Federal agents have backed up al Qaeda captive Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's confession in the killing of journalist Daniel Pearl by using photographs of the veins in his hands, according to a new report released Thursday.
Mohammed confessed to beheading Pearl after his 2003 arrest in Pakistan. But the U.S. admission that he had been subjected to "waterboarding" -- a practice historically treated as torture -- while in CIA custody cast doubt on the reliability of his confession, according to a lengthy investigation of the Pearl case by the Center for Public Integrity.
According to the report, the FBI and CIA used stills from the video of Pearl's killing to match the patterns of the veins in Mohammed's hand in 2004 and repeated the process in 2007, after Mohammed repeated his confession during a hearing at the U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
"Beyond KSM's confession, the U.S. government has never revealed any corroborating evidence," the report states. But it called the vein match the "best evidence" the United States has linking Mohammed to Pearl's 2002 slaying.
Mohammed is accused of planning al Qaeda's September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington. According to military prosecutors, he admitted responsibility for the attacks "from A to Z" during a hearing before a military court at Guantanamo Bay.
He has not been charged in Pearl's death, however. According to the report, U.S. officials decided against bringing charges in the Pearl case to avoid complicating Mohammed's prosecution for the 9/11 attacks.
Pearl was kidnapped in the Pakistani city of Karachi while on his way to what he believed was an interview with a radical cleric connected to al Qaeda operative Richard Reid's "shoe bomb" plot. A video of Pearl's beheading was distributed online nearly a month after he was abducted, but the face of the killer who slit his throat was not visible.
Now that they are releasing the SOB I wish the waterboarding would have killed him