts_nm/attack_pakistan_reporter_dc_168&cid=578" target="_blank">Reuters report</a>:

[quote]... in a account of Pearl's last moments, the Pakistani official, who asked not to be identified, said Pearl's last words uttered on camera before his killing were that he was a Jew and his father was a Jew.

"I have been told that the last words uttered by Pearl in the videotape, immediately before his throat was slit, were 'Yes I am a Jew and my father is a Jew'," the official said...<hr></blockquote>

[ 02-22-2002: Message edited by: roger_ramjet ]</p>

<a href="http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=105001680" target="_blank">'They Did Not Take My Spirit'</a>
A statement from Danny Pearl's widow.
BY MARIANE PEARL
Friday, February 22, 2002 3:00 p.m. EST

[quote]From the bottom of my heart, I would like to express my gratitude to all of the people throughout the world who have given Danny and me support and encouragement.

The messages I have received from the five continents have shown me that a lot of you who don't even know Danny personally have come to understand him as a man. Not a hero, not a spy, but an ordinary man and great journalist who has traveled the world to reveal facts and seek the truth - a value for him as sacred as freedom itself...<hr></blockquote>

[quote]I guess you don't know the history here. The guy they arrested for this was released by India to free some jet full of people some time ago. So in the end that action allowed this terrorist to kidnap the next person. If the US had released some terrorist to get Pearl back who would they have killed in their next terrorist act?<hr></blockquote>

I'm aware of that, the vicious cycle aspect of it all. Yet I fail to understand how we can allow such things to happen. I mean sure, there's little we can do to prevent it, but surely negotiations can lead to less deaths?

We didn't allow anything to happen. This is the result of terrorist.

[ 02-22-2002: Message edited by: Scott H. ]</p>

[quote]Originally posted by SYN:
<strong>

I'm aware of that, the vicious cycle aspect of it all. Yet I fail to understand how we can allow such things to happen. I mean sure, there's little we can do to prevent it, but surely negotiations can lead to less deaths?</strong><hr></blockquote>

negotiations would have been a dead end. the kidnappers wanted the terrorists released--theres nothing to negotiate. they would have settled for nothing less. the only way pearl would have been released is if the terrorists were released...and we all know that the US would and could not allow that to happen. unfortunately, Pearls death was somewhat of a sacrifice...

[quote]Originally posted by SYN:
<strong>

I'm aware of that, the vicious cycle aspect of it all. Yet I fail to understand how we can allow such things to happen. I mean sure, there's little we can do to prevent it, but surely negotiations can lead to less deaths?</strong><hr></blockquote>

No they won't because their goal is to kill people, not have their demands meet. Negotiations serve two purposes: 1. getting the criminal to see giving up is a good (the only) option or 2. distract them so you can put a bullet in their brains.

It also supposes that the US could have done anything at all about it. From this history of this terrorist it seems killing is the number one goal. Considering Pearl was a Jew too :eek: Holy ****ing crap what chance did the guy have?

The WSJ has gathered together a <a href="http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/pearlstories022202.htm" target="_blank">selection</a> of his more memorable front-page stories. This is one of them.

From the Archive, May 14, 1996:

These Songs Bring Tears
To Your Eyes, or Worse

By DANIEL PEARL
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

My eye is crying all the time
Until my eye gets sick.
My eyes. My eyes.
This is my fate
I have to wait for it.
I can't do anything about it.

[quote]DOHA, Qatar - American blues can make you sad. Russian work songs can make you suffer. The fervent belief of many in the Persian Gulf is that pearl-diving songs can make you go blind.

The songs are undergoing a revival, a half-century after crowded pearl boats plied the shallow Gulf waters for the last time. As a new generation in the Gulf rediscovers the wailing old spirituals, they are also rediscovering the special pain of singing them.

"Sometimes I feel like my head is going to explode," 37-year-old soloist Omar Busaqar says after recently singing a few pearling songs with the Qatar National Folkloric Troupe in Doha.

"I get migraines," says another soloist, Monssour Al-Mahannadi, 24. After singing for six years, he concedes, he has gone a bit farsighted and wears glasses. "Ah, you're going to go blind," Mr. Busaqar taunts.

He wouldn't be the first. Soloists, or nahams, were notorious for going blind in decades past, according to Aldulrahman Al-Mannai, a Qatari folklorist. Researchers who recorded the remaining nahams in the 1970s and 1980s say the best ones had poor vision, or none at all: Al Allan, Bahrain's most famous naham, was blind. So was Kuwait's Abu-Mussa'ed, according to one researcher. Rashed Al-Mass, a Qatari singer whose voice was so sweet his nickname was "The Sugar," stopped singing certain songs in the early 1980s after his eyesight deteriorated.

The chief culprit seems to be the fjeri, a haunting type of song filled with wailing improvisation and accompanied by a crescendo of drums and low droning hums. Fjeris were often sung during restful moments and the words are mostly about crying and missing home. The fjeri never made it to Dubai, where pearl divers stuck to more upbeat work songs for raising the boat's anchor, jib, or mainsail. "People were more business-oriented here," singer Omar Sabt Ashoor says after performing with his turban-clad troupe at the Dubai Shopping Festival.

Ethnomusicologists haven't been able to trace the fjeri's origins, except to record a curious tale told by many old pearl-diving hands. One day, according to the story, some sailors looking for a quiet place to sing stumbled upon some half-man, half-donkey genies. They were singing a mesmerizing song, which they taught the sailors, but only after warning them that singing the songs in public would make the singer go blind or die. The songs proved too beautiful to keep bottled up.

The emotion involved in singing these songs makes nahams go blind, contends Khalif Bin Salah Al Mannai, a septuagenarian Qatari naham who learned to sing as a pearl diver in the 1940s and whose eyesight is now starting to fade. "If you really get involved, you get deeply sad, deeply hurt," he says, but if you stop singing the songs you feel even worse. The beginning part of a fjeri is even called jarhan or "hurt." The hurt can get physical, says Feisal Atmimi, the Qatari Troupe's leader. As evidence, he recalls the autopsy of one naham: "His chest was herniated, because he sang with such deep feeling."

It wasn't the emotion, it was the volume of the singing that made nahams go blind, says Nasser Al-Hamadi, a Qatari musician and marine biologist. "The bass drum, it's working, the clapping, the humming - he has to put his voice first. He has to shout to be the clearest one," Mr. Al-Mahadi says, motioning to a pearl-diving video playing in the Qatar National Museum. "Now there's no need to shout. With just a small mike you can reach 3,000 people."

In truth, it wasn't the volume, it was the sun that made nahams go blind, say doctors at Qatar's Hamad Hospital. Nahams spent the whole day in the sun while divers plunged in and out of the water. Long exposure to the sun's rays can cause cataracts. Those nahams who also dove faced another problem: fast pressure changes can hurt the eyes as well.

Everybody agrees that pearl diving, which dates back hundreds of years, was a brutal way to make a living. Historians and divers say that even up to the 1930s, the job required men to dive all day without oxygen tanks, with only the briefest of air breaks. They got one meal of rice and dates a day for four months at sea. The boat was cramped, and sharks and jellyfish were never far away. A diver who contracted a communicable disease was left on an island to die. And divers got sharecropper's pay that depended on the season's take.

Nahams were paid better. "He was the main figure. He was sort of the maestro on the ship," says Scheherazade Q. Hassan, a researcher who helped to record a troupe with a partially blind naham in 1987. A good naham could attract workers to a boat, keep them motivated by singing through the day, and help them beg Allah for protection, Ms. Hassan says.

Cultured pearls, developed in Japan in the 1890s, and oil, discovered in the Gulf in the 1930s, combined to kill off pearl diving and leave the songs in obscurity. But in the 1970s, Gulf countries started rediscovering their folklore. Pictures of pearls started appearing on business logos, and a statue of a giant pearl was built on Doha's beach walk. Singing troupes sprouted to perform pearl-diving songs at weddings and official state functions. Several compact disks hit the market, and troupes traveled as far as the U.S. and Australia to perform.

Some singers scoff at the tales of blindness. Muhammad Jassim Harban, a young naham in Bahrain, counts seven active groups in that small country, including his own troupe, which includes his four brothers and father. And he doesn't know of a single naham who went blind. True, there was Al Allan, but "he lost his eyes a long time ago, not when he was singing," Mr. Harban says.

Which suggests another theory: maybe blindness actually made the nahams better singers. As an Arab researcher once wrote, "Isn't it said, that if a nightingale's eyes are popped, its singing will improve?"<hr></blockquote>

[ 02-23-2002: Message edited by: roger_ramjet ]</p>

[quote]Originally posted by SYN:
<strong>

I'm aware of that, the vicious cycle aspect of it all. Yet I fail to understand how we can allow such things to happen. I mean sure, there's little we can do to prevent it, but surely negotiations can lead to less deaths?</strong><hr></blockquote>

From what I understand, the terrorists didn't want to negotiate. They wanted their demands met. Giving into the demands of terrorist hostage takers is not a good idea because it encourages more of the same.

That looks colder than I mean it. I'm as upset about what happened as anybody, and I realize that this is small comfort to Daniel Pearl's family. But IMO, it was lose/lose situation, and the only real hope for a positive outcome was if the Pakaistani authorities could have found him in time.

[ 02-23-2002: Message edited by: jesperas ]</p>

<a href="http://www.timesofindia.com/articleshow.asp?art_ID=1760610" target="_blank">Pearl's murder technique proves Jaish link</a>
SIDDHARTH SRIVASTAVA
TIMES NEWS NETWORK [ FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 22, 2002 2:32:51 PM ]

[quote]NEW DELHI: The brutal way in which WSJ journalist Daniel Pearl was murdered is a clear indication of the involvement of the terrorist group Jaish-e-Mohammed, which is headed by Masood Azhar and Omar Sheikh, say senior security officials with the Intelligence Bureau.

Pearl's throat was slit from behind by his abductors and, going by media reports, he was subsequently beheaded.

This is similar to the manner which 27-year-old Norwegian Hans Ostro was beheaded by Al Faran terrorists in July 1995 and the way Rupen Katyal, one of the passengers in the hijacked Indian Airlines aircraft IC 814 was killed in December 1999.

That the Al Faran was a front of the Jaish - which, at that time, was called the Harkat-ul-Ansar - was confirmed when the kidnappers demanded the release of Azhar, who was incarcerated in an Indian jail at that time.

The Al Faran had kidnapped Ostro in Pahalgam, Jammu & Kashmir, along with five other foreigners.

The Narasimha Rao government in 1995 did not give in to the demands of the hijackers. Ostro's body was subsequently found beheaded with 'Al Faran' engraved on his body...<hr></blockquote>

[ 02-23-2002: Message edited by: roger_ramjet ]</p>

You can't bargain with a terrorist, otherwise he'll be inclined to do the same thing over again.

I just wonder what Islamic fundamentalists who have been largely sympathetic to the terrorists are saying/thinking about this. How will they spin it, if at all?

Muslim fundamentalists have discovered a (historically) new-found hate of Jews. Since Pearl was Jewish, I doubt they will spin anything, perhaps just adding that since he was Jewish he therefore must have been an Israeli spy. Stuff like this doesn't damage terrorists in their eyes. We have to make everyone else any enemy of them, not try to convert the ones who are lost already. They are too far-gone.

In the words of Kurtz, "Exterminate the brutes!"

One "good" thing they are pointing out is that Musharif (sp?) is now "free" to do what he wants. That is, now he doesn't have to worry about getting Pearl back he can unleash his dirty tricks team to "get" the people who did this.

[quote]Originally posted by NoahJ:
<strong>Seems they killed him when he was not prepared. Interviewing him and someone came up from behind and slit his throat. Barbarians...

<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A47103-2002Feb21.html" target="_blank">http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A47103-2002Feb21.html</a></strong><hr></blockquote>

Yes this act is ugly, an horror and a barbary. Like you i did not see the video tape (it's a good thing : whe should never see it : it will make the murderer too happy), but what i have ear of it, is horrible. I have the feeling that the men who did this where happy to do this. The way that's crime happen make me think that no deal was possible : they have the intention to kill him anyway, just for the pleasure to do it.

Musharaf have given the order to capture the authors of this horror by all the ways, but why did he not do this before ?