A longtime partner of Ground Zero Imam Feisal Rauf is a 9/11 Truther. Faiz Khan, who co-founded one of the groups heading up the Ground Zero mosque project, believes the attacks were an “inside job” perpetrated by the United States government and big corporations.

Steve Emerson reports:

Faiz Khan, a physician who claims to have been a first responder after the September 11 attacks, is a founding member of the Muslim-Jewish-Christian Alliance for 9/11 Truth and is on the advisory board of the Muslims for 9/11 Truth. In an essay on the Alliance’s website, he argued that “the prime factor for the success of the criminal mission known as 9/11 did not come from the quarter known as ‘militant Islam’ although the phenomenon known as ‘militant Islamic networks’ may have played a partial role, or even a less than partial role – perhaps the role of patsy and scapegoat.”…

Khan also helped form the American Sufi Muslim Association in 1997 with Rauf, a group now known as the American Society for Muslim Advancement (ASMA). ASMA and Rauf’s Cordoba Initiative are leading the mosque effort in lower Manhattan. Khan has led Friday prayers at the Al Farah Mosque, where Rauf is the imam, for years. That practice continued at least through December – after the mosque proposal was unveiled — when Khan was cited and photographed in an article in the German magazine Der Spiegel on the project.

Khan and Rauf also are members of the Sufi Circle, created in 2004 to promote “a Divine Love, unity and tolerance for a happy and meaningful life.” In an announcement for a pending appearance, Khan’s photograph on the Sufi site comes from this 2005 speech he gave explaining his beliefs about the 9/11 attacks. Cropped out is a sign behind Khan that reads “Expose the 9/11 Cover-Up.” In that speech, Khan claimed people he meets in the Middle East and North Africa take government responsibility for 9/11 as a given and ask what Americans don’t understand. In the Third World, he explained “the sleaze of governance is a lot more transparent” and accepted by the public. He also urged people not to get hung up on the concept of nation states:

“There’s no such thing as a Saudi nation, there is a royal sleazy family there. And there is no such thing as the American nation when it comes to 9/11 because there’s a sleazy mob, if you will, in the White House that co-opts Washington, D.C. and actualizes the agendas of Wall Street. That is the way things have worked all throughout history.”

… On June 3, 2006, Khan spoke at a 9/11 truth summit called “Revealing the Truth/Reclaiming our Future” in Chicago. In his remarks, he acknowledged that there is a militant Islamist movement, but “the most logical explanation” for 9/11 is that the hijackers were “working for working for us” in furtherance of a corporate-controlled schemes involving gigantic stock trades, billions of dollars in heroin sales and interest in Caspian Sea resources.

The speech was videotaped and remains available on the Internet. In it, he traced his doubts about the attack to the days and weeks immediately afterward, explaining how he stopped serving as a clergyman at memorial services for 9/11 victims because “I would ruffle a lot of feathers at a memorial service if he got up there and said it wasn’t just angry Muslims gone bad. There’s a lot more to this.” He provided a similar account at another meeting captured on video.

Khan believes the most reasonable explanation for 19 Al Qaeda-employed flying commercial airliners into prominent American landmarks is that the terrorists were actually secretly employed by the United States government and big corporate interests. Clearly a sane man.

This whole story just becomes more absurd by the day. We already had a shadily-financed mega-mosque being built at Ground Zero by a developer with a criminal history and an imam who believes the United States, which should adopt the sharia legal system, deserved the 9/11 attacks. Now we learn that one of the imam’s longtime partners believed the attacks were an “inside job” rather than the result of Muslim terrorists waging jihad against America.

And yet people like Michael Bloomberg and Barack Obama defend the project, saying that the terrorists will win if we don’t support this whole shady arrangement. Meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi calls for an investigation into those who oppose the project while the left-wing media smears such opponents as “Islamaphobic”.

It’s like a really bad episode of the Twighlight Zone.