How can he bring himself to write this and quote from this ridiculous book with a straight face? Who does he think he's kidding??

http://visibility911.com/jongold/?p=14

Excerpts From “A Mighty Heart”
Daniel Pearl, Mariane Pearl, Pakistan, Pakistani ISI

I highly recommend everyone buy this book. It seems to be very good. - Jon

Pages 27 - 30
Khawaja is a fascinating but dubious character, one of those people who seems to know everybody, at least in militant Islamist circles. A former Pakistani intelligence agent and air force officer, Khawaja loves nothing more than to entertain journalists, especially Americans. He loves to watch their faces when he tells them he is friend of Osama bin Laden. Danny and I have interviewed Khawaja several times, as has Asra, and found him to be, in Danny’s blunt terms, “Nice guy, but a bit of a psycho.”

Danny and I met with him in Islamabad shortly after the 9/11 attacks, and more recently in early January, in an office he uses in a relatively empty house in a gated district apparently reserved for military. Asra visited him at his real home in September, when she was staying at her paternal aunt’s house. “You might want to interview our neighbor,” her aunt had said helpfully. “He’s a religious man, a friend of bin Laden’s and the Taliban. He fought with the Afghan resistance.” And so, escorted by her aunt and uncle, Asra paid a call to Khalid Khawaja, and the three of them sat and listened politely as he ranted and raved about the righteousness of the Muslim jihad against America.

Asra would watch him every morning as, after prayers, he headed down the street, hands clasped behind his back, for a daily stroll around the little local park. One day she joined him, and as they walked, he described how he, along with the influential Pakistani-American businessman Mansur Ejaz and former CIA chief James Woolsey, had tried to hammer out an agreement that would have averted war between the United States and the Taliban. The effort failed.

Khawaja spun a similar story to Danny and me, and while we were never able to nail down all the facts, we were inclined to believe a part. But much of what Khawaja told us was total and ugly fabrication:

“You know who was behind the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon?” Khawaja asked us in September. “The Jews did it, the Mossad, it can only be them.”

That was not the first time we’d been exposed to “the Jew theory.” We’d heard it the day before from Hamid Gul. The director of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistani Intelligence, from 1987 to 1989, Gul is considered the architect of the Afghan jihad, the man who masterminded the war financed by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and waged by the mujahideens against the Soviet occupiers. A decade ago, Gul was the most powerful man in the region; some called him the “godfather of the Taliban.” But power, like an unfaithful mistress, had left him without turning back. New alliances had been formed, and Hamid Gul wasn’t part of them.

I could feel the bitterness behind his assured diatribe. Gul manifested the same fanatical exaltation we saw in Khawaja, and in so many others we met in the days after September 11. It was a craving for revenge that had been unsatisfied for too long. It was a dominating and burning desire.

After an hour-long monologue during which Gul insisted that Osama bin Laden couldn’t have had anything to do with the attacks, he had leaned in toward us conspiratorially. “Do you know,” he said, “that the four thousand Jews who normally worked at the World Trade Center were all absent that day?”

To the day I die, I will love the cool with which Danny responded. “Really?” he said, without any perceptible trace of irony.

The “theory” was that the perpetrators had secretly notified all the Jewish workers in the Twin Towers so they would fail to show up for work and hereby be spared the terrible fate. The allegations apparently originated on Al Manar, the TV channel of Hezbollah, the Lebanese Islamist party, not long after 9/11. Once the ugly rumor hit the Internet, it found dedicated converts throughout the fundamentalist world.

In an article Danny filed just ten days after the attacks, he wrote, “A theory that Jews or Israelis engineered the September 11 attacks on the United States is gaining credibility among Muslim intellectuals, in a disturbing sign of how little globalization has bridged gaps in perception.”

In Pakistan, Danny reported, pilots, scientists, and experts had gathered for analysis, and they had all concluded that the attacks could not have succeeded without the help of American intelligence services or the Israelis. “Pakistani air force officers casually opine that ‘Mossad is the only one that could do it.’ Respected newspapers in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates run news items suggesting authorities suspect some Israelis of involvement in the attack… One Pakistani commentator told the BBC Friday that America’s belligerent attitude ‘gives credence’ to conspiracy theories spreading on the Internet.”

Here is the same old hatred, the kind that makes you wonder if humanity will ever draw the lessons of its own history. Still, Danny and I refuse to let it defeat us in our work as journalists. We see ourselves as tightrope walkers, careful and insistent in our quest to bridge the world. In his work, Danny struggles to keep free of dogma and allegiance. It’s not easy to remain impartial, but it sharpens Danny’s vision and independence. He doesn’t represent a country or a flag, just the pursuit of truth. He is here to hold up a mirror and force people to look at themselves. What better way is there to respect humanity?