Extradite Pearl’s killer to stand trial

The following is from a New York Daily News editorial:

A panel of three people who call themselves judges ordered the release of the man convicted of orchestrating the kidnapping and murder of journalist Daniel Pearl — with the insulting coda that the reasons will “be recorded later.” America must not rest until this Pakistani travesty is corrected.

Pearl, 38, a Wall Street Journal reporter and a very good man, disappeared 19 years ago in Karachi on his way to what he thought was an interview with a radical Muslim cleric. Terrorists abducted him and 19 years ago this Monday, Pearl was beheaded on camera, after saying: “My father is Jewish, my mother is Jewish, I am Jewish.”

In 2002, Pakistani courts convicted Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, a British national. He and three accomplices were locked away until last spring, when a lower court overturned their convictions, pending the appeal that just failed at the nation’s Supreme Court.

Sheikh and the other three aren’t the sole guilty parties. A report by a Georgetown faculty-research investigative project released in 2011 fingered Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the 9/11 mastermind now rotting in Guantanamo Bay, for the murder, while detailing 26 accomplices. The most charitable way to frame Sheikh’s crimes is that he only abducted Pearl, serving him up to his slaughterers.

The Bid en administration seeks to extradite Sheik hf rom Pakistan to try him on a 2002 indictment by a New Jersey grand jury. All who mouth platitudes about protecting journalists, about countering violent jihadism, about standing up to anti-semitism: This is your fight. Echo the call.