It has been about 40 years since I've been doing this kind of work, it's pretty bizarre work. It's called journalism but it is better and more accurate to call it the information business. The information/knowledge business. Very powerful, potentially very powerful – if you know what you are doing. And that's the thing, hardly anyone can claim to know what they are doing, it's that challenging and difficult.

You make arguments. You construct arguments, you conceive theory. “Scientific theory” etc. All rational stuff. You become fluent in history. Solicit interviews, collect facts, information. Do you form opinions? Obviously you do, and you hope they are not loser, disreputable opinions. You aim to impress people, earn their respect, and actually predict future events. Are you an advocate? No. Not at all. You argue, you actually do commit yourself to the truth – whatever the truth is.

One thing is inadvisable: you do not insult the people you are investigating and discussing. This is obvious, right? I had wanted to interview Osama Bin Laden. My friend Robert Fisk [who died in 2020] beat me to it, well he was working for a real newspaper, a prominent British newspaper. He had several advantages over me at the time but I was fast on his trail. The Sunni Arabs, the young men, they respected me and liked me. I wanted to develop the Sunni Arab story, and I did. I cultivated the Sunni Arabs, I worked on getting an interview with Mr Saddam Hussein – and I came very close to achieving that. What stopped me? The US military invades Iraq in 2003 and kills Saddam Hussein and hundreds of thousands of Sunni Arabs during the “war on terror” – all this kind of Ashkenazi Jewish conspiracy and bullshit.

In 1999 I published with a “think tank” in the Washington DC metropolitan area an article or monograph which had the title The Logic of the Arab-Israeli Conflict. It was pretty darn good [I will republish it here soon, both in English and Arabic], so good that the Arabs wanted to translate it which they did. Then it was published in Arabic. Circulated widely. They wanted me on Al Jazeera and of course I agreed. I was interviewed in January 2001 for 1.5 hours on one of their programs reserved for Arab VIPs, heads of state etc. Mr Ali Abdullah Saleh [the president of Yemen] was on the program before me, the week before, or the month before. He was assassinated in Yemen in 2017.

Very rational approach, very scientific approach – and it has to be grounded in the idea that this has to happen, you have to be practical and absorb and overcome the challenges and difficulties.

Yet there is something else at work in journalism, in the information business. It is the reality of the danger. I have interviewed [2003-2004] the founders of Hamas and the Israeli government assassinated them immediately afterward. In fact, I was on the telephone with Dr Abdel Aziz Ali Abdul Majid al-Rantisi, a co-founder of Hamas, and he was almost killed by a Hellfire missile while I was interviewing him. Yeah, while we were talking. The missile killed some Palestinians nearby him. He told me we had to interrupt the interview and reschedule. We scheduled another talk, and he was killed very soon after, by a Hellfire missile. These three men were killed because of me, because I was interviewing them. 

In 2003 I had organized an interview with Ms Anna Lindh, who was at the time the foreign minister of Sweden. I had not firmly set up a date and time to call her but I had talked to her spokesman and he agreed that we would set up an interview very soon. About a week later she was stabbed to death in a shopping mall in the center of Stockholm. Seems possible she was assassinated because she had agreed to talk to me – with the recorder on. She was supportive of Palestine.

In 2006 I got an email from some people in Washington who said they were representing Mrs Benazir Bhutto, former prime minister of Pakistan, the daughter of Ali Bhutto, also prime minister of Pakistan. I was told she was keen to do an interview with me. I was pleased to hear that, obviously. It was going to be cool. And what happened? We schedule the interview, I wake up that morning, early, because Pakistan is 12 hours ahead of CA time. I learn from someone who did research for me that Mrs Bhutto had been killed. Assassinated. I was upset, and I felt very bad for her. She was a brave woman. Also Ms Lindh. Both very nice ladies, very capable. I cannot be certain of course but it appears that she was killed to prevent me from interviewing her. Always possible and probably very likely. The timing is pretty suspicious. A coincidence?

I could go on, there are more disgusting illustrations of criminality I could share. I will someday put them all down into some kind of memoir or autobiography. Kind of pompous to do that but I suppose I have an obligation to tell the world the truth of what has happened. Do they want to know the truth? Yes they do.

So it is very rewarding to do this work despite the dangers and nightmare challenges. Yeah they are all mostly nightmares. I am not disturbed by them, really. I am not really affected. I do feel horrible for these brave men and women who want to tell the truth or who try to describe some events – whether there is so-called injustice or not.

You connect to the human animal, all of them on the Earth. Some of them are very impressive and many of them are not so impressive but they all have some foundation of support and truth which gives their experience some value. We want to hear from them, for this is the information business. This is the knowledge business. It is awesome, for sure.

The image below is a letter which Al Jazeera addressed to me after my interview in January 2001. They should republish the interview. I have a copy of it, and I will try to convert it to a digital file, and publish it myself.

I forgot to mention one other Arab leader, Moammar Gaddafi. I had cultivated him, and was really on track to getting access to him and interviewing him. He was also killed. No surprise.