This article titled “Briton jailed for Daniel Pearl’s murder is ‘likely to be freed’” was written by Declan Walsh in Islamabad, for The Guardian on Thursday 20th January 2011 19.55 UTC

A new investigation into the death of the American journalist Daniel Pearl says that the British jihadist jailed for his murder is likely to be released because Pakistani officials used tainted evidence.

The report, by a collective of American investigative journalists, asserts that Pakistani prosecutors knowingly used perjured evidence to suggest that Omar Saeed Sheikh and three other men were in the room where the Wall Street Journal reporter was killed in 2002.

American officials have found evidence based on “vein analysis” that the killing was carried out by the self-confessed 9/11 mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, who is in Guantánamo Bay. Muhammad confessed to the murder in 2007, but lawyers said his testimony was tainted by torture and he has not been charged.

But the report author Asra Nomani said there was little doubt that Sheikh, now 37 and facing a death sentence, was behind Pearl’s initial kidnapping. “He was the mastermind behind it and should be held responsible for that,” she said.

Sheikh’s appeal has been pending for nine years in Pakistan and shows no sign of taking place soon. There have been repeated reports that, thanks to his connections with Pakistan’s ISI spy agency, he enjoys privileged conditions in jail.

Those rumours also appeared to have reached US officials, who have repeatedly expressed concern that Sheikh could be released, according to the WikiLeaks state department cables. In 2009 the US ambassador, Anne Patterson, officially requested that Pakistan transfer Sheikh to the US. In the meantime she requested “written assurances that Sheikh will remain in custody throughout the appeals process”. The foreign ministry official Sohail Khan replied that Sheikh’s case was a “sensitive issue”.

In 2006 the previous US ambassador, Ryan Crocket, also expressed concern that Sheikh could be freed. The Pakistani interior minister, Aftab Sherpao, said he was “confident that the Pakistani conviction would hold and that Sheikh would be executed as sentenced”.

The Pearl Project, compiled by Nomani and 32 students at a Washington journalism college, gives the most comprehensive account yet of Pearl’s kidnapping and death. It describes a sprawling operation characterised by bungling and confusion, involving at least three militant groups. It also traces the hapless efforts of Pakistani authorities to find and prosecute the culprits.Pearl was initially abducted by Pakistani militants commanded by Sheikh, it says, but he quickly passed into the hands of al-Qaida operatives led by Muhammad.

CIA and FBI officials confirmed that Muhammad killed Pearl, the report says, by matching veins on his hands with those of the figure in the murder video. The beheading was taped by his nephew, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, who became so nervous that he botched the filming and had to stage it a second time.

Ali, also known as Ammar al-Baluchi, came to public attention last year when it emerged that he subsequently married Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani mother-of-three convicted of attempting to kill American soldiers in Afghanistan.

Siddiqui is currently appealing against her 86-year sentence; Ali is awaiting trial in Guantánamo Bay alongside his uncle, Muhammad. Siddiqui’s family deny the two were ever married.

Pearl’s widow, Mariane, who gave birth to his child months after his death, declined to comment yesterday. “I am not ready … yet,” she emailed the Guardian. Her account of the kidnapping was dramatised in the 2007 Hollywood movie A Mighty Heart starring Angelina Jolie.

Sheikh was educated at the same London school as the film-maker Peter Greenaway and attended Aitchison School in Lahore, often dubbed the “Eton of Pakistan”.

The former president Pervez Musharraf claimed he was recruited by British intelligence while studying at the London School of Economics, and was sent to the Balkans on an operation. “At some point, he probably became a rogue or double agent,” Musharraf wrote in his autobiography In the Line of Fire.

Other reports have suggested that Sheikh also worked for Pakistan’s ISI, which reportedly assisted with his legal fees after he was charged with kidnapping four British and American tourists in India in 1994.

Of the 27 people involved in the kidnapping, four have been convicted, four are in suspected ISI detention, five have died and 14 are still free, Nomani said.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

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Everyone needs to read John Fund’s column in The Wall Street Journal today. He looks at how the left cooked up the idea for “Net Neutrality” and the trail that leads back to campaign finance reform and the Fairness Doctrine.

The man who really came up with Net Neutrality is a man I’ve written about many times and Glenn Beck has discussed many times. His name is Robert McChesney and he’s a Marxist professor at the University of Illinois.

Net Neutrality is a key piece of McChesney’s vision for a media takeover and critical to his long term goal of overthrowing the Capitalist system.

The net neutrality vision for government regulation of the Internet began with the work of Robert McChesney, a University of Illinois communications professor who founded the liberal lobby Free Press in 2002. Mr. McChesney’s agenda? "At the moment, the battle over network neutrality is not to completely eliminate the telephone and cable companies," he told the website SocialistProject in 2009. "But the ultimate goal is to get rid of the media capitalists in the phone and cable companies and to divest them from control."

A year earlier, Mr. McChesney wrote in the Marxist journal Monthly Review that "any serious effort to reform the media system would have to necessarily be part of a revolutionary program to overthrow the capitalist system itself." Mr. McChesney told me in an interview that some of his comments have been "taken out of context." He acknowledged that he is a socialist and said he was "hesitant to say I’m not a Marxist."

Glenn Beck was talking about this stuff two years ago and he was called a “conspiracy theorist” and a nut, but it’s all true. The scariest thing is that the President of The United States is in bed with these people.

Fund goes on to detail how McChesney’s and his group “Free Press” put together a campaign to push for “Net Neutrality” that gave the appearance of being grass roots, but was in fact almost solely funded by radical left wing groups.It was the same strategy these groups employed to get campaign finance reform passed.

After McCain-Feingold passed, several of the foundations involved in the effort began shifting their attention to "media reform"—a movement to impose government controls on Internet companies somewhat related to the long-defunct "Fairness Doctrine" that used to regulate TV and radio companies. In a 2005 interview with the progressive website Buzzflash, Mr. McChesney said that campaign-finance reform advocate Josh Silver approached him and "said let’s get to work on getting popular involvement in media policy making." Together the two founded Free Press.

Free Press and allied groups such as MoveOn.org quickly got funding. Of the eight major foundations that provided the vast bulk of money for campaign-finance reform, six became major funders of the media-reform movement. (They are the Pew Charitable Trusts, Bill Moyers’s Schumann Center for Media and Democracy, the Joyce Foundation, George Soros’s Open Society Institute, the Ford Foundation, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.) Free Press today has 40 staffers and an annual budget of $4 million.

The final piece of the puzzle was getting Obama to appoint far left McChesney stooges to the FCC, which he happily did. One of the most prominent appointees is FCC “Diversity Czar” Mark Lloyd. He’s a supporter of Hugo Chavez and the media takeovers in Venezuela.

John Fund goes to describe how the entire plan came together beautifully and we ended up the FCC going rogue and approving Net Neutrality.

Fortunately, Republicans are not going to sit by and let it happen. Rep. Marsha Blackburn says the GOP already has a plan when the new Congress takes office.

Pawlenty lays out the case against public sector unions in a new WSJ piece. He’s absolutely right. It’s unbelievable what government unions get away with.

Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal was among a group of reporters who had the “privilege” of asking Iranian dictator Mahmoud Ahmadinejad some questions while enjoying a breakfast buffet. He writes an interesting account of how the meeting went and what it was like in the room. What was his final conclusion?

…but my own impression of Ahmadinejad was that he was easily the smartest guy in the room. He mocked us in a way we scarcely had the wit to recognize. We belittle him at our peril.

Let’s hope our political leaders recognize that as well.

News Corp chairman Rupert Murdoch has an excellent editorial in today’s Wall Street Journal about the state of journalism and the media today. He says media organizations who innovate and embrace new technologies will thrive and those who do not will go out of business. Companies that do not produce a product consumers want are supposed to go out of business. What we don’t need, says Murdoch, is for the government to get involved and prop up failing news organizations.

Technology now allows us to do this on a much greater scale. That means we have the means to reach billions of people who until now have had no honest or independent sources of the information they need to rise in society, hold their governments accountable, and pursue their needs and dreams.

Does this mean we are all going to succeed? Of course not. Some newspapers and news organizations will not adapt to the digital realities of our day—and they will fail. We should not blame technology for these failures. The future of journalism belongs to the bold, and the companies that prosper will be those that find new and better ways to meet the needs of their viewers, listeners, and readers.

…Finally, a few words about government. In the last two or three decades, we have seen the emergence of new platforms and opportunities that no one could have predicted—from social networking sites and iPhones and BlackBerries, to Internet sites for newspapers, radio and television. And we are only at the beginning.

The government has a role here. Unfortunately, too many of the mechanisms government uses to regulate the news and information business in this new century are based on 20th-century assumptions and business models. If we are really concerned about the survival of newspapers and other journalistic enterprises, the best thing government can do is to get rid of the arbitrary and contradictory regulations that actually prevent people from investing in these businesses.

There’s a lot more and everyone should click over and read the rest. Murdoch is one of the greatest business minds in the world. When he speaks we should all listen.

As anyone who reads this blog knows, I’m no fan of Deepak Chopra. I think the guy is an overrated douchebag who makes a living selling his spiritual guru crap to Hollywood elites. Then CNN decided to make Chopra into a terrorism expert after the Mumbai attacks. Repeatedly seeking his insights into terrorism and the overall War on Terror — something Deepak Chopra doesn’t know the first thing about.

Predictably, Chopra blames America and president Bush for terrorism. He sat there on CNN with his Swarovski crystal encrusted glasses shimmering under the studio lights and said America’s reaction after 9/11 “alienated” Muslims around the world which is causing more terrorism.

So Dorothy Rabinowitz wrote an Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal calling Deepak out for his ridiculous assertions and the absurdity of looking to him for commentary on terrorism.

If you missed out — here’s a little taste:

If the Mumbai terror assault seemed exceptional, and shocking in its targets, it was clear from the Thanksgiving Day reports that we weren’t going to be deprived of the familiar, either. Namely, ruminations, hints, charges of American culpability that regularly accompany catastrophes of this kind.

Soon enough, there was Deepak Chopra, healer, New Age philosopher and digestion guru, advocate of aromatherapy and regular enemas, holding forth on CNN on the meaning of the attacks.

The article is spot on and if you haven’t read it yet — you must.

The best part is that it got under Chopra’s skin, because he wrote a lengthy and long winded reply at The Huffington Post. I could only read part of it, because Chopra drones on and on pretending to be a genius as usual. What I did read of it though, he sounds pretty damn irritated.

All the elements of a far left argument are included. Accusations of racism, bigotry, attacks on Fox News, Neocons, Bush/Cheney bashing, etc, etc.

Here’s a sample:

When I first read Ms. Rabinowitz personal attacks on me as the lead article on the opinion page of the Wall Street Journal, I have to confess that my first reaction was that she was an ethnocentric racist and prejudiced bigot. After some reflection, I realized that she was probably more ignorant than bigoted. I could have let the matter rest there, but aside from the personal attacks, there are a number of factual errors, that, in the spirit of clarity ought to be corrected.

Ms. Rabinowitz is on the editorial board of the now Fox News-affiliated Wall Street Journal. Its editorial page has long been a faithful stenographer for the Neoconservatives and the Bush/Cheney administration’s benighted approach to militant Islam. Elsewhere, my son addressed the complexity of the terrorist problem and the US involvement in it. Gotham Chopra has experience as a war correspondent in the Middle East, including Pakistan and Afghanistan. While returning from Afghanistan, he was arrested after interviewing an Afghani leader (which caused immense anguish for my wife and I). Suffice it to say that the causes of Islamic terrorism are complex. To trivialize my views on such as vast topic of terrorism with: “Deepak Blames America,” as Ms. Rabinowitz has done, not only suggests how abysmally uninformed she is, but also speaks to the ever-sinking journalistic standards of her newspaper.

Read the rest if you can stand it. I’ve never heard of Gotham Chopra, but I hope he doesn’t invade my news cast anytime soon.

Kudos to Dorothy over at the WSJ for writing an excellent piece, and more importantly for getting Deepak Chopra riled up.

-Chris Jones

Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili has taken to the pages of The Wall Street Journal to dish on the current conflict between his country and Russia. Georgia is a close ally of the U.S. and until yesterday had the third largest troop commitment in Iraq behind Great Britain.

Georgia’s military is U.S. trained and has been a big help in Iraq. Unfortunately, the sudden outbreak of war with Russia forced President Saakashvili to immediately order his 4,600 troops home to help fight off the Russians.

To show our appreciation for Georgia’s help in Iraq, the U.S. military began flying Georgia’s troops home yesterday.