Daniel Pearl: Slain KLA debunker. (Insider Report).

The late Wall Street Journal correspondent Daniel Pearl became a tragic celebrity when Pakistani terrorists abducted, murdered, and mutilated him. Some commentators have pointed out that Pearl, who held dual U.S. and Israeli citizenship, was regarded as a prize catch by Muslim extremists. But it's possible that Pearl had earned the malevolent attention of the international terrorist network by a story he co-wrote more than two years ago debunking key propaganda claims made by the terrorist Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA).

The KLA, as we have warned since early 1999, is an element of Osama bin Laden's terrorist network (see, for example, "Diving Into the Kosovo Quagmire" in the March 15, 1999 issue of TNA). Following the 1999 NATO assault on Yugoslavia, the UN gave the KLA political control of the Serbian province of Kosovo. The 78-day NATO air campaign was sold to the public as a crusade to end the supposed genocide against Kosovo's Albanian population. But subsequent inquiries -- including the article co-written by Pearl -- have utterly demolished the claims made by NATO and the KLA.

Pearl's December 31, 1999 Wall Street Journal story was entitled: "War in Kosovo Was Cruel, Bitter, Savage; Genocide it Wasn't." The article's subtitle was a story itself: "Tales of Mass Atrocity Arose and Were Passed Along, Often with Little Proof." Pearl and co-author Robert Block focused on the propaganda efforts of KLA propagandist Halit Barani, "a former actor with a Karl Marx beard who summarizes Serb war crimes by showing a photo of a baby with a smashed skull. [He] spent the war moving from village to village with his manual typewriter, calling in reports to foreign radio services and diplomats with his daily allotment of three minutes on a KLA satellite phone."

Barani's fertile mind and antique typewriter were the primary source for many of the lurid atrocity accounts cited by official sources during NATO's assault on Yugoslavia. When Pearl and Block asked about the reliability of his stories, Barani replied: "I told everybody it was supposition, it was not confirmed information.... For the Serbs, anything is possible."

Despite being exposed as a fraud by the Wall Street Journal -- which, ironically, had supported NATO's war on Yugoslavia -- Barani was called as an "expert" witness by the prosecution in the UN's war crimes trial of former Serbian ruler Slobodan Milosevic. An even more painful irony is that Barani's testimony was being offered at about the same time that news broke of Pearl's murder. And mainstream media organs once again retailed Barani's statements uncritically to the public.

"A few days ago, these people [in the Establishment media] were singing the praises of Danny Pearl, a real reporter, who lost his life trying to get the facts of a story," observed Thomas Fleming, editor of Chronicles magazine. "Instead of eulogizing Danny Pearl, they should be emulating him."