An atrocity (or other notorious event) is less useful as a political tool if its apparent meaning is made ambiguous or reversed; the possessors of the interpretation then experience a loss of rhetorical advantage. Correspondingly, if a previously ambiguous event can be advantageously seized and disambiguated (however speciously) the possessors experience an increment of rhetorical advantage and their competitors a loss. We can expect, then, that those who lose ground in the struggle for interpretation will be offended by those they perceive to have assisted the other side(s).
The most ordinary common sense would seem to tell us that we do not know exactly why Daniel Pearl was killed. It could have been for any of a variety of reasons, or a combination of them: he was a journalist, American, Jew, CIA suspect, in the wrong place at the wrong time, could have been mistaken for someone else or seized at random in order to satify a thirst for vengeance or impress some third party, and so on. But it is apparently not useful to think of this; hence the event must be intepreted to cast the appropriate parties in the appropriate light.
Probably, by saying so I will offend someone.
-- Gordon