Daniel Pearl video

Wired had a story the other day about supposed FBI demands to have the Daniel Pearl murder video removed from one of the several web sites where it has been available for those who want to download it. Although the site in question complied, it’s not clear whether the FBI was demanding the video be removed or merely “suggesting” its removal, according to an editor’s note written after the story first ran (scroll down to the bottom of the above linked page).

I never downloaded the video, I know it would make me sick to my stomach and I have no need to confirm for myself what it contains, but I’m glad it is available for those who want to. (Despite the FBI’s recent action, and the ISP in question’s capitulation, the video is still readily available elsewhere — the Wired article has links to other sites still carrying it, for the moment at least.) It irked me back in February when the news media ran their “we’re not going to show you the video but our reporter has seen it and will give you their impressions” stories, ostensibly “out of respect for the family”. (These same networks had no qualms about showing ad nauseum every single piece of video depicting the the second airplane flying into the World Trade Center last September.) It irritates me even more however, that it apparently is Dow Jones, parent company of the Wall Street Journal, where Daniel Pearl worked, that has been putting the pressure on the FBI to go after these sites that have the video available. These sites are doing nothing wrong; they are merely doing a service to the public’s right to know, a responsibility that mainstream media is all too willing to abdicate these days.

LawMeme, which has its own take on this story, brought up an interesting point (implicitly rather than directly) by providing links to two other famous documents of murder from a different era, the “Execution of Vietcong Prisoner” photograph by Eddie Adams which was featured on the cover of the New York Times and later won the Pullitzer Prize, and the Zapruder home movie capturing Kennedy’s assassination. There are plenty of other examples as well. The FBI apparently claimed that the site hosting the Pearl video was running afoul of obscenity laws, a laughable claim. (How many movies would not be released if similar bogus standards were applied to Hollywood?) What’s really obscene is that an interested public has to resort to scouring the internet or P2P networks to see something that should have been shown to the public (who of course would have been free to choose whether they wanted to see it or not) back in February.

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I note that “Daniel Pearl” was the fourth most searched term for the week ending May 18th on the . The reasons are obvious, and no one should be surprised by this. What is surprising is that anyone still uses Lycos to do searches in this day and age.