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Mohammed Says He Beheaded U.S. Reporter Despite Warnings
(Los Angeles Times) Richard A. Serrano - A senior al-Qaeda military commander strongly warned Khalid Shaikh Mohammed not to kill Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in 2002, cautioning him "it would not be wise to murder Pearl" and that he should "be returned back to one of the previous groups who held him, or freed." Mohammed told his U.S. interrogators at Guantanamo Bay that he cut off Pearl's head anyway, according to U.S. military documents posted Monday by WikiLeaks. Mohammed also told his captors of the aborted attempt by Richard Reid to light a shoe bomb aboard a flight from London to the U.S. in late 2001. "He had instructed Reid to shave his beard prior to boarding the airplane and to detonate the bomb inside the airplane bathroom." But Reid refused to shave his beard, tried to ignite the bomb in his seat, and was stopped. Mohammed boasted that the "planes operation" of Sept. 11 was his "dream and life's work." He was later forced to undergo 183 separate water-boarding treatments to get him to talk. Mohammed's right-hand man was Ramzi Binalshibh, the "9/11 coordinator." Binalshibh learned from lead Sept. 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta that "the targets were the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the Capitol," sites personally selected by Osama bin Laden. It has long been in dispute whether the plane which crashed in a field in Pennsylvania was headed for the Capitol or the White House.