Pearl Project provides lessons about future of investigative national security journalism

Nearly four years ago, with some fanfare, Georgetown University announced the launch of The Pearl Project, billing it as an innovative investigative journalism initiative in which faculty and students would use their classroom setting to search for clues as to “what really happened when Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was kidnapped and murdered’’ while reporting from Karachi, Pakistan in early 2002.

They have just released the results of their investigation, and the lengthy report raises important questions about why more than half of the 27 people allegedly involved in Pearl’s kidnapping, detention and murder were never brought to justice in their home country.

But for those interested in the future of national security journalism—especially of an investigative nature—the details about how the project worked are as noteworthy as its findings.  (see “The Truth Left Behind: Inside the Kidnapping and Murder of Daniel Pearl.’’)

The project was led by Barbara Feinman Todd, associate dean of journalism at Georgetown’s School of Continuing Studies, and Asra Nomani, Pearl’s friend and former colleague from the Wall Street Journal. Pearl and his wife, Mariane, were staying in Nomani’s house in Karachi when he went out to meet a source about the jihadist underworld and never came home.

“Sadly, we couldn’t save Danny, but journalists are sort of like the Marines. We can’t leave the truth behind,” Nomani said at the project’s outset in 2007.  “For the five years since Danny was killed, I have wanted to find out the full truth behind Danny’s kidnapping and murder. We are truly fortunate that the leaders of Georgetown University believe deeply in bringing academic principles of critical thinking, investigation and social justice to the world.”

Mariane Pearl said at the time that the project  was important not just for her and her husband, “but also for all journalists and citizens. This investigation is crucial for the sake of truth and independence, two values treasured by my husband and by other courageous journalists who refuse to make compromises–political or otherwise–in their quest to tell the story.”

Robert Manuel, dean of the School of Continuing Studies, described it at the launch as bringing “the real world into the classroom,” and a unique experience in which students “will be a part of history as it unfolds-instead of reading about it in a textbook.’’

The Pearl Project began as a six-credit seminar during the academic school year 2007-08, and The Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation provided funding. But it bloomed into much more than that, ultimately becoming a model for how university-based journalism schools can do some of the best investigative reporting around—and often the kinds of long, complex and potentially controversial  “deep dives’’ that the mainstream media is doing less of these days. At then end of the project’s first year, most students moved on, but  a handful stayed.

Nomani and Feinman Todd ultimately joined forces with some prominent working journalists, and with the Washington-based Center for Public Integrity, which has sponsored the project, providing some journalistic firepower and also published the findings on its website.

The team modeled the Pearl Project after the Arizona Project, an investigative reporting initiative that looked into the murder of Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles three decades ago and brought together dozens of prominent journalists. It helped launch the group Investigative Reporters and Editors.

Over the past three-plus years, the Pearl team grew to 32 people. They interviewed hundreds of sources and pored over thousands of pages of documents in an effort to uncover what Pakistani and American authorities had learned about Pearl’s slaying. They also took the case farther than the authorities did—and point some fingers at both suspects and the investigators who were pursuing them.

In fact, the report said, only four men have been charged and convicted; none of them involved in the actual murder of Pearl. It also concluded that self-described 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed slashed Pearl’s throat and then decapitated him, holding aloft his head in a video that was later circulated on the Internet. Mohammed, or KSM as he is widely known, had claimed so himself. But the project’s investigators wrote that the U.S. government took steps to independently confirm that after his capture in Pakistan in 2003 by matching the veins on KSM’s right hand with those in the video.

And that raises an important question: CIA waterboarding may have irreparably tainted a criminal prosecution of KSM for the 9/11 attacks, but why can’t the Justice Department charge and try him in federal court for the murder of Pearl, a U.S. citizen?

The team is now embarking on another ambitious venture; the Pearl Consortium of Faculty-Student Investigative Reporting Projects, to bring together the many faculty-student investigative reporting projects emerging at universities around the world and use them to fill the gap created by reduced numbers of  mainstream media investigative reporting teams, Feinman Todd and Nomani say. (At least three are here at Medill, including its National Security Journalism Initiative, Innocence Project and Watchdog Reporting Initiative).

They say the consortium is committed to nurturing a new generation of investigative reporters trained in old school gumshoe reporting combined with new media expertise.

“This consortium will be a place, though only virtual at first, where we can come together to talk about what we’re doing, to brainstorm about particular challenges of various natures–creative, legal, ethical or practical,’’ the say on the project’s website. “Over time we will meet in person, for panels, coffee, brainstorming sessions and to celebrate the publication of our work and the accomplishments of our students.’’

It is an effort that deserves attention, and support from the broader journalistic community. Those interested in participating can email pearlproject@georgetown.edu and also sign up for their electronic newsletter.