Daniel Pearl: Slain KLA debunker. (Insider Report).(Pearl may have been killed because of a previous article telling the truth about the Kosovo Liberation Army)(Brief Article)

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 ...