KSM and Danny Pearl

Scott Shane at The New York Times had a ground-breaking piece yesterday on Deuce Martinez, the old-fashioned interrogator who gleaned the secrets from 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

The subtext of the piece was the question of whether KSM, as the Kuwaiti is known, was broken by torture, or by Martinez's traditional, hands-off approach. Read the piece, then let's talk.

But my own attention was drawn to a passage near the end of the piece in which Shane addresses a question that's vexed some friends of Daniel Pearl, my colleague at The Wall Street Journal who was murdered in Pakistan six years ago.

Much has been said that Danny was kidnapped because of a story he was working on, but that was not the case -- he was simply caught in a trap that could have gotten any of us.

On the last day of his week-long kidnapping, three Arabic-speaking men arrived at the nursery where he was being held, and killed him. But this turn of events always seemed abrupt -- a couple of the guards themselves said they did not expect Danny to be killed. So who were these killers and why did they come?

There were reports that the actual killer was KSM, but some of us had our doubts -- to be blunt, why would someone of his rank in al-Qaeda get involved with the nitty-gritty of terrorism? Plus KSM confessed to so many crimes while in U.S. detention that they strained credulity.

But, in Shane's piece, we get KSM confessing to Danny's killing out of the blue. He simply blurted it out while in conversation with Martinez. Here is the key sentence from the piece, involving a videotape that the killers made of the slaying: Intelligence analysts eventually were convinced ... because Mr. Mohammed pointed out to Mr. Martinez details of the hand and arm of the masked killer in a videotape of the murder that appeared to show it was him.

If Danny indeed was killed by KSM, one argument that seemed compelling to me was that this ego-driven terrorist, whose entire experience was in planning but never actually carrying out any operation, wanted to prove his credentials to the brute rank and file. A quote from an unnamed "foreign counterterrorism official" in Shane's piece lends credence to this theory: KSM “was a leader. He wanted to demonstrate to his people how ruthless he could be.”

The Valid Isolation of Uzbekistan: We've talked before at O and G about hope springing eternal when it comes to Uzbekistan, and sure enough the West is again softening up toward the worst dictatorship in the former Soviet Union, somehow convinced that this time President Islam Karimov really will keep his word.

The thinking is that isolating Uzbekistan has been counter-productive, particularly sanctions imposed over the 2005 Tiananman Square-like massacre of civilians in Andijan.

Where Karimov does particularly well is in spooking the West by threatening to serve as a foundation for Russia's imperial return to Central Asia. This canard gets repeated by diplomats and reporters repeatedly despite 17 years of a clear Karimov record of swinging from the West to Russia and back again when it is convenient, with no allegiance to anyone.

Just now, I'm concerned about colleagues and their families. Uzbek television is broadcasting open threats against the stay-behind relatives of seven Radio Liberty reporters, most of whom fled for their lives after Andijan. Recall that it was just such threats that preceded last year's murder of Uzbek correspondent Alisher Saipov, who was shot dead in the Kyrgyz city of Osh. Saipov was a long-time critic of Karimov's government and, just prior to his murder, told colleagues he thought he was being followed by agents of Karimov's government.

Book note: Robert Amsterdam, the talented lawyer for imprisoned Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, reviewed Putin's Labyrinth for The New York Post yesterday. It's to be published tomorrow.

Photo: Irargerich

Rights: Creative Commons