Page 125 – Nejat Society

Mujahedin Khalq Organization's Propaganda System

Senior US lawmakers slated to address summit of anti-Iran MKO terror organization

A bipartisan group of US lawmakers will address an online gathering of the Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MKO), a terrorist organization that has carried out numerous attacks against Iranian civilians and government officials since the Islamic Revolution in 1979.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, a Republican from California, and Senator Bob Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, are among those that organizers say will address the three-day event.

They will be joined by Democratic Sens. Cory Booker of New Jersey and Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, as well as Republican Sens. Rick Scott of Florida, John Cornyn and Ted Cruz of Texas.

The summit, being organized by major Iranian exile organizations in the US and Europe, touted itself as “the largest-ever online international event dedicated to liberating Iran.” Organizers said they hoped the annual event will help incite uprisings against the government in the Islamic Republic.

“Iranian society is a powder keg on the verge of explosion,” Maryam Rajavi, leader of the MKO terrorist cult and president of its umbrella National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), told The Washington Times. “More ferocious and extensive uprisings are waiting to erupt at a moment’s notice.”

Albania: PMOI Nowruz celebration In Tirana

The planned summit comes as the administration of US President Joe Biden is working to potentially rejoin a landmark 2015 nuclear deal with Iran that his predecessor, Donald Trump, abandoned three years ago in defiance of international criticism.

Top US lobbying firm BGR clinches a $40,000 contract with notorious anti-Iran terrorist group, Mujahedin-e-Khalq Organization (MKO), ahead of the group

Representatives from Iran and other remaining signatories to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)– namely the UK, France, Germany, Russia and China– have been negotiating in the Austrian capital, Vienna, since April in an effort to revive the accord.

A US delegation is also in the Austrian capital, but it is not directly attending the talks because the United States is no longer a party to the deal. Iran has made it clear that all sanctions, which the JCPOA had lifted but were reimposed in the wake of the US withdrawal, should first be removed in a verifiable manner before the United States can return to the accord.

The congressional roster addressing the online MKO event indicates the political headwinds the Biden administration faces on Capitol Hill in diplomacy with Iran.

The MKO had been designated as a terrorist organization by the United States for 15 years before it was delisted in 2012, following an intense lobbying campaign by pressure groups in Washington and Iranian exiles.

Ever since, the cult, responsible for the death of more than 12,000 Iranians, has been heavily propagandized as an “Iranian opposition group” by the West.

The European Union (EU) also removed the MKO from its list of terrorist organizations in 2009, seven years after blacklisting the outfit.

MKO throws lavish conferences every year in the French capital, with senior American, Western, and Saudi Arabian officials in attendance as guests of honor.

Past attendees include former US national security advisor John Bolton, Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, former Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper, and former Saudi Arabian spy chief Prince Turki al-Faisal.

July 11, 2021 0 comments

PressTV underreport on the MEK Saudi Arabia connections

Mujahedin Khalq Organization as a terrorist group

Riyadh: MKO’s godfather

The People’s Mujahedin Organization of Iran, known better by its acronym the MKO, is a terrorist group responsible for the deaths of thousands of Iranian civilians.

Over the past four decades, the group has been committed to overthrowing the Islamic Republic of Iran through every possible means.

The notorious group sided with Saddam Hussein during Iraq’s war with Iran in the 1980s, but fell out of favor with Baghdad after he was toppled by a US-led invasion in 2003.

to download the video file click here

Since then, the group has desperately been looking for a new rich godfather for survival. Over the last few years, the terrorist group has developed close relations with the deep-pocket Saudis.

The two sides have done little to hide their ties. Quite the contrary, every now and then, they seek to flaunt their romance, in one way or another.

July 10, 2021 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq Organization as a terrorist group

Why did the Mojahedin choose violence?

Hassan Zadeh Zine el-Abidine; one of MEK victims : They fired twelve bullets in my back

Hassan is 47. He lives alone in a modest neighborhood in Isfahan, in southern Iran. He gets around by wheelchair since 1980.in that year, a member of the Mojahedin shot him several times in the back. He never recovered.
As he described it:” At the time, I was a simple worker in a mosaic workshop. In the evening, toward eight o clock, I was on my way home. I parked my car and had taken a few steps toward my house when a gunman, hidden in the dark, fired at me from point blank range. I had no time to react. From the first bullet wound, I was on the ground. The gunman, who had two revolvers, riddled my body with twelve shots. He emptied them both in me.”
Hassan was treated for several months in Tehran Hospital. He was lucky: many other people shot by the Mojahedin did not survive. His disability has not kept him from his studies. With his degree in Theology, he teaches at Isfahan’s Teacher Training College.

MEK terror activities

Hassan remembers:” it was during the first months of the revolution. Everybody was involved. but I was no more active than many others. And I had not joined any political party”. He sill cannot understand why the Mojahedin chose him as a target. His assailant was arrested soon thereafter in Sabzebar, in Khoram province in northeastern Iran. He was tried and executed. Hassan states:” I would have liked so much to hear him explain why he did it”.
Why did the Mojahedin choose violence? Hassan’s philosophical answer: “They could not take power through peaceful and democratic means in a system of universal suffrage. No human being can agree with the violent strategy they adopted”.

From the book: The People’s Mojahedin of Iran: A Struggle for what? “By Victor Charbonnier

July 8, 2021 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq Organization members' families

light of hope in the heart of MEK members families

“The news of the court is a light of hope in the heart of mine and the hearts of other families of MEK members,” said Soraya Abdollahi, a mother whose son, Amir Aslan Hassanzadeh has been captive behind the bars of the MEK for two decades.

Soraya Abdollahi

Ms. Abdollahi commented as news published on the MEK formers appearance at the headquarters of the International Court of Justice in the Hague on Monday, July 5, 2021. The Plaintiffs submitted related documents to the Secretariat of the International Court of Justice and the documents were initially examined and registered in the Secretariat office.

July 8, 2021 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Analyst: West nurture and use MKO , other terrorists to advance destructive agendas

A political commentator says certain Western countries continue to nurture and use terrorist groups such as the MKO to advance their destructive agendas against independent countries.

Canadian writer and activist Mark Taliano told Press TV in an exclusive interview on Sunday that the West plays the terrorist card in pursuit of its own interests, stressing that Washington and its allies continue to resuscitate and fortify terrorist proxies.

Taliano said the West’s support for the notorious anti-Iran terrorist group Mujahedin Khalq Organization (MKO) is consistent with its support for international terrorism.

“The West and its allies train, support, arm, command and control these terrorist assets. They play them as cards, and deploy them beneath shrouds of secrecy and disinformation,” he noted.

(From left to right: Maryam Rajavi, former leader of the MEK and current leader of the National Council of Resistance of Iran talks with Rudy Giuliani and Senator Joe Lieberman at the free Iran Gathering, July 1, 2017. (Maryam Rajavi/Flickr)

The MKO has carried out numerous terrorist attacks against Iranian civilians and government officials since the victory of the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979. Out of the nearly 17,000 Iranians killed in terrorist attacks over the past four decades, about 12,000 have fallen victim to the group’s acts of terror.

During former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s war on Iran between 1980 and 1988, MKO members were armed and equipped by Iraq and fought alongside Ba’ath forces against the Islamic Republic.

After the war, the US and the European Union removed the MKO from their lists of terrorist organizations in order to use them as proxies against Iran. The terrorists enjoy freedom of activity in the US and Europe, and even hold meetings with top American and European officials.

Faced with the growing anger among many Iraqis who had suffered at the hands of Saddam’s forces and MKO henchmen, the terrorists were relocated by the US from their Camp Ashraf in Iraq’s Diyala Province in 2016 and sent to Albania, from where they continue their anti-Iran activities.

Taliano said the West, in its policy against sovereign nations, commits crimes against humanity and uses terrorists as an appendage.

The West’s operations against sovereign countries are multi-faceted, and include massive propaganda through media cartels and various assets on the ground, he said.

Taliano pointed to the presence of the so-called civil defense group White Helmets in Syria, emphasizing that its members are essentially the assets of al-Qaeda and Daesh terrorist groups in order to depict savage imperial barbarism as “humanitarian”.
He said the West is currently supporting al-Qaeda and its affiliates in Syria’s militant-held northwestern province of Idlib.

The Canadian pundit referred to the so-called Caesar Act as well as other US and EU sanctions as collective punishment of Syrians living in government-controlled areas.

“Military actions involving active warfare, terrorist attacks, occupation, illegal bombardment of Syrians, coupled with economic warfare and myriad strategies of deception, all serve West’s purpose to destroy and balkanize Syria,” Taliano said.

July 8, 2021 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq Organization

The Rajavis one step forward to trial

Ex-members of the Mujahedin Khalq Organization (MEK, MKO, PMOI, Cult of Rajavi), current members of the group and their families are all victims of its cult-like and violent practices during over forty years.
42 former members of the Cult of Rajavi raised their complaint in the Iranian judicial system in March 2019. Branch 55 of the Tehran International Legal and General Court officially registered their complaint, and on March 7 and 8, 2021, court hearings were held. The primary verdict of the Court was issued on March 16, 2021. The Iranian judiciary, in accordance with civil procedures, sent notices to the governments of France and Albania to notify the defendants, who are residents there, of the verdict.

court hearing on MKO leaders crimes

A petition was consequently filed on Change.org in support of the complaint of these 42 Former members against the leaders of the MEK. “These people were enslaved and contained in the closed and remote Camp Ashraf in Iraq, isolated from the outside world, and subjected to the conditions of severe cultic abuse,” the petition read. The petition has so far reached near five thousand signatures.

MEK defectors at Hague

Following the final verdict of the Iranian judiciary and the accompanying media coverage of the case at domestic and international levels, the number of plaintiffs has been on the rise. They seek to file a complaint with international judicial bodies against the MEK leaders.
The file was finally referred to The International Court of Justice in The Hague, Netherlands, under the Iranian judicial law and international justice, in the early days of July 2021.

Former members of the MEK and families of current members –who are taken as hostages in the group– welcome the new action taken to bring Massoud and Maryam Rajavi to justice. They are hopeful that the International Criminal Court in The Hague prosecute the MEK leaders who continue to practice cultic abuse and violate the most basic rights of their members while asking compensation for some of the damage caused by years of modern slavery inside the group.

Soraya Abdollahi

A number of ex-members of the group including some of the petitioners of the complaint has sent messages to express their happiness and their desire for a fair trial for the MEK leaders.
The release of brainwashed radicalized members of the Cult of Rajavi will naturally be the secondary consequence of a fair trial of MEK leaders. “The news of the court is a light of hope in the heart of mine and the hearts of other families of MEK members,” said Soraya Abdollahi, a mother whose son, Amir Aslan Hassanzadeh has been captive behind the bars of the MEK for two decades.

July 7, 2021 0 comments

Maryam Rajavi

What is the point of Maryam Rajavi

Three decades ago in 1993, Maryam Rajavi was appointed ‘president elect’ of a free Iran as envisioned by her husband Massoud Rajavi. In a once only election, in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, with Maryam as the only candidate, the electorate – members of the Council of the National Council of Resistance (a pseudonym for the Mojahedin e Khalq) – voted for her unanimously. Turnout was 100%. She has ruled over the members ever since without even a whiff of democratic due process.

The point of Maryam Rajavi back then was to create a feminist brand that would win political support in the west among Iran’s enemies. Massoud Rajavi sent her to France to perform this specific task. Of course, putting aside their diverse politics, we have many examples of strong female leadership. In opposition, Marine Le Pen is a tough, capable woman, able to command attention and attract a substantial following, while withstanding harsh criticism. (Maryam Rajavi treats all criticism as an existential threat.) Jacinda Adern has demonstrated that it is possible to have a baby and lead a country. (Maryam Rajavi presided over forced hysterectomies among the female leadership cadre due to her husband’s whim to have sex with them.)

Over three decades Maryam Rajavi has proven incapable of commanding attention or support. The MEK as an entity has certainly been a useful tool for the anti-Iran crowd. But this was not Rajavi’s doing, rather the MEK simply amplified the agenda, narrative and messaging which already existed. The MEK added to the cacophony of noise rather than create or conduct it.

For three decades the MEK has had to pay for audiences and speakers alike to attend ever more lavish carnival-like rallies to showcase Maryam Rajavi’s ‘leadership’. Year on year under her rule, the MEK has become more and more toxic and indefensible. To the point that now Maryam Rajavi has become persona non grata in exactly those countries she tried to woo. The USA has never allowed her into the country. The UK, allowed her one short visit in 1996. France, under the pressure of a CIA brokered deal (certainly there will be traces of Donald Rumsfeld in this murky deal), was forced to host her and her cult until, in 2018, Rajavi was forced out of the EU and exiled to Albania.
This year, from her headquarters in Albania, Maryam Rajavi will again front this annual event. This time a virtual event due to coronavirus restrictions. One development, however, is that MEK have hired lobbying firm BGR Group in Washington with a $40,000 contract to put on the event. There are several takeaways from this.

The MEK is so reduced and depleted of supporters that it does not have the capacity to organise this itself.

The MEK still has lots of money. Foreign money. (Although the MEK is perennially coy about the source of its funding, the words ‘Saudi Arabia’ and ‘finance’ and ‘MEK’ are frequently used in the same sentence.) BGR Group is promoting a foreign group using foreign money to influence American foreign policy. Well, at least it’s registered.

The bipartisan speaker list may give the appearance of US support, but these are paid speakers, not affiliates. Not one Iranian will be allowed on the stage with Maryam Rajavi. This is not only due to the fact that no Iranian would be willing to be associated with the blood soaked Rajavi brand. The exclusion of Iranian speakers is down to the impossibility of Rajavi presenting as the head of a political group when she is actually the sole leader of a cult, every one of which’s members exists in a state of modern slavery.

As the theme for her rally, Maryam Rajavi has instructed BGR Group to focus on Iran’s newly elected president Ebrahim Raisi. Not, as the leader of an opposition group, to challenge his present-day policies, but to question his role in events which took place in 1988 at the end of the Iran-Iraq war. Rajavi had three decades to pursue this line of enquiry in her role as ‘president elect’. She didn’t. Perhaps it’s only now that Raisi is the real president of Iran that reality has hit home. That reality is that there is not much point to Maryam Rajavi. She does not lead anyone except her own enslaved followers in Albania. She cannot command respect and attention among even the most virulent of Iran’s enemies and has to pay people to attend and speak at her self-promoting events. We cannot fault BGR Group. It’s what they do. But everyone else who is not being paid by Rajavi is entitled to ask: Really, what’s the point of Maryam Rajavi?

July 7, 2021 0 comments

Former members of the MEK

MEK leaders’ crimes to be prosecuted at ICC

A group of former members and high-rankings of the MEK Cult appeared at the headquarters of the International Court of Justice in the Hague on Monday, July 5, 2021. The Plaintiffs submitted related documents to the Secretariat of the International Court of Justice.The documents were initially examined and registered in the Secretariat office.

MEK defectors at Hague court

A number of MEK cult ex-members held an action in front of the Supreme Court in The Hague and exposed the crimes of the MEK leaders by installing banners and distributing announcements.

Ghafour Fatahian and Isa Azade

MEK defectors at Hague

July 6, 2021 0 comments

Massoud Rajavi

Massoud Rajavi, Don Juan or Revolutionary leader?

When in 2003, Elizabeth Rubin of the New York Times visit Camp Ashraf, the headquarters of the Mujahedin Khalq (MKO/ MEK/ PMOI/ Cult of Rajavi) in Iraq, she reported what he had witnessed in an unbiased article titled “The Cult of Rajavi”. The article that turned out to be one of the most reliable sources on the MEK contained two paragraphs on how Massoud Rajavi replaced men with women in the command structure of his cult of personality. “Rajavi liked having women around him,” Rubin wrote.

However, it took the world almost a decade to know about sexual abuses that Massoud Rajavi committed against women of his group by the company of his wife and co-leader Maryam Rajavi and certain female commanders of the group. New evidences indicated that Massoud Rajavi is actually a Don Juan; an obsessive seducer of female members of his cult.

Massoud Rajavi

Gender segregation and forced divorces of married members of the group was one of the proceeding steps for woman abuse in the MEK. The 2009 report by the RAND Corporation noted how MEK rank-and-file had to swear “an oath of devotion to the Rajavis on the Koran” and highlighted the MEK’s “authoritarian, cultic practices” including ‘mandatory divorce and celibacy” for the group’s members. “Love for the Rajavis was to replace love for spouses and family,” explained the RAND report.

In Camp Ashraf Iraq and Albania, lines were “painted down the middle of hallways separating them into men’s and women’s sides,” according to RAND, and even the gas station there had “separate hours for men and women.”
In March 2020 Murtaza Hussain and Matthew Cole of the Intercept interviewed six defectors, including several who held senior positions and allegedly offered the most detailed account to date of what life was like inside the MEK. They interviewed Batool Soltani an MEK female commander and a member of the Elite Council of the group.

Batoul Soltani

“Maryam Rajavi came to us as female members of the group many times and asked us why we haven’t demanded to see our leader in his bedroom,” Soltani told the Intercept. “There was a strong pressure” on MEK women to initiate sexual relationships with Rajavi, she said, “to show your commitment to the leader and the group.” During a long brainwashing procedure, Batool was convinced by Maryam Rajavi to sleep with Massoud. Soltani has given written and filmed evidences on the whole procedure.
Another female member of the Elite Council, whom The Intercept agreed to identify only as Sima, said she joined the MEK in the 1980s and left it in 2014. “Unlike other former members, Sima asked that her real name not be used because she feared retaliation from current MEK members.,” the intercept writes. “She now lives in hiding in a European country and agreed to meet privately in a place where other local supporters of the group were unlikely to see her.”

Rajavi gave every single woman in the organization a pendant

Like many other female members of the MEK, Sima was also victim of Rajavi’s passion for power and women. According to the Intercept, for most of the next 14 years, Sima was confined to one section of Camp Ashraf, unable to move freely on her own. Like Batool Sultani, Sima described an intense form of psychosexual manipulation by Rajavi that she said became an integral tool for controlling female cadres. Years earlier, in 1995, “Rajavi gave every single woman in the organization a pendant and told us that we are all connected to him and to no other man,” Sima said. She was forced to divorce her husband and, like Sultani, eventually became sexually involved with Rajavi.

Don Juan’s entire career of seduction is based on his desire to humiliate women. As Don Juan Tenorio says in the famous Jose Zorrilla’s play: “my greatest pleasure is to trick women and leave them dishonored”.
Mazda Parsi

July 6, 2021 0 comments

USA

Rumsfeld Used MEK Terrorists During And After Saddam

“The only thing tragic about the death of Donald Rumsfeld is that it didn’t occur in an Iraqi prison.”

Donald Rumsfeld, the former U.S. congressman, aide to several Republican presidents, and two-time defense secretary whose torture-laden tenure and ruinous legacy were defined by his lies in service of an unending war that’s killed at least hundreds of thousands of people, died Tuesday at age 88.

By the time he was chosen as then-President George W. Bush’s secretary of defense, Rumsfeld had already been a Navy veteran, four-term Republican U.S. congressman, and adviser to former Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford—for whom he had served as defense secretary.

In the early 1980s, President Ronald Reagan repeatedly dispatched Rumsfeld as a special envoy to Iraq, whose brutal dictator Saddam Hussein was at the time an important U.S. ally. An infamous handshake between Rumsfeld and Hussein led to the transfer of deadly chemical and biological materials from the U.S. and allies to Iraq. Hussein subsequently weaponized the components and unleashed weapons of mass destruction on both Iranian troops—with the assistance of the Reagan administration—and Iraqi Kurds during the genocidal (pdf) Anfal campaign.

Rumsfeld

As Bush’s defense secretary, Rumsfeld—who served as CEO or chairman of companies including General Instrument and Gilead Sciences—recruited an inner circle of former corporate executives to oversee Pentagon operations, including Air Force Secretary James G. Roche (Northrop Grumman), Navy Secretary Gordon England (General Dynamics), and Army Secretary Thomas E. White (Enron). So great was the influence of the arms industry in the department during Rumsfeld’s tenure that one commentator described it as “Department of Defense, Inc.”

Given his passing today, let’s do some of former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s greatest hits (add your own below).

Here he is, in 2002, being asked about his 1983 meeting with Saddam Hussain. Rumsfeld’s “isn’t that interesting…there I am” lives in my head rent free. pic.twitter.com/h4PifdOe1r

— Sana Saeed (@SanaSaeed) June 30, 2021

An ardent imperialist, Rumsfeld was a leading luminary of the neoconservative movement and a prominent leader of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), whose other members included Bush administration officials such as Dick Cheney, John Bolton, Elliott Abrams, and Paul Wolfowitz.

PNAC hawks—who envisioned and strategized regime change in Iraq and elsewhere even before 9/11—lobbied vigorously for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, even though they knew the country had no connection with the September 11, 2001 attacks on the U.S. or weapons of mass destruction. When pressed on this last point, Rumsfeld offered perhaps his most infamous explanation:

As we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know.

In the rushed run-up to invade Iraq, Rumsfeld dutifully disseminated Bush administration lies about Hussein’s nonexistent nuclear program, while laughably asserting that the Iraq invasion had “literally nothing to do with oil.”

This is Donald Rumsfeld’s legacy:

“We know they have weapons of mass destruction. We know they have active programs. There isn’t any debate about it.

6 months later, the US invaded #Iraq. pic.twitter.com/8TRKdlkNd7

— Assal Rad (@AssalRad) June 30, 2021

The invasion of Iraq, at first called Operation Iraqi Liberation (OIL) began in the dark of night with a Navy SEAL raid on two offshore Iraqi oil platforms. The New York Times—which parroted many of the administration’s Iraq lies—hailed this as the first “victory in the battle for Iraq’s vast oil empire.”

Rumsfeld predicted a quick and easy war in Iraq. “Five days or five weeks or five months, but it certainly isn’t going to last any longer than that,” he declared in November 2002 with cocksure miscalculation. Although former President Barack Obama officially ended the Iraq War in December 2011, U.S. troops are still stationed there today—and President Joe Biden bombed the country earlier this week.

When U.S. forces conquered Baghdad, one of the first sites they secured was the Oil Ministry headquarters. Meanwhile, the Iraqi National Museum, which housed priceless ancient artifacts spanning Mesopotamia’s 5,000-year history, was being looted. Thousands of statues, manuscripts, and countless other treasures, some of them among the oldest objects created by civilized humans, were stolen while nearby U.S. troops did nothing.

“Stuff happens,” Rumsfeld flippantly replied when faced with images of the looting. “The images you are seeing on television you are seeing over and over, and it’s the same picture of some person walking out of some building with a vase, and you see it 20 times, and you think, ‘My goodness, were there that many vases? Is it possible that there were that many vases in the whole country?’”

Thousands of U.S. troops would die during the course of the U.S.-led invasion and occupation of the country, along with hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. The latter were practically ignored by Bush officials. When Rumsfeld was asked why the public only hears about the number of American war dead and not about Iraqi casualties, he cooly replied that “we don’t do body counts on other people.”

Donald Rumsfeld was war criminal. He didn’t merely “oversee” Iraq War. He was an architect, who backed extrajudicial executions and systematic torture at Abu Ghraib, Bagram, Guantanamo Bay and other prisons. He approved torture plans for Mohamedou Slahi and Mohammed al-Qahtani

— Kevin Gosztola (@kgosztola) June 30, 2021

Rumsfeld was also an instrumental figure in the Bush administration’s torture program. He signed off on torture techniques used by U.S. troops at Guantánamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and elsewhere—places where prisoners were sometimes tortured to death. He also issued a directive allowing torturers to withhold medical care to prisoners under interrogation who had injuries as serious as gunshot wounds. Later, Rumsfeld would require doctors to certify that detainees slated for torture were certified “medically and operationally” fit for abuse.

The torture memo signed by Donald Rumsfeld, 12/2/02, authorizing 20-hour interrogations, removal of clothing, the use of phobias, and stress positions for up to 4 hours.

Note his handwriting at bottom: “However, I stand for 8-10 hours A day. Why is Standing limited to 4 hours” pic.twitter.com/F34zbkJ5HQ

— George Zornick (@gzornick) June 30, 2021

When the Abu Ghraib torture photo scandal broke, Rumsfeld—after outing the courageous soldier who exposed the abuse—lied about what he knew.

Gen. Antonio Taguba, author of an Army report (pdf) on U.S. torture at Abu Ghraib, said he met with Rumsfeld and other Pentagon brass just before the defense secretary testified to the Senate about abuse at the notorious prison. Taguba, who had seen thousands of photos of detainee abuse, says Rumsfeld asked him if what was happening in the Iraqi prison was abuse or torture.

“I described a naked detainee lying on the wet floor, handcuffed, with an interrogator shoving things up his rectum and said: ‘That’s not abuse. That’s torture.’ There was quiet,’” the general recalled.

#DonaldRumsfeld is responsible for thousands and thousands of deaths and enriching himself in the process. The least we can do is to forever link his name with “war criminal”.

— Veterans For Peace (@VFPNational) June 30, 2021

Yet Rumsfeld testified before the Senate that nobody in the Pentagon had seen the Abu Ghraib torture photos.

However, a Senate Armed Services Committee investigation concluded that “Rumsfeld’s authorization of interrogation techniques… was a direct cause of detainee abuse.”

The senators additionally asserted that it was “unconscionable and false” for leading Bush officials to blame a “few bad apples” in the military for detainee abuse in order to avoid accountability.

Neocon #WaronTerror, #Iraq war and #torture #architect #DonaldRumsfeld has passed away. His legacy of death, destruction, murder and abuse will be remembered by those who experienced it. But, his appointment with dawn has come. pic.twitter.com/v0egPcpMi4

— Moazzam Begg (@Moazzam_Begg) June 30, 2021

While fighting a war purportedly meant to defeat terrorism in some parts of the world, Rumsfeld supported terror elsewhere. Pursuing allies in the so-called War on Terror, Rumsfeld courted dictators including Uzbekistan’s Islam Karimov—who boiled political opponents alive—and the Iranian exile militants Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), a State Department-designated terrorist organization.

CIA personnel wait as President George W. Bush visits CIA Headquarters, March 20, 2001, Langley, VA. Photo by Brooks Kraft – Corbis for Time dcfeed

Meanwhile, a Senate Foreign Relations Committee report concluded that Rumsfeld let bin Laden escape in December 2001. The report also said Rumsfeld’s failures ultimately left Americans more vulnerable to terrorism.

It wasn’t as if Rumsfeld did not understand the real root causes of anti-U.S. terrorism. In 2004, he commissioned a task force to study the subject. It concluded that “Muslims do not ‘hate our freedom,’ but rather, they hate our policies.” The task force report cited “American direct intervention in the Muslim world,” U.S. support for dictators in countries including Saudi Arabia and Egypt, and, most of all, “the American occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Yet Rumsfeld remained an unrepentant cheerleader for war and empire until the end. Medea Benjamin, the co-founder of the women-led peace group CodePink who famously confronted the former defense secretary over his war crimes, tweeted that “his legacy of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan lives on.”

Here’s the day we introduced Donald Rumsfeld as a war criminal at the White House Correspondents Dinner. Of course, he got to eat the nice dinner and we got booted out. Crime pays. https://t.co/6OWFL39MPA

— Medea Benjamin (@medeabenjamin) July 1, 2021

“Donald Rumsfeld was a merciless war criminal who presided over systemic torture, massacres of civilians, [and] illegal wars,” tweeted journalist and The Intercept co-founder Jeremy Scahill. “That’s his legacy and how he should forever be remembered.”

Daily Beast senior national security correspondent Spencer Ackerman wrote, “The only thing tragic about the death of Donald Rumsfeld is that it didn’t occur in an Iraqi prison.”

On the bright side, Donald Rumsfeld gets to shake hands once again with Saddam Hussein AND Nixon.

— John Fugelsang (@JohnFugelsang) June 30, 2021

“Do not mourn the defense secretary,” said Ackerman. “Mourn his victims. There were nearly too many to tally, but his Pentagon refused to count anyway.

BRETT WILKINS, STAFF WRITER, commondreams

July 6, 2021 0 comments

Newer Posts

Older Posts