Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Bolton and the MEK

Re-reading part of John Bolton’s op-ed calling for war with Iran, I noticed something that I had overlooked the first time:

An attack need not destroy all of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, but by breaking key links in the nuclear-fuel cycle, it could set back its program by three to five years. The United States could do a thorough job of destruction, but Israel alone can do what’s necessary. Such action should be combined with vigorous American support for Iran’s opposition, aimed at regime change in Tehran [bold mine-DL].

Peter Beinart objects to Bolton’s op-ed in part because Bolton, who was a leading advocate for the invasion of Iraq, pays no attention to the possible negative consequences of a war with Iran. That’s a fair point. Hawks frequently ignore or minimize the costs and risks of the military action they’re urging the government to take, they exaggerate the efficacy of hard power to “solve” problems, and they often fail to anticipate or plan for unintended consequences of the wars they support. These are all good reasons to view any hawkish argument for war very skeptically, especially when it comes from someone with such an appalling track record. There is another reason to view anything Bolton has to say about Iran in particular with great suspicion.

Bolton is hardly the only former official, retired officer, or ex-politician to do this, but for the last several years he has been a vocal cheerleader of the Mujahideen-e Khalq cult (and “former” terrorist group) and its political organization. He has been consistently misrepresenting a totalitarian cult as a “democratic” Iranian opposition group. When Bolton or someone else with this record talks about “vigorous American support for Iran’s opposition,” we can be fairly sure that he means that the U.S. should be backing the MEK in its quest for seizing power in Iran.

This confirms Bolton’s extremely poor judgment and underscores how truly crazy his overall argument for war with Iran is. It also reminds us how oblivious Iran hawks such as Bolton are to the political realities inside Iran. Once again we have a hawkish demand for U.S. support for an exile group that has absolutely no support in its own country in order to achieve regime change. Indeed, the group that Bolton has been helping to promote is widely loathed in Iran for good reason and has no credibility at all with the domestic political opposition. It is Bolton’s embrace of the MEK as much as anything else that ought to discredit his views on Iran policy.

By Daniel Larison

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Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

John Bolton and the nuclear terrorists

Many bloggers have noted John Bolton’s instantly-notorious editorial demanding war with Iran. Most commentators have neglected to mention one key fact: Bolton himself is linked to terrorism — including nuclear terrorism.

Bolton has received very hefty fees for speaking on behalf of a group called the MEK, which seeks the overthrow of the present government of Iran, and which is widely credited with carrying out assassinations within that country.

Until recently, the United States kept the MEK on the official list of terrorist organizations. From a 2012 U.S. News & World Report story:

As recently as 2007, a State Department report warned that the M.E.K., retains "the capacity and will" to attack "Europe, the Middle East, the United States, Canada, and beyond."

The M.E.K., which calls for an overthrow of the Iranian government and is considered by many Iranians to be a cult, once fought for Saddam Hussein and in the 1970s was responsible for bombings, attempted plane hijackings, and political assassinations. It was listed as a foreign terrorist organization in 1997.

At one time, the MEK considered itself to be Marxist. That fact makes Bolton’s association with the group seem particularly cute.

One of the lobbyists working on behalf of the MEK was Victoria Toensing, who played a role in the Monica Lewenski affair, and who later told lies about Valerie Plame Wilson. Toensing says that the MEK has "reformed its violent past." Those murdered scientists might disagree, if they could speak.

(I wonder how Toensing would react to someone who said that Hamas was no longer a terrorist organization…?)

But the MEK is only one part of the story. The Intercept helps us zoom out for a wider view.

In his call for war with Iran, Bolton said that, during the Reagan years, Pakistan was allowe3d to develop the bomb only because the United States was "inattentive." That’s a particularly droll phrase to use.

Rather than being “inattentive,” the Reagan administration – in which Bolton served – proactively helped Pakistan violate U.S. law and purchase key material for its nuclear weapons in the United States. Reagan also falsely certified to Congress that Pakistan did not have nuclear weapons so that the U.S. could continue sending the country hundreds of millions of dollars in aid each year. When a Defense Department intelligence analyst complained, the George H.W. Bush administration – in which Bolton also served – fired the analyst and stripped him of his security clearances. The analyst, whose life was ruined, discovered that the specific officials involved in his firing included Scooter Libby and Stephen Hadley – both then working for Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney and both, of course, key ideological allies of John Bolton.

The Intercept’s story is good, but does not go far enough.

It should be recalled the the so-called "father of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb,’ A. Q. Khan, tried to sell nuclear technology to Libya and North Korea. From a 2010 L.A. Times review of a book on nuclear terrorism…

Much of this perilous state of affairs can be traced to the villainous deeds of Abdul Qadeer Khan. A.Q. Khan, as he is known, is the self-described father of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb and the self-confessed mastermind of a criminal network that seemingly sold nuclear weapons technology like it was aluminum siding. The proof: Nearly every nation that has tried to build or obtain a nuclear device in the last 30 years has relied on Khan’s black market enterprise.

For years, government officials downplayed or ignored Khan’s illicit trade as industrial spying, or violations of export control laws, rather than as nuclear espionage on behalf of a foreign power. Security breaches were repeatedly concealed lest they jeopardize other diplomatic priorities or corporate profit margins. It is a terrifying tale, not least because the failure to prosecute or imprison most of Khan’s associates means the world’s most dangerous business may still be thriving.

Other books have sketched Khan’s story, but Albright mines previously unavailable documents, and he interviews key players for new details. He chronicles how Khan stole classified blueprints from a European consortium to jumpstart Pakistan’s uranium enrichment program in the mid-1970s and then did what no Western scientist considered remotely possible – he built an atomic bomb in Pakistan by secretly buying and assembling component parts from abroad.

In the 1980s, Khan again broke new ground: He began selling complete nuclear factories and the know-how to construct bombs, something only governments had done before.

That’s what John Bolton’s pals helped to unleash on the world. And now this guy thinks that he has the moral standing to call for war against Iran.

The CIA whistleblower referenced by The Intercept was Richard Barlow. Sy Hersh wrote about him in 1992, in the New Yorker…

Barlow, now thirty-eight years old, was hired by the C.I.A. in 1985 and quickly became one of the agency’s top experts on Pakistan’s nuclear program. In 1987, he was dismayed to learn, at first hand, that State Department and agency officials were engaged in what he concluded was a pattern of lying to and misleading Congress about Pakistan’s nuclear-purchasing activities. He resigned a year later, after senior agency officials attempted to bar him from working on Pakistan.

And just what was John Bolton doing in the Reagan administration at this time?

During the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations, he worked in several positions within the State Department, the Justice Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). He was a "protege" of conservative North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms.

USAID has strong ties to CIA. I think that we may fairly posit that Bolton was one of the State Department officials whose actions alarmed Barlow.

The origin of the Pakistani bomb is a disturbing and hideously under-discussed tale. Joseph Trento reveals a fair amount of the story in Prelude to Terror, a book discussed in several previous Cannonfire posts. Greg Palast has also done some fine work in this area.

The Pakistani bomb was really the Saudi bomb, since Saudi Arabia arranged for much of the financing. Both the funds and the necessary nuclear materials were channeled through a secret organization called The Safari Club.

Prince Turki bin Faisal, the head of Saudi intelligence from 1977 to 2001, revealed the existence of this group during a 2002 speech in Georgetown:

And now I will go back to the secret that I promised to tell you. In 1976, after the Watergate matters took place here, your intelligence community was literally tied up by Congress. It could not do anything. It could not send spies, it could not write reports, and it could not pay money. In order to compensate for that, a group of countries got together in the hope of fighting Communism and established what was called the Safari Club. The Safari Club included France, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Iran. The principal aim of this club was that we would share information with each other in countering Soviet influence worldwide, and especially in Africa.

Turki here offers a skewed reading of what went on during the 1970s. The CIA did send out spies throughout this period, and those operatives got up to all sorts of spooky mischief. That said, it is true that the hardest of the hardliners no longer ruled the roost at CIA during the Carter years.

That’s why reactionary intel professionals in various countries set up their own alternative networks. The main one — though not, I believe, the only one — was the Safari Club.

One of the key operatives within this little club was Ed Wilson. Although younger readers may not recognize that name, Wilson used to be infamous as the "rogue" CIA operative who turned terrorist. That’s a huge story which we may get into in another post.

Right now, let’s return to Trento’s book:

    The same leadership that promulgated the Safari Club-the Saudi royals-also strongly funded and supported the Islamic Development Bank…. It was through the bank’s scientific and economic development efforts that huge amounts were funneled into Pakistan, which ended up in the hands of A.Q. Khan and his now-infamous nuclear bomb-building syndicate.

During the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, this network sent a massive amount of money to Pakistan, because the ISI (Pakistan’s CIA) handled much of the funding for the jihadis. (As you know, the anti-Soviet fighters included a promising fellow named Osama Bin Laden).

But Pakistan also dipped into this treasure trove for its own purposes. India had a bomb, and now Pakistan wanted one. The Saudis wanted to pay for it. To make the Saudis and the Pakistanis happy, the United States was willing to countenance the creation of the Islamic world’s first nuke.

As noted above, A.Q. Khan later shopped the technology around to various "rogue" states. Some even claim that he tried to give a small nuke to Al Qaeda.

Did the U.S. know about Khan’s activities? Of course.

A senior source in the British government, who asks not to be named, confirms that Khan ran the network and that parts for the nuclear-weapons program came from the United States. Khan’s daughter, attending school in England, was being tutored, and at the ends of faxes dealing with logistics for her education, Khan would sometimes write, in his own hand, items he needed for the nuclear program.

So that’s the tale of the Pakistani bomb, a baby which the Reagan administration State Department helped to midwive — at a time when John Bolton was an important official in that administration.

If this background briefing seems ancient or abstruse to you — well, all I can say is this: The tale of how the Pakistani bomb came into existence will suddenly seem very interesting to you on the day when CNN describes the blinding flash of light that evaporated thousands of people.

If and when that terrible day comes, don’t rely on the mainstream media to tell you the full story of how nuclear technology spread in that part of the world. I imagine that our journalists will spew a lot of hooey about Iran. You won’t hear much about A.Q. Khan and Pakistan.

And you certainly won’t hear anything about John Bolton.

Cannonfire.blogspot.com

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Former members of the MEK

Pictorial – Mr. Najjarian declares his defection from the destructive Cult of MKO

Mr. Najjarian says:” I missed eleven years of my life within this Cult. For the sake of this cult, I left my life,my youth,my wishes ,my attachments and my family. I tolerated sufferings, pains and miseries during more than a decade of my membership in the MKO Cult. However, finally I painfully found out that the organization for which I and thousands others like me dedicated everything we had; including our lives, was nothing more than a destructive cult with an egoist leader. And that all we did were in fact to meet the ambitions of the Cult leader.

Mr. Najjarian declares his defection from the destructive Cult of MKO

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Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

The Factual Errors in John Bolton’s “Bomb Iran!”

Last week, at a crucial moment in nuclear negotiations between the U.S. and Iran, the New York Times published an op-ed by former U.S. Ambassador to the UN John Bolton titled “To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran.” As I pointed out at the time, the Times accidentally undermined him by linking one of his key claims to an explanation of why that claim was wrong. After I asked about it, the Times changed the link.

 Bolton’s many other factual mistakes, detailed below, have also not been corrected — on top of which, Bolton failed to make a relevant disclosure about his paid work for a group that advocates the overthrow of the Iranian regime. It’s worth dwelling on these problems a bit given that Bolton’s perspective has a significant constituency in Congress — which could still derail the accord the White House is closing in on with the Iranians.

 • Bolton: the Obama administration has “abandon[ed] the red line on weapons-grade fuel…”

 This is false. Natural uranium contains only 0.7% uranium-235, the isotope needed both for nuclear power and nuclear weapons. Uranium can be used as reactor fuel when enriched to 3-5% uranium-235, but it only becomes weapons-grade when enriched to about 90%. The “Joint Plan of Action” agreed to in 2013 by Iran, the U.S. and other nations capped Iran’s permitted ability to enrich at 5%, the level of reactor fuel. Under the framework announced this week, Iran will agree not to enrich uranium beyond 3.67% for at least fifteen years. There’s no evidence that the Obama administration ever considered a long-term agreement that would allow Iran to enrich uranium to 90%, or indeed anywhere past 5%.

 • Bolton: “There is now widespread acknowledgment that the rosy 2007 National Intelligence Estimate, which judged that Iran’s weapons program was halted in 2003, was an embarrassment, little more than wishful thinking.”

 “Widespread acknowledgement” could mean almost anything – for instance, in my apartment there’s widespread acknowledgment that I should be cast as the next James Bond. And presumably there’s widespread acknowledgement among John Bolton’s friends that they’ve never believed the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on Iran. However, the Times itself reported in 2012 that “Recent assessments by American spy agencies are broadly consistent with a 2007 intelligence finding that concluded that Iran had abandoned its nuclear weapons program years earlier” and that that “remains the consensus view of America’s 16 intelligence agencies.” Moreover, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence commented that Bolton’s op-ed “misrepresents several [Intelligence Community] positions.”

 • Bolton: the U.S. was “guilty of inattention” regarding Pakistan’s development of nuclear weapons.

 Rather than being “inattentive,” the Reagan administration – in which Bolton served – proactively helped Pakistan violate U.S. law and purchase key material for its nuclear weapons in the United States. Reagan also falsely certified to Congress that Pakistan did not have nuclear weapons so that the U.S. could continue sending the country hundreds of millions of dollars in aid each year. When a Defense Department intelligence analyst complained, the George H.W. Bush administration – in which Bolton also served – fired the analyst and stripped him of his security clearances. The analyst, whose life was ruined, discovered that the specific officials involved in his firing included Scooter Libby and Stephen Hadley – both then working for Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney and both, of course, key ideological allies of John Bolton.

 • Bolton does not disclose his paid speeches on behalf of the MEK.

 The Times identifies Bolton only as “a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute [and] the United States ambassador to the United Nations from August 2005 to December 2006.” However, Bolton has acknowledged delivering paid speeches in support of the People’s Mojahedin of Iran, or MEK. The MEK advocates the overthrow of the Iranian government (as Bolton does himself in his op-ed) and was designated as a terrorist organization by the U.S. until 2012. According to a 2012 NBC report, U.S. officials believe the MEK has carried out assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists with training and financing from Israel.

 Bolton did not respond to questions about how much he has been paid by the MEK. However, the Financial Times reported in 2011 that speakers such as Bolton received from $20,000 to $100,000 per speech, with four-speech packages being “common.”

 According to the Times’ own stated policy, contributors such as Bolton are contractually required both to disclose any conflicts of interest to the Times and be truthful:

 We request that you disclose anything that might be seen as a conflict of interest, financial or otherwise … We need to know. That doesn’t mean we’ll throw out your article on that basis — in most cases it just means disclosing the relationship to the reader. We also need all of the material that supports the facts in your story … Yes, we do fact check. Do we do it perfectly? Of course not. Everyone makes mistakes, and when we do we correct them. But the facts in a piece must be supported and validated.

 None of the above, however, makes any impression on the Times op-ed editors. Asked for comment, they responded: “Mr. Bolton’s views and affiliations are widely known and a matter of public record. All our Op-Ed articles are fact-checked. We do not see a factual error that needs to be corrected.”

Jon Schwarz, The Intercept

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Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

US-Israel Wage War on Iran in Syria

The ongoing conflict in Syria has always been a proxy conflict aimed at  Iran, as well as nearby Russia, and more distant China. As far back as 2007, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour Hersh warned in his 9-page New Yorker report “The Redirection Is the Administration’s new policy benefitting our enemies in the war on terrorism?,” that a region-wide sectarian war was being engineered by the US, Saudi Arabia, and Israel – all of whom were working in concert even in 2007, to build the foundation of a sectarian militant army.

The report would cite various serving and former US officials who warned that the extremists the West was backing were “preparing for cataclysmic conflict.”

In retrospect, considering the emergence of the so-called “Islamic State” (ISIS), Hersh’s warning has turned out to be prophetic. The destabilization of Syria and Lebanon were noted in particular as prerequisites for a coming war with Iran. Confirming this would be the lengthy policy treatise published by the Brookings Institution in 2009 titled, “Which Path to Persia?”

In it, it is openly discussed that regime change for the purpose of establishing regional hegemony is the only goal of the United States and its regional partners, with attempts to frame the conflict with Iran as an issue of “national security” and “global stability” serving as mere canards.

Throughout the document, US policymakers admit that negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program are merely one of several pretexts being used to foster political subversion from within and justify war from beyond Iran’s borders.

More importantly, Brookings details explicitly how the US will wage war on Iran, through Israel, in order to maintain plausible deniability. It states specifically under a chapter titled, “Allowing or Encouraging an Israeli Military Strike,” that:

…the most salient advantage this option has over that of an American air campaign is the possibility that Israel alone would be blamed for the attack. If this proves true, then the United States might not have to deal with Iranian retaliation or the diplomatic backlash that would accompany an American military operation against Iran. It could allow Washington to have its cake (delay Iran’s acquisition of a nuclear weapon) and eat it, too (avoid undermining many other U.S. regional diplomatic initiatives).

Various diplomatic postures are discussed in consideration of the best formula to mitigate complicity amid a “unilateral” Israeli strike on Iran. Of course, and as the report notes, US-Israeli foreign policy is unified with Israel’s defenses a product of vast and continuous US support. Anything Israel does, therefore, no matter the political or diplomatic facade constructed, it does with America’s full backing – hence the inclusion of “encouraging” in the title of the chapter.

Today, an alleged “fallout” between the US and Israel has been grabbing headlines. Beyond the most superficial of political commentary, there have been no real manifestations of this “fallout.” Israel is still receiving immense aid both military and political from the United States, and Israeli foreign policy is still one with Washington.

The purpose of the feigned “fallout” is to produce room between the US and Israel, so that possible upcoming “unilateral” actions taken by Israel can be disavowed by a “cold” US.

The BBC’s article, “Netanyahu row with Obama administration deepens,” reported that:

A row between the US and Benjamin Netanyahu has deepened, with the Israeli leader accusing America and others of “giving up” on trying to stop Iran obtaining nuclear weapons. The US secretary of state questioned Mr Netanyahu’s judgement on the issue.

This is precisely the political charade implied by the Brookings Institution in their 2009 report as being necessary before any so-called “unilateral” action by Israel could be taken. In reality there is no row, simply a need for establishing plausible deniability ahead of an egregious act of unwarranted, unjust military aggression.

The War on Syria: Containing Iran Before, During, and After Airstrikes

Such theatrics are but one troubling sign that aggression toward Iran is still very much in the cards, that current negotiations are but a smokescreen for preparations to strike Iran anyway regardless of what concession it is willing to make, and that such aggression may take place once the US and its regional partners believe Syria has been reduced to its weakest state possible – if outright regime change is seen as impossible.

Brookings states clearly that:

As the conclusion discusses, an air campaign against Iran’s nuclear sites would likely have to be coupled with a containment strategy—before, during, and especially after the strikes. Containment would be necessary to hinder Iran from reconstituting its nuclear program, prevent it from retaliating against the United States and its allies, and to deal with Iran’s support for violent extremist groups and other anti-status quo activities.

Admittedly, part of that containment strategy have been attempts to destroy Syria and Lebanon – where the majority of Iran’s regional support is based and where Iran would marshal support from in the immediate aftermath of an unprovoked attack on its territory by US-Israeli aggression.

In addition to propping up terrorists across the region to attack Iran’s allies abroad, the Brookings report dedicated an entire chapter to “Inspiring an Insurgency: Supporting Iranian Minority and Opposition Groups.” Here, Brookings talks about backing the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) and its military wing, the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK) – the latter being a verified terrorist organization, previously listed by the US State Department as such, and guilty of killing not only Iranian civilians throughout decades of terrorism, but also US military personal and US civilian contractors.

For those who have difficulties believing the US would back Al Qaeda terrorists for the purpose of overthrowing the governments of Libya, Egypt, and Syria, they need only look at overt and continuous support for MEK terrorists in a bid to overthrow the government of Iran to uncover the reality of Washington’s willingness to sponsor terrorism.

Brookings would openly admit that:

…even if U.S. support for an insurgency failed to produce the overthrow of the regime, it could still place Tehran under considerable pressure, which might either prevent the regime from making mischief abroad or persuade it to make concessions on issues of importance to the United States (such as its nuclear program and support to Hamas, Hizballah, and the Taliban). Indeed, Washington might decide that this second objective is a more compelling rationale for supporting an insurgency than the (much less likely) goal of actually overthrowing the regime.

Brookings describes in exceptional detail how the US would organize its proxy terrorists. It would claim:

Insurgencies take a long time to succeed, when they succeed at all. It takes time for insurgents to identify leaders and recruit personnel, establish bases and gather equipment, and learn tactics and proficiency with weapons. It takes even longer to win popular support, erode the morale of the government’s armed forces, and then undermine the government’s legitimacy.

It would also claim:

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) could take care of most of the supplies and training for these groups, as it has for decades all over the world. However, Washington would need to decide whether to provide the groups with direct military assistance…

And finally, it would admit:

To protect neighboring countries providing sanctuary to the insurgents. Any insurgency against the Iranian regime would need a safe haven and conduit for arms and other supplies through one or more of Iran’s neighbors.

This precise strategy has been implemented regarding Syria. Material support for terrorists operating in Syria has been provided for years by the West, with the West’s vast media monopolies providing rhetoric to undermine the legitimacy of the Syrian government, and US-created sanctuaries outside of Syria (primarily in Turkey and Jordan) for terrorists to to seek safe havens in and through which a torrent of arms, cash, equipment, and fighters flow.

When understanding that the war in Syria is but a lead up to a larger conflict with Iran – with a literal signed confession created by US policymakers clearly serving as the foundation for several years of American foreign policy across the Middle East – one begins to understand the urgent imperative incumbent upon those who, for the sake of their own self-preservation, are tasked with stopping it.

Russian and Chinese efforts to obstruct US designs in Syria are about more than selfish regional interests, they are a matter of self-preservation, stopping the conflict in Syria from spilling into Iran next, southern Russia afterwards, and eventually enveloping western China as well.

That the US has committed itself to fueling chaos in Syria despite the unlikelihood of actually overthrowing the government in Damascus, costing tens of thousands of innocent people their lives, illustrates the callousness of US foreign policy, highlighting that Western sponsorship of terrorism around the world constitutes perhaps the most egregious, continuous, and most horrifically demonstrable threat to global peace and stability in our age.

As the US and Israel conduct their latest diplomatic charade, a harbinger of even more chaos to come, those concerned must read the policy papers of the West and understand the true nature of their methodology if ever they hope to expose it and stop it.

Tony Cartalucci, Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine“New Eastern Outlook”.

Journal-neo.org

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Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Good Riddance to Bob Menendez?

Yesterday, the Justice Department hit Democratic New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez with fourteen counts of corruption, including 8 bribery charges that alone could carry more than a century in prison. The indictment was based on Menendez’s relationship with Salomon Melgen, a Florida ophthalmologist and major donor. In exchange for a litany of gifts, including Caribbean resort stays, campaign cash and flights, according to the indictment, Menendez used his influence to benefit Melgen’s interests, extending to his businesses and even helping to get visas for “several of Melgen’s girlfriends.”

Menendez held a defiant press conference on Wednesday evening (before officially pleading not guilty today), declaring his innocence and, as he did when news of the imminent charges broke last month, telling reporters, “I am not going anywhere.” That may be true, in terms of Menendez’s Senate seat, but the Democratic hawk already gave up his powerful post as ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (a position he hopes to retake when cleared of the charges).

Some of the media coverage of the charges suggested that Menendez’s departure from his leadership position would harm Democrats—but that’s not quite as clear as it seems. Indeed, in lamenting the Democrats’ loss, National Journal noted Menendez was able “to work with Republicans and has earned their respect through his occasional battles with the White House over foreign policy.” That hardly sounds like a leader of the caucus, but rather like a senator who has worked hand in hand with the most obstructionist critics of the Obama administration’s foreign policy.

The constant efforts, in cahoots with Republicans, to constrain the Obama administration’s diplomacy with Iran, for instance, have divided Democrats bitterly. In January of 2014, Menendez, along with rapacious anti-Iran Senator Mark Kirk (Ill.), introduced a new sanctions bill backed by the powerful anti-diplomacy American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Critics said the bill would kill the interim agreement struck by Iran and world powers—the framework that just today bore fruit as negotiations toward a comprehensive pact advanced—leading to widespread opposition among the Democratic Senate leadership. When liberal grassroots groups rallied enough Democrats to sustain a promised presidential veto, the bill failed to come to a vote.

This year, Menendez introduced another sanctions measure with Kirk, but it too has so far stalled without the necessary Democratic support. He also sponsored a bill with Republican Foreign Relations Chair Bob Corker to empower Congress to vote on any deal with Iran—earning another veto threat from Obama. And working with Republicans came back to bite Menendez when Majority Leader Mitch McConnell couldn’t restrain his partisan impulses and sought to bring the bill to a quick vote; even Menendez himself had to object.

These are just a few examples of Menendez siding with AIPAC and its Republican stalwarts over the White House and a majority of Senate Democrats. At times, Menendez’s rhetoric has been harsh. He reportedly clashed directly with Obama at a Democratic congressional luncheon in January. Later that month, he berated administration officials defending diplomacy: “The more I hear from the administration and its quotes, the more it sounds like talking points that come straight out of Tehran,” he said. In a 2013 hearing, Menendez went after Undersecretary of State Wendy Sherman over the administration’s policy on the exiled Iranian exile group the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK), a hawkish, cult-like outfit that pushes for regime change.

But Menendez’s strategy has paid off—literally. Menendez received more campaign contributions from the MEK and its allies than any other member of Congress, according to a study by Eli Clifton and me for our piece on their relationship in the Intercept. And during his 2012 re-election campaign, Menendez garnered more contributions from pro-Israel groups than any other senator, according to Open Secrets. This winter, the Israel lobby flagship gave Menendez a hero’s welcome. Today, AIPAC leaders and other pro-Israel donors are funding and bundling contributions for his legal defense.

So Menendez has a long record of taking money from donors and advocating the policies they support. No one—certainly not me—is suggesting that his work on behalf of groups like AIPAC and the MEK rises to the level of corruption. And, despite the neocon conspiracy theories, the charges aren’t retribution from Obama. But allegations that Menendez took money to do favors shouldn’t come as a huge surprise to anyone. He is, after all, from New Jersey.

Ali Gharib The Nation

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Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Howard Dean’s Iran secret: “Famously dovish” Dem is paid shill for Iranian regime change group

Former DNC chair is critical of the Iran negotiations! This is… not at all a new position for him. Here’s why

Even the liberal Howard Dean, we learned yesterday, is critical of the Obama administration’s negotiations with Iran. Dean, appearing on Morning Joe, urged the administration to back out of thHoward Dean’s Iran secret: “Famously dovish” Dem is paid shill for Iranian regime change groupe negotiations still underway in Lausanne, Switzerland. This is supposed to imply that there is some sort of bipartisan consensus forming around the idea that administration is too willing to cede ground in order to secure a deal.

“In a move that stunned the hosts of MSNBC’s Morning Joe,” National Review wrote in one of several breathless reports yesterday, “liberal former Vermont governor Howard Dean agreed that the U.S. should now walk away from the nuclear negotiation table with Iran.”

“I think John Kerry and Barack Obama are far, far too eager for a deal with Iran, and could actually get a better deal if they walked away from the table and possibly came back later,” Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough began with Dean on Wednesday morning. “Why am I wrong, Howard?”

“I actually think you’re right about this,” the famously dovish Dean replied, shocking Scarborough and the other panelists.

[…]

“Obama is right to try to get a deal,” he continued. “[But] I’m worried about how these negotiations have gone. And I think that Joe is right, probably, to step away from the table.”

Well, if Obama has lost the “famously dovish” Howard Dean, then he’s lost Blue America.

Anyone who wrote about this as if it were a surprising comment from Howard Dean, as National Review did, is simply lazy. Joe Scarborough and his producers, though, are guilty of something closer to malpractice. Dean is a paid shill for the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK), the Iranian exile group that calls for an overthrow of the Iranian regime. This organization has worked closely with hawks in recent years to build support for their shared goal. And a new policy of rapprochement with Iran, however modest, is not good for MEK.

Dean, along with the likes of John Bolton, Rudy Giuliani, Ed Rendell and other notables, has given paid speeches at MEK rallies. In the first term of the Obama administration, MEK’s allies launched a expensive P.R. effort to get the State Department to de-list MEK as a Foreign Terrorist Organization. (Anyone who lived in the D.C. metropolitan area between 2010 and 2012 will be familiar with a seemingly endless cycle of television ads calling for this.) The effort was successful: in September 2012, just before the election, the State Department de-listed MEK. It was a heavy, cynical lobbying effort that offered a real education in the how subjectively the government applies the term “terrorism” to suit its interests.

Dean has never been a strong supporter of negotiations with Iran. The day after President Obama called for continuing negotiations with Iran in his 2014 State of the Union address, Dean said, “We need to stand up to the mullahs. These are not people we ought to be negotiating with.” He made these comments at a “policy briefing… hosted by the Iranian-American Community of Arkansas, a member of the Organization of Iranian-American Communities, an MEK advocacy group.” Dean added that any deal made with Iran on its nuclear program needs to include all sorts of stipulations regarding human rights, including the protection of 3,000 MEK exiles stationed at an American camp in Iraq. He repeatedly dodged a Buzzfeed reporter’s question about whether he was paid for that particular speech.

Last May, Dean co-wrote an op-ed with another MEK shill, Rudy Giuliani, warning against negotiations on the grounds of Iran’s human rights record — specifically its record towards the MEK, which, again, has given Dean and Giuliani lots of money. Calling on the administration to bail on Iranian nuclear negotiations because they don’t address Iran’s human rights abuses or regional aggressions is a common tactic for people who don’t want the United States to reach a diplomatic agreement over Iran’s nuclear program. Dean takes the same approach as Benjamin Netanyahu: suggesting that there is a “better deal” out there in which Iran eliminates every last trace of its nuclear infrastructure, reforms itself into the world’s number one protector of human rights, and abandons all of its regional interests. Perhaps, if John Kerry had the courage to twist a few more arms, he could even get Ayatollah Khameini and his regime to self-abdicate and put in place an American puppet government. How about… the MEK?

It’s been a long time since Howard Dean was “famously dovish.” Howard Dean’s no longer the little-known governor looking for a viable lane in a presidential primary. He’s in the big time now. He’s made it, and now he’s getting paid. Good for him. But it’s completely dishonest to suggest that he’s carefully watched these negotiations and suddenly come to the conclusion that the Obama administration, alas, has given up too much.

Jim Newell covers politics and media for Salon.

Jim Newell,

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Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

The week the neocons jumped the shark

As of last week, I have concluded that the so-called “neo” conservatives have “jumped the shark,” if I may invoke a cliché from popular culture.

And it’s not just any shark. It’s a great white.

If you doubt that, consider a couple of pieces that ran recently on the op-ed pages of the New York Times.

One came from columnist Tom Friedman, who is generally located on the liberal internationalist side of the same coin as the neocons. In a recent column he said he would “toss out” for discussion the question “Should we be arming ISIS?”

Uhh, no. They have a habit of cutting journalists’ heads off – though I suspect that might be superfluous in the case of Friedman.

Then there was the piece by former UN ambassador John Bolton headlined “To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran.” It contained the usual cliches about weapons of mass destruction and the need to stop terrorism along with this proposition: “Such action should be combined with vigorous American support for Iran’s opposition, aimed at regime change in Tehran.”

In the past Bolton has identified the “opposition” as called Mojahedin-e-Khalq. This is a shadowy cult that makes the Scientologists look transparent by comparison. In the past MEK members have killed Americans in terror attacks. More recently they are seen as the likely suspects in the car-bombing of nuclear scientists in Tehran.

Until 2012, MEK was listed by the State Department as a terrorist group. That designation was lifted because of the lobbying by, of all people, John Bolton.

And just to show the bipartisan nature of this sort of thing, MEK is also a pet cause of our Democratic senior U.S. Senator, Bob Menendez.

Menendez leaped a tiburon or two himself earlier this year when he accused a president of his own party of mouthing “talking points straight out of Tehran” on those nuclear negotiations with the Iranians.

Those talks have been going on for 12 years and will probably drag on for quite a bit longer. Yet of late the neocons have decided to spread panic about them and also about the dire threat from those nasty Houthis in Yemen.

Few Americans even know where Yemen is or who the Houthis are. In fact, they are a tough mountain tribe of the Shia faith who have a history of defeating their Sunni enemies in battle. Among those enemies are Al Qaeda. Yeah, that Al Qaeda – the guys who blew up the World Trade Center and started this whole thing.

(Go to http://www.nj.com/opinion/index.ssf/2015/03/

more_on_menendezs_favorite_ex_terrorist_group_-_an.html to the many of my fellow traditional conservatives who get derided as “isolationists” for pointing out that we should take an America-first attitude and stop messing around in the Mideast.)

You may have noticed a pattern here. In the name of the War on Terror we are being asked to take the side of a wide range of terrorists.

That fits with the origin of that cliché. Wikipedia traces it to an episode of the series “Happy Days” in which the Fonzie character jumps over a shark-filled pool on water skis. It signals “a particular scene, episode, or aspect of a show in which the writers use some type of gimmick in an attempt to keep viewers’ interest, which is taken as a sign of desperation and is seen by viewers to be the point at which the show had strayed irreparably from its original premise.

Paul Mulshine, NJ.com

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Iran Interlink Weekly Digest

Iran Interlink Weekly Digest – 91

++ An hour before the announcement from Lausanne on the result of the nuclear negotiations, Ramin Fakhari, an Iranian analyst, published an article analysing the situation. He concluded that irrelevant of the outcome – whether there is agreement or not and who names who to be the winner or loser – ensuring that there is one less nuclear bomb in the world, and reducing the savage effects of sanctions on the ordinary citizens of Iran is a victory for all the people of the world. The real winners are the people and the losers are Israel, the Saudis and the MEK.

++ Maryam Rajavi and the NCRI websites published statements in support of bombing Yemen, accusing the victims of these bombs of being “agents of the Iranian regime”. The critical Farsi Commentariat have denounced Rajavi for taking this cruel position at a time that the UN says this action is in violation of international law and has expressed deep concern for the lives of ordinary citizens there. Critics say that this is not the first time Rajavi has taken such an anti-human stance, and remind us of the MEK’s collusion with Saddam Hussein to kill their own people and their begging the Neocons to bomb their mothers’ and sisters’ homes in Iran. This is normal, they say, for Rajavi and the MEK.

++ This week the MEK has again asked to be armed in Iraq. Many critics ridiculed this, reminding the MEK that they are in the process of being expelled by the UN. Ehsan Bidi, who is in Tirana, goes into more detail about what is really in Massoud Rajavi’s mind. Bidi suggests that Rajavi is desperate to stop people being transferred to third countries – Albania, the US, Europe; he produces evidence of the ways the MEK is trying to prevent the UN from taking people to America. When Rajavi says “Iran wants to kill us, that’s why we need arms”, what he really wants, Bidi says, is a way to legitimize killing the residents of Camp Liberty. Rajavi even has people who will do this killing – bands related to the Saddamists and ISIS. Bidi then reflects on MEK history in this respect; whenever Rajavi announces that “Khamenei wants to kill us”, some weeks later a disaster strikes and several MEK are killed. This only happens to disaffected members not the commanders. There is clear danger that this will happen again soon. Bidi appeals to everyone to inform the authorities in their own countries and help prevent a tragedy from happening again.

++ The MEK published a video on its satellite and websites in reaction to an open letter by 80 ex members and critics addressed to the President of France asking him – as her host – to put pressure on Maryam Rajavi to release the people in Camp Liberty. The letter also emphasised the MEK’s threats to kill critics all over Europe, saying that the French should take action to stop this, not the potential victims. Ghorban Ali Hossein Nejad has examined the MEK’s video message and come to an interesting conclusion. He points out that Rajavi has not only backed down from his threats to kill his critics, but has now apologised for this. Hossein Nejad explains that this is clearly the result of France’s security services having a word with the leaders and telling them that incitement to murder is illegal in Europe. Rajavi has had to take his words back because clearly Europe is not Iraq.

In English:

++ In the week leading up to the historic Lausanne announcement, Paul Mulshine has written two articles in NJ.com about the MEK and America. The first ‘More on Senator Menendez’s favorite (ex?) terrorist group and the insanity of neocon policy in the Mideast’ criticizes efforts to push America into a war with Iran. He mentions Menendez and Bolton as paid advocates of the MEK position, saying “As part of that propaganda, we’re supposed to think it’s just peachy to support the MEK in its efforts to topple the Iranian government. Or in other words, we’re supposed to support a terrorist effort in the midst of a War on terrorism.” His second article, ‘The week the neocons jumped the shark’ attacks Bolton and the neocon agenda as a distraction saying “Then there was the piece by former UN ambassador John Bolton headlined “To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran.” It contained the usual cliches about weapons of mass destruction and the need to stop terrorism along with this proposition: “Such action should be combined with vigorous American support for Iran’s opposition, aimed at regime change in Tehran. In the past Bolton has identified the “opposition” as called Mojahedin-e-Khalq. This is a shadowy cult that makes the Scientologists look transparent by comparison. In the past MEK members have killed Americans in terror attacks. More recently they are seen as the likely suspects in the car-bombing of nuclear scientists in Tehran.”

++ In a bad week for the MEK, Jim Newell for Salon, also writes about another MEK paid advocate, this time on the Democrat side. In his article “Howard Dean’s Iran secret: “Famously dovish” Dem is paid shill for Iranian regime change group”, Newell says “Dean, along with the likes of John Bolton, Rudy Giuliani, Ed Rendell and other notables, has given paid speeches at MEK rallies. In the first term of the Obama administration, MEK’s allies launched a expensive P.R. effort to get the State Department to de-list MEK as a Foreign Terrorist Organization. (Anyone who lived in the D.C. metropolitan area between 2010 and 2012 will be familiar with a seemingly endless cycle of television ads calling for this.) The effort was successful: in September 2012, just before the election, the State Department de-listed MEK. It was a heavy, cynical lobbying effort that offered a real education in the how subjectively the government applies the term “terrorism” to suit its interests.” Newell comments sarcastically “Dean takes the same approach as Benjamin Netanyahu: suggesting that there is a “better deal” out there in which Iran eliminates every last trace of its nuclear infrastructure, reforms itself into the world’s number one protector of human rights, and abandons all of its regional interests. Perhaps, if John Kerry had the courage to twist a few more arms, he could even get Ayatollah Khameini and his regime to self-abdicate and put in place an American puppet government. How about… the MEK?”

April 3, 2015

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Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

More on Senator Menendez’s favorite (ex?) terrorist group and the insanity of neocon policy in the Mideast

Even at this late date a lot of people claim not to know the difference between us true conservatives and the so-called “neo” conservatives.

Hint: “Neo” means new. And if you have new beliefs, then by definition you’re not a conservative. We stick to the tried and true. Plato’s fine but that Aristotle guy was getting a little ahead of himself.

Another hint: If you’re a true conservative, then people will call you an “isolationist.”

They mean it as an insult. But the way they define the term it’s really a compliment. To the neocons, an isolationist is anyone who doesn’t believe the Beltway crowd should micro-manage every event everywhere on Earth.

In that regard, you might have seen that piece I did recently showing our senior senator’s ties to a shadowy Iranian cult called Mojahedin e Khalq.

The more I look into these characters, the more I realize how nutty the so-called “War on Terror” being carried out by the so-called “neo” conservatives has become.

And now we’ve reached the point where we’re supposed to take the side of the terrorists in the War on terror.

As I noted in a prior post, the neocons and their hired mouthpieces have been trying to sell the American public in the proposition that we should support Saudi Arabia in its efforts to impose the extremist Wahabbi form of Islam on the people of neighboring Yemen.

This is absurd on its face, as is the idea that the U.S. should support the Islamic Republic’s side in the current dust-up in the Mideast.

Yet that’s what we’re being told. Our wonderful allies the Saudis – you know, the folks who brought us the 9/11 attacks – are tacitly backing ISIS in an effort to score points against Iran.

Do you think Iran is a greater threat, with a tenth of the world’s Muslims, is a greater threat to the U.S. than the Saudis, who present the nine-tenths of Muslims who are Sunni?

If so, you have been taken for a ride. Doing the driving are neocons like John Bolton, the Captain Kangaroo clone who has been pushing the neocon line harder than anyone else inside the Beltway.

If you wish to begin your deprogramming I suggest starting with this piece by Daniel Larison of the American Conservative on Republican Bolton’s connection with Democrat Bob Menendez’s favorite Iranian cult. Here’s a passage that reminds us that the Saudis have done a good job of buying support from both parties:

Bolton is hardly the only former official, retired officer, or ex-politician to do this, but for the last several years he has been a vocal cheerleader of the Mujahideen-e Khalq cult (and “former” terrorist group) and its political organization. He has been consistently misrepresenting a totalitarian cult as a “democratic” Iranian opposition group. When Bolton or someone else with this record talks about “vigorous American support for Iran’s opposition,” we can be fairly sure that he means that the U.S. should be backing the MEK in its quest for seizing power in Iran. This confirms Bolton’s extremely poor judgment and underscores how truly crazy his overall argument for war with Iran is. It also reminds us how oblivious Iran hawks such as Bolton are to the political realities inside Iran. Once again we have a hawkish demand for U.S. support for an exile group that has absolutely no support in its own country in order to achieve regime change.

The effort to push the U.S. into war with Iran is, as Larison notes, truly crazy – especially when you consider Iran is our only useful ally in the fight against ISIS. Our other supposed “allies,” the Saudis, the Turks and the Israelis, are in full appeasement mode as regards ISIS – even though they could crush it in a week.

This is absolutely nuts, and only one in a thousand Americans knows how nuts it is. That’s because they don’t get to talk to the experts I get to talk to, ex-CIA guys, ex-grunts and others who actually understand the Mideast. Among them is ex-CIA man Larry Johnson with this piece about the misguided effort to convince Americans to take the Saudi side:

The American public are being saturated with propaganda intended to convince them that Iran is the greatest evil in the world today and must be stopped at all costs. While I harbor no illusions that Iran is a harmless, impotent nation, it also is not the Shia Muslim reincarnation of Nazi Germany or Stalin’s Soviet Union. Here’s a simple test – if you had a daughter and she had to work in Saudi Arabia or Iran, where would she have more freedom? Simple answer – Iran. Which nation allows Jewish synagogues to still function? Iran.

We need a new consensus in the United States regarding our policy in the Middle East. As I noted in an earlier piece, we have been the bitch of the Saudis for the last 35 years. Ever since the Shah was dumped and the Ayatollah took the reins of power in Iran, we have been cozying up to carry the Saudis’ chamber pot.

But times have changed and the old policy has collapsed and the United States bears sole responsibility for setting in motion the emergence of Iran’s growing influence in the region. A lot of smart people in the United States still do not understand that our decision to dump Saddam and replace him with Shia Iraqis that had close ties to Iran flung wide open the door for Tehran to enter Iraq and build out intelligence networks. This is on us.

As part of that propaganda, we’re supposed to think it’s just peachy to support the MEK in its efforts to topple the Iranian government. Or in other words, we’re supposed to support a terrorist effort in the midst of a War on terrorism.

That sure seems to describe MEK if this 2012 report by Richard Engel and Robert Windrem is any indication:

Deadly attacks on Iranian nuclear scientists are being carried out by an Iranian dissident group that is financed, trained and armed by Israel’s secret service, U.S. officials tell NBC News, confirming charges leveled by Iran’s leaders. The group, the People’s Mujahedin of Iran, has long been designated as a terrorist group by the United States, accused of killing American servicemen and contractors in the 1970s and supporting the takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran before breaking with the Iranian mullahs in 1980.

The attacks, which have killed five Iranian nuclear scientists since 2007 and may have destroyed a missile research and development site, have been carried out in dramatic fashion, with motorcycle-borne assailants often attaching small magnetic bombs to the exterior of the victims’ cars.

U.S. officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the Obama administration is aware of the assassination campaign but has no direct involvement.

The report contains the usual denials, but few Mideast insiders believe these attacks could be anything other than an MEK operation. That of course would mean our side is supporting terrorism, since putting magnetic bombs on cars is quite obviously an act of terrorism.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that, by the way. Anyone who understands terrorism understands that one man’s terrorist really is another man’s freedom fighter. At least that was the case in every war zone I’ve ever visited.

In Nicaragua, for example, the Marxist Sandinista government persisted in calling the Contra rebels “terrorists.” Ronald Reagan called them freedom fighters. Reagan was vindicated when the government made the mistake of holding an election and the Contra side won.

But “terrorism” remains in the eye of the beholder. That’s why we should have called this post-9/11 enterprise the “War on Al Qaeda” rather than the “War on Terrorism.”

Which brings up the current dust-up in Yemen.

The people the neocons are opposing, the Houthis, are a tough Shia mountain tribe openly hostile to the Sunni Saudis and – how did you guess – Al Qaeda, which is also Sunni.

You read that right. The neocons want to target the enemies of Al Qaeda.

Does that make any sense to you? It doesn’t make any to Pat Lang, the former Vietnam Green Beret and Mideast expert who spent several years in Yemen. In this post, Lang enjoys a hearty laugh at the notion that the Houthis are “Iran’s puppet.”

There are certain peoples who are instinctively good at fighting. The Pushtuns, Somalis, Sikhs and Yemeni Zaidi tribesmen are among them. Others are not so good at fighting or joyful at the prospect of combat; Saudi hirelings of the Al-Saud “country” of Saudi Arabia, Egyptian peasant conscripts, and Sunni Yemenis of the south. The Zaidi mountain tribesmen defeated the Egyptian Army fifty years ago. There is a large Egyptian military cemetery in San’a. The road down from the mountains to the port of Hodeida is still littered with destroyed Egyptian Army vehicles that were “killed” in guerrilla ambushes.

Lang goes on to debunk any idea that the Houthis are part of an Iranian axis. In fact they don’t even share the same form of Shia Muslim.

The Zaidi scholars profess no allegiance to the 12er Shia scholarship of the Iranian teachers. In theology the Zaidis follow the methodology in analysis of the mu’tazila , the “rationalist” school of theology exterminated in the rest of Islam (including Iran) 1200 years ago.

Do you ever hear such details from any of the neocons who assert there is some sort of monolithic Iranian axis at work here?

No. They’re idiots I use that term not as an insult but a useful description. Look at the etymology of the word “idiot.” “From Greek idiotes “layman, person lacking professional skill” (opposed to writer, soldier, skilled workman).”

There’s a lot of that going around. But thanks to the efforts of conservatives like Pat Buchanan and libertarians like Ron Paul, people are finally starting to realize they’ve been duped for all these years.

Here’s Pat holding forth on the current effort to get us bogged down in the Mideast:

Some mullahs may be fanatics, but Iran is not run by fools. Yet even if we have a mutual interest in avoiding a war, where is the common ground between us?

Let us begin with the Sunni terrorists of al-Qaida who brought down the twin towers, and the Islamic State that is beheading Christians, apostates, and nonbelievers, and intends to establish a Middle East caliphate where there are no Americans, no Christians, and no Shiites.

Americans and Iranians have a common goal of degrading and defeating them.

In the Syrian civil war, Iran and its Shiite allies in Hezbollah have prevented the fall of the Alawite regime of Bashar Assad.

For years, Iran has helped to keep the al-Nusra Front and ISIL out of Damascus.

Why do the neocons want to see Assad out of control in Damascus?

As it happens, I had a very humorous back-and-forth with Menendez on that very point.

I say “humorous” because Menendez was, as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, perhaps the loudest voice calling for the U.S. to depose Assad.

That led directly to the rise of ISIS. His excuse?

He argued that everyone else was making the same mistake:

Mulshine criticizes me for pushing the U.S. “to take an active role in supporting the rebels fighting to oust Syrian dictator Bashar Assad.” But that exact position is the administration’s policy, arguing that “Assad must go” and supporting the training and equipping of the Syrian opposition. President Barack Obama over Labor Day 2013 even came within minutes of approving air strikes against Assad for gassing Syrians and crossing his self-imposed red line.

It is also the position of Senators from liberal Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) to conservative Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) who voted with me in September 2013 to provide lethal and non-lethal assistance to vetted Syrian opposition groups

This is obvious nonsense. Menendez acts as if there weren’t voices pointing out that the effort to depose Assad would bring Muslim fundamentalists to the fore. But all he had to do back then was read my columns. I cited expert after expert who predicted exactly that.

Among them was former CIA agent Bob Baer, who asked this of one proponent of deposing Assad:

“Who does he propose supporting in Syria? Anyone with any common sense knows it’s the Muslim Brotherhood that would take over. There are no white hats in Syria.”

What, no “vetted moderate rebels?”

Anyone who could ever use such a term without laughing should shut up forever as regards the Mideast. That would shut up just about every neocon, including a certain senator who supports the MEK.

(Paul Mulshine, NJ.com,

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