A lengthy new report on the 2002 kidnapping and murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl says that a photo of a hand definitively proves that 9/11 plotter Khalid Sheik Mohammed killed and decapitated Pearl, on video.

The report from the Center for Public Integrity (which is over 80 pages—the Washington Post has it all here) says that U.S. officials matched the veins in the hand seen on a video decapitating Pearl to the veins in the hand of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, who's currently in Guantanamo Bay, never to be freed. It was confirmation of KSM's own confession to the CIA. Here is the WaPo's summary of Pearl's awful end:

Mohammed slashed Pearl's throat, killing him, but one of his accomplices failed to operate the video camera, which they had brought to capture the murder for propaganda purposes. Mohammed restaged the killing, this time decapitating Pearl, according to the report. He then dismembered Pearl's body, and it was buried on the compound. Guards washed the bloody floor and then prayed, foreheads to the ground, on the same surface where their prisoner had just been killed, the report said.

[Photo: AP]