News
Government
Feb. 26, 2002
Reporter's Death Advances No Goal
Column by Garry Abrams - The barbaric murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in Pakistan is a ghastly reminder that the war on terrorism is a battle against a culture of death.
By Garry Abrams
The barbaric murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in Pakistan is a ghastly reminder that the war on terrorism is a battle against a culture of death.
Before they decapitated Pearl and recorded that act with a video camera - apparently last month shortly after Pearl's abduction on Jan. 23 in Karachi - his captors issued a set of demands. These demands included the release of all Pakistani prisoners held at the U.S. naval station at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
But police in Pakistan suspect that Pearl's captors always planned to kill the reporter, who went to high school and college in California. A senior police official told the Washington Post, "Killing Daniel in the most gruesome fashion and releasing its video to the outside world was the topmost priority of the kidnappers."
News of Pearl's killing came last Thursday when the video of his death was delivered to the U.S. consulate in Karachi.
Over the weekend, the New York Times reported that one of the suspects in Pearl's kidnapping, Ahmad Omar Saeed Sheikh, once gloated to another group of hostages, "We've just told the press we're going to behead you."
Saeed's capture thwarted his plans in that 1994 kidnapping of three British tourists in India. But one of his hostages vividly recalled Saeed's enthusiasm for bloodshed.
"He was laughing," one of the former hostages told the Times. "The prospect excited him."
And who can forget the video of Osama bin Laden chuckling and smirking with pleasure over the beyond-his-wildest-dreams success of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon?
In other words, the pleasure of killing may well have become the end, as well as the means, for terrorists. Now there's a philosophy Charles Manson could get behind.
It was against this backdrop that I read last week's decision by a federal judge in Los Angeles that dismissed a sincere but misguided habeas corpus suit brought on behalf of 300 al-Qaida and Taliban prisoners held at Camp X-Ray
On the same day that the world learned of Pearl's death, U.S. District Judge A. Howard Matz ruled that the petitioners, an ad hoc group calling itself the Coalition of Clergy, Lawyers and Professors, had no standing to bring the suit.
According to Matz's decision, the petitioners claimed that the prisoners in Cuba "have been deprived of their liberty without the due process of law." Matz disagreed, noting that news accounts cited by the coalition reported that the prisoners have received visits from the International Red Cross and from diplomats from their home countries. The prisoners also had been allowed to write to their families. (Over the weekend, a television news broadcast reported that the prisoners in Cuba received a special meal that included lamb stew and baklava to celebrate a religious holiday.)
The bottom line is that Matz ruled that his court, and no other federal court, had jurisdiction over the coalition's lawsuit. Among other things, Matz determined that the coalition failed to show a "special relationship" to the prisoners and that a treaty gives Cuba sovereignty over the naval station.
By whatever chain of reasoning Matz came to his decision, it strikes me as the right result. The war on terrorism has raised many tough and legitimate legal questions about protecting the rights of U.S. citizens and residents.
But an even tougher question is how to deal legally with terrorist suspects captured abroad. Many European countries have protested the detention of the prisoners in Cuba and their "unlawful combatant" status.
The Bush administration defused much of the criticism by announcing that the detainees will be treated according to the Geneva Convention, even though the terrorist suspects are not considered traditional prisoners of war.
It now seems clear, at least to me, that the decision to keep the prisoners outside the boundaries of the United States was a smart one.
So far, the preponderance of evidence is that the terrorists who declared war on the United States Sept. 11 have no real goal beyond the slaughter of human beings they have designated as their enemies. Professed goals, such as driving the United States out of Saudi Arabia, seem to me to be an excuse or a fig leaf to justify the unjustifiable.
Suppose for a moment that the terrorists who killed Daniel Pearl - who may or may not be linked to Osama bin Laden but clearly spring from similar concepts of organized nihilism - killed everybody that they want to, most probably including you and me. What would they do then - kill themselves because they have nothing to live for?
It's a war, not a lawsuit.
The barbaric murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in Pakistan is a ghastly reminder that the war on terrorism is a battle against a culture of death.
Before they decapitated Pearl and recorded that act with a video camera - apparently last month shortly after Pearl's abduction on Jan. 23 in Karachi - his captors issued a set of demands. These demands included the release of all Pakistani prisoners held at the U.S. naval station at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
But police in Pakistan suspect that Pearl's captors always planned to kill the reporter, who went to high school and college in California. A senior police official told the Washington Post, "Killing Daniel in the most gruesome fashion and releasing its video to the outside world was the topmost priority of the kidnappers."
News of Pearl's killing came last Thursday when the video of his death was delivered to the U.S. consulate in Karachi.
Over the weekend, the New York Times reported that one of the suspects in Pearl's kidnapping, Ahmad Omar Saeed Sheikh, once gloated to another group of hostages, "We've just told the press we're going to behead you."
Saeed's capture thwarted his plans in that 1994 kidnapping of three British tourists in India. But one of his hostages vividly recalled Saeed's enthusiasm for bloodshed.
"He was laughing," one of the former hostages told the Times. "The prospect excited him."
And who can forget the video of Osama bin Laden chuckling and smirking with pleasure over the beyond-his-wildest-dreams success of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon?
In other words, the pleasure of killing may well have become the end, as well as the means, for terrorists. Now there's a philosophy Charles Manson could get behind.
It was against this backdrop that I read last week's decision by a federal judge in Los Angeles that dismissed a sincere but misguided habeas corpus suit brought on behalf of 300 al-Qaida and Taliban prisoners held at Camp X-Ray
On the same day that the world learned of Pearl's death, U.S. District Judge A. Howard Matz ruled that the petitioners, an ad hoc group calling itself the Coalition of Clergy, Lawyers and Professors, had no standing to bring the suit.
According to Matz's decision, the petitioners claimed that the prisoners in Cuba "have been deprived of their liberty without the due process of law." Matz disagreed, noting that news accounts cited by the coalition reported that the prisoners have received visits from the International Red Cross and from diplomats from their home countries. The prisoners also had been allowed to write to their families. (Over the weekend, a television news broadcast reported that the prisoners in Cuba received a special meal that included lamb stew and baklava to celebrate a religious holiday.)
The bottom line is that Matz ruled that his court, and no other federal court, had jurisdiction over the coalition's lawsuit. Among other things, Matz determined that the coalition failed to show a "special relationship" to the prisoners and that a treaty gives Cuba sovereignty over the naval station.
By whatever chain of reasoning Matz came to his decision, it strikes me as the right result. The war on terrorism has raised many tough and legitimate legal questions about protecting the rights of U.S. citizens and residents.
But an even tougher question is how to deal legally with terrorist suspects captured abroad. Many European countries have protested the detention of the prisoners in Cuba and their "unlawful combatant" status.
The Bush administration defused much of the criticism by announcing that the detainees will be treated according to the Geneva Convention, even though the terrorist suspects are not considered traditional prisoners of war.
It now seems clear, at least to me, that the decision to keep the prisoners outside the boundaries of the United States was a smart one.
So far, the preponderance of evidence is that the terrorists who declared war on the United States Sept. 11 have no real goal beyond the slaughter of human beings they have designated as their enemies. Professed goals, such as driving the United States out of Saudi Arabia, seem to me to be an excuse or a fig leaf to justify the unjustifiable.
Suppose for a moment that the terrorists who killed Daniel Pearl - who may or may not be linked to Osama bin Laden but clearly spring from similar concepts of organized nihilism - killed everybody that they want to, most probably including you and me. What would they do then - kill themselves because they have nothing to live for?
It's a war, not a lawsuit.
#337642
Garry Abrams
Daily Journal Staff Writer
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