Pakistani daily passes 'death sentence' on US journalist

WASHINGTON: Nearly eight years after the brutal murder by beheading of Wall Street Journal’s South Asia correspondent Daniel Pearl at the hands

of Pakistani extremists, a Pakistani newspaper had endangered the life of another journalist by calling him a CIA spy linked to the Israeli secret service Mossad.

The charges against Wall Street Journal’s Matthew Rosenberg, which has outraged his newspaper and the journalists’ community in the US, were published last week in the hard-line Pakistani daily, Nation, widely seen to be a mouthpiece of the Pakistani military-security establishment. Citing ''an official of law enforcement agency who requested anonymity,'' the paper said ''Matthew was working as chief operative of CIA and Blackwater in Peshawar,'' and ''law enforcement agencies...had also traced Matthew’s links with Israel’s intelligence agency Mosad as well.''

Aside from being scurrilous, the charges are also considered life-threatening given the fate that befell Rosenberg’s predecessor Daniel Pearl, who was beheaded in February 2002 by extremists because he was Jewish and was accused of being an American and Israeli spy in a country increasingly steeped in paranoia and hatred against Americans, Indians, and Jews.

Pearl, who like Rosenberg was based in India, was investigating the links between al-Qaida terrorists and the Pakistani spy agency ISI when he was entrapped.

Pakistani courts convicted Omar Saeed Sheikh, a British-Pakistani terrorist, for Pearl’s abduction and murder (the death sentence awarded to him is yet to be carried out) but in March 2007, 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed said he carried out Pearl’s execution.

In an angry Nov 6 letter to the Nation’s Editor Shireen Mazari, WSJ Managing Editor Robert Thomson conveyed ''in the strongest possible terms our dismay and disgust over the slanderous and dangerous falsehoods” published against Rosenberg. The charges that he had some intelligence connection ''has endangered him, all other Wall Street Journal correspondents, and all journalists and foreign correspondents in your country,'' he said.

Thomson said Rosenberg is an experienced foreign correspondent who has ''pursued no other agenda than seeking the truth.'' Asking for a prominent retraction, he said the falsehood spread by the paper could ultimately make it ''complicit in a far greater tragedy unless this wrong is corrected.'' Thomson’s letter did not mention the Pearl episode, a tragedy that shook the journalistic community and highlighted the dangers of working in Pakistan.

While some in the blogging and tweeting community accused the Pakistani paper of effectively passing a death sentence on Rosenberg, the New York-based Committee for Protection of Journalists said it was ''deeply disturbing'' that a newspaper would publish a story like this that clearly puts the life of a fellow reporter in danger. The committee also wondered if this could be a deliberate government attempt to intimidate Rosenberg and other foreign correspondents working in Pakistan, considering the story was sourced to a law enforcement agency.

The Nation is part of the Nawa-e-Waqt group, considered close to Pakistan’s military-intelligence apparatus in defending the ''ideology of Pakistan.'' Its patriarch Majid Nizami, brother of the paper’s founder Hamid Nizami, frequently espouses nuclear war as a means of settling disputes with India. He recently sacked his nephew Arif Nizami (Hamid’s son) as Editor and replaced him with Mazari, who was the Director of the government-funded Pakistan Institute of Strategic Studies. Mazari claims she was fired from that job under pressure from the United States.


http://www.nation.com.pk/pakistan-news-newspaper-daily-english-onli ne/Politics/05-Nov-2009/Journalists-as-spies-in-FATA

http://cpj.org/blog/The% 20Nation%20Article.doc.pdf


It will be interesting to see if the Wall Street Journal is going to be allow itself to be intimidated to relative quiescence as in the aftermath of the case of their journalist Daniel Pearl getting his throat slit in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan for being Jewish or if they are going to use their clout with the US financial community to make Pakistan a no-go area for investments.

Dr. Shirin Mazari, since her appointment as editor, is certainly taking the IEDology of Pakistan obsessed “The Nation” to plumbing new lows in journalism