Last week, news broke that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks, had accepted a plea deal in an American military court. He agreed to plead guilty in exchange for life in prison, thus saving himself from the possibility of execution. A few days afterward, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin countermanded the deal, requiring the arch-terrorist, known as KSM, to stand trial before a military tribunal. Not among the 2,977 counts of first-degree murder being brought against him is the 2002 slaying of the American journalist Daniel Pearl, which KSM described thus: “I decapitated with my blessed right hand the head of the American Jew, Daniel Pearl.”

Joe Nocera speaks with Daniel’s father, the distinguished computer scientist and tireless defender of Israel Judea Pearl, about the case:

As a moral issue, it is clear that my son’s murder should be part of the charges. . . . Changing the possibility of a death sentence to life imprisonment sounds like they are reducing the sentence, which sends a bad message to the world. It suggests there were some kind of extenuating circumstances, that his crime was not as horrible as we had thought, or that he had expressed some regret or become less inhumane. But all of that is wrong.

A new trial should start with a new charge about KSM’s responsibility for the murder of my son. Witnesses must be called, evidence must be considered, and new charges must be brought. If the allegations for murdering Danny are not brought up in court, then the KSM prosecution will always be incomplete.

The pragmatic fact is that there are thousands and thousands of young Muslims who view KSM as a hero—the one who had the guts to stand up to the evil United States. Our job is to tell those young people that KSM is a criminal, not a hero. He is a criminal, and not only a criminal but a unique type of criminal, and that’s why the death penalty is important.

Yesterday, the beepers used by hundreds of Hizballah operatives were detonated. Noah Rothman puts this ingenious attack in the context of the overall war between Israel and the Iran-backed terrorist group:

[W]hile the disabling of an untold number of Hizballah operatives is remarkable, it’s also ominous. This week, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant told reporters that the hour is nearing when Israeli forces will have to confront Iran’s cat’s-paw in southern Lebanon directly, in order to return the tens of thousands of Israelis who fled their homes along Lebanon’s border under fire and have not yet been able to return. Today’s operation may be a prelude to the next phase of Israel’s defensive war, a dangerous one in which the IDF will face off against an enemy with tens of thousands of fighters and over 150,000 rockets and missiles trained on Israeli cities.

Seth Frantzman, meanwhile, focuses on the specific damage the pager bombings have likely done to Hizballah:

This will put the men in hospital for a period of time. Some of them can go back to serving Hizballah, but they will not have access to one of their hands. These will most likely be their dominant hand, meaning the hand they’d also use to hold the trigger of a rifle or push the button to launch a missile.

Hizballah has already lost around 450 fighters in its eleven-month confrontation with Israel. This is a significant loss for the group. While Hizballah can replace losses, it doesn’t have an endlessly deep [supply of recruits]. This is not only because it has to invest in training and security ahead of recruitment, but also because it draws its recruits from a narrow spectrum of Lebanese society.

The overall challenge for Hizballah is not just replacing wounded and dead fighters. The group will be challenged to . . . roll out some other way to communicate with its men. The use of pagers may seem archaic, but Hizballah apparently chose to use this system because it assumed the network could not be penetrated. . . . It will also now be concerned about the penetration of its operational security. When groups like Hizballah are in chaos, they are more vulnerable to making mistakes.