Following a meeting in Paris on June 21, 2014 to share their experiences on living within the MKO Cult , the former members of the terror-cult of Rajavis gathered in Saint Michelle Square, Paris. Books, flyers and Placards on the MKO crimes were distributed. Defectors explained true substance of the MKO and its cult-like terrorist history to French citizens and Iranians including passengers or France residents.
MKO defectors in Albania far from the cultic boundaries
A number of former members of the Mujahedin Khalq Organization (the MKO) attended a meeting in Paris on June 21, 2014.
The meeting was organized by Yaran Iran Association. It was also attended by some Iranians residing in Paris.
The Mojahedin Khalq has performed yet another volte-face (complete reversal) today, which is characterist
ic of the online presence of this group. When a screenshot of the MEK’s official website praising the actions and achievements of ISIS was widely circulated and universally condemned in June, the MEK panicked. Now, on a different website, (National Council of Resistance of Iran or NCRI) the MEK has retracted that position and claims not only that it doesn’t support ISIS but that the ‘Iranian regime’ has put about this rumour in order to engineer a massacre of the residents of Camp Liberty – a camp which the MEK refuses to open to outside help.
In spite of its expensive and sophisticated look, the online life of the MEK/NCRI is becoming more and more inconsistent, with the group issuing statements and news items one day which are retracted and removed a week later when the negative impact of what they said hits home. Over its history, the MEK has been unable to maintain a clear message. Once it boasted of killing Americans in Iran in the 1970s – ‘Let’s make Iran another Vietnam’ was the headline banner – only to deny this during its campaign to be removed from the US terrorism list in 2012. It boasted the embassy sieges in 1992 and again denied this later. The MEK has several times embraced as ‘martyrs’ operatives sent on terrorist missions, only to denounce them later as ‘agents of the Iranian regime’ when it was found they were not actually killed in these operations.
The problem for the MEK is not so much the inconsistency of these messages; that can be put down to incompetent propaganda and desperate expediency. The problem is that so many eye witnesses are vocal in speaking the truth and so much factual evidence exists to back their claims, that it is impossible for the group to escape not only its past, but also its present crimes and failures.
An example of this is the claim in this latest statement that the MEK “has never interfered in the internal affairs of Iraq”. Yet there is a video of Maryam Rajavi ordering her combatants to ‘take the Kurds under your tanks and save your bullets for the Revolutionary Guards’, as the MEK followed orders from Saddam Hussein in 1991 to suppress the Kurdish uprising which followed the First Gulf War. Sadly for Rajavi, survivors of this massacre cannot be airbrushed out of history to suit the current MEK position.
It is interesting that the MEK’s new position of denying any links or sympathies with ISIS or Al Qaida is accompanied with the accusation that this is ‘disinformation by the mullah’s regime’ with the goal of “preparing the ground for a large scale massacre of Iranian refugees, members of PMOI, in Camp Liberty.”
Putting aside the contradiction that members of a paramilitary group cannot also be described as refugees, what does the MEK really mean?
The MEK initially sent out messages of support for ISIS because they believed the group would overrun Iraq, take control of the Diyala province and restore the MEK to Camp Ashraf which the Iraqi government had forced them to evacuate a year ago. When this failed the MEK now anticipate a Sunni backlash against the Shiite populations and, although not aimed at the Diyala province, have re-worked this narrative to suit a dual purpose – to encourage or actually engineer a deadly attack on the residents of Camp Liberty which can be subsequently blamed on Iran, and which will rid the Rajavis of a few more potential eye witnesses to their crimes before they can be brought to safety in the West.
If this sounds overly cynical let us not overlook one aspect of the MEK’s online life which is at least consistent, that is, its unfailing support for non-democratic forces the world over. The MEK never declare support for democratic movements or groups but always side with terrorist groups. Even its denial of support for ISIS is couched in bizarre, suspect terms. The MEK says “crimes” such as blowing up Shiite shrines is “inhumane”, but there is no mention of the shocking murders which took place in Mosul and elsewhere.
Indeed, from its initial praise of ISIS to news about a landslide in Iran, the MEK is curiously selective in its support. For years the people of Gaza have suffered greatly under the programme of ethnic cleansing by the Zionist political leaders of Israel and supporters and enablers of Zionism in the West. The MEK have not reported on this, let alone voiced an opinion. The MEK knows instinctively that it needs to support Israel, while at the same time trying to blame Iran, so the important news they have published is about the suffering of the illegal settlers under attack from Iranian-made missiles. Such a stance could only arise from a conflict of interests inside the MEK, and shows that not only is the MEK’s political system collapsing but the brain behind it is collapsing too.
Massoud Rajavi still believes he is the leader of an independent cultic group which will, and can, obey his every whim. Maryam Rajavi in Paris serves a different reality. She must obey paymasters and protectors whose agenda is only to use the MEK as long as it is useful and discard it should it prove unhelpful. Between these two positions a kind of poisonous rot has set in which both Rajavis are powerless to change or control.
No matter how slick and well financed the MEK’s propaganda is, if it doesn’t maintain a consistent message it is worse than useless, it becomes ridiculous. Maryam Rajavi should ignore the whims of her husband Massoud and take a leaf from the book of her Zionist masters whose false ‘victim’ narrative and blatant lies are at least consistent if not truthful.
“In Iran we have big deserts — when it rains the ground cannot absorb the water quickly, so the land becomes blue like the sky,” a retired government official from the foreign ministry of the Islamic Republic explained to me. “The nuclear issue is also a mirage. It is not real. It is not about uranium. It is not about proliferation. It is not about the atom bomb. It is about America’s fight with us and our fight with America.”
Perhaps no international news story has been shaped by 
as much deception and wrong-headed analysis as the Iranian “nuclear crisis.” The average Western news consumer is under the impression that Iran has been secretly building a nuclear weapon under the cover of a civilian energy program, but is now being forced to change course due to sanctions and military threats. The Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s fatwa against nuclear weapons and the Islamic Republic’s assertions that it simply seeks to develop the civilian power program it inherited from the Shah are both roundly dismissed as sophistry at best and, at worst, deceitful.
The politically motivated narrative, willfully adopted by much of the press, of a duplicitous Iran posing a regional and even global threat has been manufactured — often deliberately — to serve security and bureaucratic interests in the West.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) monitors Iran’s enrichment program with regular inspections, closed-circuit television cameras, electronic seals on uranium stocks, and intelligence from Western spy agencies that have spared little effort in hunting for evidence of foul play. None has ever been found. No trustworthy evidence detailing an Iranian nuclear weapons program has emerged, and Iran has never diverted nuclear material from its civilian program.
‘Iran has to be identified as Enemy No. 1.’
“The Americans had no issue with us developing nuclear energy before the revolution so we wouldn’t burn our oil,” Mohammad Ali Shabani, a doctoral candidate at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies who is conducting research in Iran, told me. “But now they do, so it is clear that the problem is not proliferation but our government.”
The two most recent National Intelligence Estimates in 2007 and 2011, representing the best judgments of 16 US spy agencies, concluded that the Islamic Republic is not pursuing nuclear weapons. Perhaps wary of politicians playing fast-and-loose with the facts after the debacle over weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, James Clapper, the US director of national intelligence, summarized the 2011 estimate by affirming that he had a “high level of confidence” that Iran had not decided to develop the bomb. His confidence was not based on an absence of evidence but on, among other intelligence, intercepted communications — reportedly between Iranian military commanders — that indicated Iran had stopped researching nuclear weapons in 2003.
US and Iranian involvement in Iraq is escalating again. Read more here.
Although the US does not have evidence detailing the pre-2003 research, it is probable that prior to America’s ousting of Saddam Hussein — whose forces killed 20,000 Iranian troops with chemical agents during the Iraq-Iran War (1980-1988) — the Islamic Republic was seeking to deter a neighboring threat.
There is, however, considerable evidence to suggest that non-proliferation is being used as a convenient political tool to keep pressure on Iran to maintain a security configuration in the Middle East favorable to US and Israeli interests.
Origins of the crisis
In the decades preceding the Islamic Revolution in 1979, Israel and Iran — both principle beneficiaries of US political and military support in the region — cooperated deeply against the growing threat of Iraq. After 1979, when American relations with Iran became hostile and Iran broke off official ties with Israel, Israel still held out for Iranian cooperation, providing covert support to the Islamic Republic in its war with Iraq and discouraging America from providing Saddam with logistical assistance.
But in 1992, in the wake of the Cold War and under domestic pressure to end the first Palestinian intifada (1987-1993), Israel elected Yitzhak Rabin, who adopted two mutually reinforcing security policies: pursuing detente with the Palestinians and casting Iran as a nuclear proliferator seeking to sow “murderous Islamic terror.”
“Israel wanted to convince the US that both Israel and the US are facing a major strategic threat in the Middle East, and the source of that threat was an Iran which was embarking on a program of WMDs,” Peter Jenkins, a former British ambassador to the IAEA, explained to me. “They were worried that as the Cold War was ending, Israel would cease to be seen in the US, as it had been up to 1990, as a valuable partner in an unstable part of the world.”
“Iran has to be identified as Enemy No. 1,” Yossi (Joseph) Alpher, a former Rabin adviser, told the New York Times in 1992.
Israeli officials used their influence to aggressively persuade the US that Iran was re-arming itself after its war with Iraq and getting Russian help to develop missiles that could one day reach the US.
In fact, Iran at that time was exhausted by the war and decreasing its arms purchases, according to World Bank figures. In 1993, Iran spent 16 times less than Saudi Arabia and nearly nine times less than Israel despite having a population about three-times larger than both of those nations combined.
Israel also spun Iran’s purchase of rudimentary nuclear equipment from China as evidence of a nefarious nuclear program that would produce a “Shia bomb” in a decade, and invoked the “existential threat” posed by Iran to justify its threat of airstrikes. In 1992, Benjamin Netanyahu, then an MP, said that Iran would get the bomb in three to five years.
The “Iran threat” was an easy sell to the US intelligence establishment and the political right.
A Field Guide to Iraq’s Fighting Factions, Part 3: Who Gets Iraq — Iran or the US? Read more here.
“At the end of the Cold War you have intelligence agencies that are a little worried about how they are going to justify their existence,” Jenkins said. “They can still spy in China and a little bit elsewhere, but Russia had been their bread and butter for 45 years. They needed some new sexy threats.”
CIA director Robert Gates — who reportedly told his staff, “The only moderate Iranian is one who has run out of bullets” — was one key figure pushing the narrative of Iranian post-war rearmament. Others such as Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton, and Dick Cheney, who would later emerge as the biggest proponents for regime change in Iran, were instrumental in making the nuclear threat a mainstream concern in US politics.
The laptop of death
No twist in the nuclear tale better exemplifies the dubious case against Iran than the emergence of alleged evidence of the “possible military dimensions” (PMD) of its nuclear program.
PMD remains the only major “outstanding nuclear issue” on the IAEA’s file on Iran after a decade of allegations were investigated and dismissed by the agency. The entire documentary evidence for PMD comes from one purloined computer that found its way to intelligence officials in 2004. Dubbed the “laptop of death,” it contained over 1,000 pages of documents allegedly from 2001 to 2003 concerning the redesign of a ballistic missile’s re-entry vehicle, high-explosives testing for a nuclear weapon detonator, and a uranium conversion system.
‘Was this salted in there for someone to find?’
This questionable material was essentially ignored for six years while the highly politicized IAEA was run by Mohamed ElBaradei, a Nobel Peace Prize winner who frequently stymied Western interference. Following ElBaradei’s replacement by Yukiya Amano — who by his own (leaked) admission is “solidly in the US court” on the handling of Iran’s program — discussion of PMD formed the backbone of a splashy IAEA report in 2011. The report was cited by the US and EU as justification for the most draconian sanctions ever imposed on a nation, which have disproportionately affected Iran’s poor.
Iran has never had a chance to review the original copies of the documentary evidence against it, but responded to the charges with a 117-page document after reviewing electronic versions of the material.
Journalists and respected think tanks like the Institute for Science and International Security have pointed out gaping “technical flaws” in the laptop documents. For example, the 2002 re-entry vehicle drawings were bizarrely based on Iran’s older Shahab-3 missile design and not the Shahab-4, which CIA testimony had indicated was being developed at least as far back as 2000.
Informed commentators also asked why a laptop, supposedly from the heart of Iran’s covert nuclear weapons program, contained documents on three completely disparate parts of the project with no rational connection between them.
After inspecting the cache, Robert Kelley, a former IAEA inspector in Iraq (and no stranger to doctored WMD documents) asked himself, “Was this salted in there for someone to find?” He added that the IAEA’s presentation of the allegations produced a “sickly sense of déjà vu,” reminding him of the skewed Iraq WMD intelligence that misled public opinion.
“Only this time the IAEA is generating the dodgy theories instead of analyzing and testing them,” Kelley told me. “The 2011 weapons annex is conveniently broken into numbered paragraphs. If you make a simple spreadsheet and look at dates and contents you quickly see that most of the information is old, released many years ago, and of very uneven quality.”
Secretary of State Colin Powell first referred to the laptop evidence against Iran in late 2004, asserting that he had seen “information” that revealed Iran was working to adapt missiles to deliver a nuclear weapon. The timing of his comments — just three days after Iran had reached a deal with Britain, Germany, and France over its nuclear program — was designed to block progress toward a detente with the Islamic Republic.
Iran nuclear negotiations are kind of hard. Read more here.
Days later, Karsten Voigt, the coordinator of German-North American relations in the German Foreign Office, publically disputed Powell’s remarks, stating that Europe “shouldn’t let their Iran policy be influenced by single-source headlines” and noting that the laptop had in fact come from “an Iranian dissident group” — a veiled reference to the exiled, eccentric Mujahideen al Khalq (MEK) group.
Despite or perhaps because of the question marks floating over the veracity of the laptop documents and their links to the MEK, contradictory accounts were leaked to several US newspapers suggesting that the laptop had come from an Iranian asset or from Iranian assets linked to German intelligence.
Voigt expanded on his 2004 assertion in 2013, telling investigative reporter Gareth Porter that his contacts in the BND, Germany’s intelligence agency, had informed him that the agency considered the MEK source “doubtful” and that Germany was concerned that the US was acting on dubious evidence, as they had done in the run up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
The MEK is an Islamist-Marxist group that helped overthrow the Shah of Iran during the Iranian Revolution but lost out to Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamist bloc. It resorted to a campaign of assassination inside Iran (killing Iran’s prime minister and several senior clerics) and fought with Saddam against Iran in the war. Reports suggest that Israel used the MEK to leak satellite photography of Iran’s Natanz nuclear enrichment facility in a much-publicized scare back in 2002. The secrecy of the site alarmed many observers; the fact that IAEA safeguards did not require Iran to announce Natanz until 180 days prior to the introduction of nuclear material was lost in the media’s coverage. (Iran is reluctant to announce such plans early because the US actively blocks its procurement of civilian power technology.) According to reports from NBC News and the investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, Israel financed and trained MEK units that assassinated five Iranian nuclear scientists in between 2007 and 2012.
A nuclear explosion simulation diagram leaked to the Associated Press and described as having more than triple the explosive force as the Hiroshima bomb has also been roundly debunked.
In a critique of the alleged simulation that was posted at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, nuclear physicists Yousaf Butt and Ferenc Dalnoki-Veress pointed out what they called a massive error in the correspondence of the two illustrated curves. “This diagram does nothing more than indicate either slipshod analysis or an amateurish hoax,” they wrote.
“I think the hype surrounding Iran’s nuclear program has been manufactured,” Dr. Butt, who is a senior scientific adviser to the British American Security Information Council, told me, adding that the simulations would still not contravene IAEA rules even if they were real. “We’ve analyzed quite a bit of the evidence that has come out on simulated explosions and magnets, and there is a lot of smoke but very little fire.”
“For any country pursuing nuclear power, there’s always a concern they will weaponize,” he went on. “But I would not see Iran being ranked higher in any way than any others. For example, Brazil and Argentina also enrich uranium and have even had weapons programs in the past, but are not pursued as vehemently as Iran.”
Avoiding the worst
The July 20 deadline for the current round of nuclear talks, in which Iran is negotiating more nuclear transparency for sanctions relief, is fast approaching. Iran’s nuclear myths have ended talks before, empowering radicals both in the West and in Iran and increasing the chance of war.
The Gulf of Tonkin incident, which misleadingly sold the US on a full-scale war in Vietnam, and the claim of “mobile biological weapons labs” by the “Curveball” informant that helped selling the world on the Iraq War, are but two examples of falsehoods willfully interpreted as truth by a supine press and a public conditioned to believe the worst.
The West cannot allow a similar travesty to unfold in Iran. Its leaders should accept that the case against Iran is political, not technical, and work to end this long and burdensome affair.
Arron Merat covered Iran for the Economist.
Arron Merat, Vice News
After a period of relative (and blissful) quiescence, the Iran hawks are springing back into action, preparing the groundwork for sabotaging any nuclear deal that may be reached by Iran and world powers 
by July 20 or shortly thereafter. While prospects for an agreement within that time frame remain uncertain — the most important sticking point by far appears to be the gap between US demands that Iran retain only a few thousand centrifuges and Iran’s insistence that it needs many more to meet its energy needs — the hawks (by which I mean the Israel lobby and its many allies in Congress) are taking no chances.
Officially, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his ambassador here, Ronald Dermer, still insist that Iran should not be permitted any enrichment capacity whatsoever, even as Israel’s professional national security officials have reportedly agreed with US intelligence (and International Atomic Energy Agency reports) that Iran is fully complying with the Geneva Joint Plan of Action (JPOA) and that Tehran is engaged seriously in seeking a satisfactory resolution of the issue.
For now, however, hawks here appear to be taking their cue more from Netanyahu than the professionals, as this week saw clear evidence of their gearing up for a major fight both within and outside of Congress.
On Thursday, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Ed Royce — who recently video-cast encouraging words to a conference in Paris organized by the (former) terrorist Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MeK) cult — and the committee’s ranking Democrat, Eliot Engel, released a letter they’d been circulating since late last month now signed by 342 other House members demanding that Obama consult Congress more closely on the ongoing negotiations and suggesting that Iran will have to satisfy Congressional demands on human rights, terrorism, ballistic missile development, and other issues unrelated to the ongoing nuclear negotiations before it will approve major sanctions relief. Here’s the most problematic passage:
Your Administration has committed to comprehensively lifting “nuclear-related” sanctions as part of a final P5+1 [US, UK, France, China, and Russia plus Germany] agreement with Tehran. Yet the concept of an exclusively defined “nuclear-related” sanction on Iran does not exist in U.S. law. Almost all sanctions related to Iran’s nuclear program are also related to Tehran’s advancing ballistic missile program, intensifying support for international terrorism, and other unconventional weapons programs. Similarly, many of these sanctions are aimed at preventing Iranian banks involved in proliferation, terrorism, money laundering and other activities from utilizing the U.S. and global financial systems to advance these destructive policies.
Iran’s permanent and verifiable termination of all of these activities – not just some – is a prerequisite for permanently lifting most congressionally-mandated sanctions. This often unnoted reality necessitates extensive engagement with Congress before offers of relief are made to Iran, and requires Congressional action if sanctions are to be permanently lifted. With the July 20 negotiating deadline on the near horizon, we hope that your Administration will now engage in substantive consultations with Congress on the scope of acceptable sanctions relief.
Of course, President Barack Obama himself can provide a certain degree of sanctions relief under executive order as he no doubt intends to if a deal is struck. And there is no doubt that Congress has a role to play in lifting sanctions. But the letter’s assertion that there is no exclusively defined “nuclear-related” sanction against Iran under US law and that any relief can only be extended by addressing a host of non-nuclear-related issues appears calculated to sow doubts about Obama’s ability to deliver among Iran’s leadership, thus strengthening hard-liners in Tehran who argue that Washington simply cannot be trusted. That’s why more than two dozen groups, including Win Without War, MoveOn.org, Americans for Peace Now and the National Council of Churches, called on Royce and Engel (unsuccessfully unfortunately) to clarify the letter’s intent:
Demanding that non-nuclear issues be added to the nuclear negotiations at this time will only ensure that we get no deal and face the prospect of an unconstrained Iranian nuclear program or a disastrous war opposed by the American people.
… It would be a travesty if the very sanctions that Congress enacted under the premise of stopping Iran from getting nuclear weapons proved to be the obstacle that blocked a nuclear deal.
(It may be worth noting that Royce has raised more money from “pro-Israel” PACs associated with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee than any other House candidate in the current election cycle, while Engel is number 4 in the rankings — only behind the just-defeated former House Majority Leader, Eric Cantor — according to the latest figures provided by the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP).
While Royce and Engel were releasing their letter, on one side of the Capitol, Sen. Mark Kirk, by far the biggest Congressional recipient of AIPAC-related funding in his 2010 re-election campaign, teamed up with Marco Rubio, the keynoter at last year’s Republican Jewish Coalition convention, to introduce The Iran Human Rights Accountability Act on the other. Among other provisions, it would impose visa bans and asset freezes against Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Hassan Rouhani. It’s just the kind of thing that generates a lot of goodwill in Tehran. Indeed, one of the Act’s chapters could only be interpreted as “regime change:” it declares the “policy of the United States” to be laying “the foundation for the emergence of a freely elected, open and democratic political system in Iran that is not a threat to its neighbors or to the United States and to work with all citizens of Iran who seek to establish such a political system.” Another gift to the hard-liners in Tehran who are as eager to undermine their negotiators in Vienna as the hawks here are to blow up the negotiations.
On Friday came news of yet another letter that is circulating on the Senate side, this one from Lindsey Graham, who has long promoted military action against Iran, and Robert Menendez, who last winter co-sponsored with Kirk the Iran Nuclear Weapon Free Act of 2014, which itself was clearly designed to sabotage the JPOA. (Graham, incidentally, is the second-leading recipient of “pro-Israel” PAC funds in the current Senate election cycle after Cory Booker, while Menendez topped the list in the 2011-12 cycle, according to CRP.) Like the Royce-Engel letter, this new one attempts to prescribe to the administration an acceptable deal that would warrant sanctions relief by Congress, specifically with respect to verification and monitoring provisions, disclosure by Iran on possible military dimensions (PMDs) of its nuclear program, and enforcement mechanisms, including making Iran “understand that that the United States reserves all options to respond to any attempt by Iran to advance its nuclear weapons program.”
And, like the Royce-Engel letter, a number of the demands included in the Graham-Menendez letter seem certain to raise doubts about Washington’s good faith and/or Obama’s ability to deliver the sanctions relief Tehran wants. For example, it says “… Iran must dismantle its illict nuclear infrastructure, including the Fordow enrichment facility and the Arak heavy water reactor…” despite the fact that Iran has made clear that, while it is prepared to make major concessions to accommodate international concerns about both facilities, it is not prepared by any means to completely “dismantle” them. Similarly, the letter demands that Iran submit to extraordinary verification and monitoring measures beyond those provided under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty’s Additional Protocol for “at least 20 years,” a time span that is certain to be dismissed as a non-starter in Tehran. In addition, it requires that Iran provide “full details about its nuclear program,” including PMDs, despite the fact that IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano has said it will take much longer than July 20 before his agency would be able to acquire that information, even with Tehran’s full cooperation.
“While the letter is written in terms that are sufficiently vague as to be somewhat meaningless, it could be interpreted in ways that call for outcomes that are not in the cards and could be deal-killers,” Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association (ACA), told LobeLog Friday.
“The negotiation is now in the final days, so who do these members of Congress think they are influencing? The Iranians? The other P5+1 parties? While members of Congress have legitimate concerns and interests in the outcome, they should wait until there is an outcome,” added Kimball.
“At this point, they can only complicate the talks and make it more difficult to achieve an agreement,” he said.
Meanwhile, outside Congress, neoconservative and other hard-line groups and individuals are also mobilizing what feels like a concerted campaign. Thus, in the latest edition of Bill Kristol’s Weekly Standard, the doom-minded and highly defensive duo of Dick and Liz Cheney conclude a lengthy article entitled, “The Truth About Iraq,” with:
[W]e should be clear that we recognize a nuclear-armed Iran is an existential threat to Israel and to other nations in the region, as well. We should refuse to accept any “deal” with the Iranians that allows them to continue to spin centrifuges and enrich uranium. In the cauldron of the Middle East today, accepting a false deal — as the Obama administration seems inclined to do — will only ensure Iran attains a nuclear weapons and spark a nuclear arms race across the region. The Iranians should know without a doubt that we will not allow that to happen, and that we will take military action if necessary to stop it.
Meanwhile, the hard-line neoconservative Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI), the Likudist Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), and the ever-hawkish Foreign Policy Project of the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC) announced a policy forum for next Thursday, July 17, entitled, “High Standards and High Stakes: Defining Terms of an Acceptable Iran Nuclear Deal.” The forum will feature Kirk, Engel, Rep. Brad Sherman, and Sen. Dan Coats, who previously co-chaired BPC’s task force on Iran. Panelists, according to the announcement, will also include the FDD’s Reuel Marc Gerecht, former Assistant Secretary of State for International Security and Non-Proliferation Stephen Rademaker, and Ray Takeyh of the Council on Foreign Relations. Given this line-up, it would be most surprising if any of the participants diverted from Netanyahu’s definition of an “acceptable Iran nuclear deal.”
Both Rademaker and Takeyh are currently serving on the Iran task force at the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA). (Most members of the BPC Iran task force previously co-chaired by Coats moved over to the JINSA task force when the original BPC staff director, Michael Makovsky, was appointed to head JINSA last year.) JINSA announced Friday that its task force, which includes Dennis Ross, as well as Rademaker, Takeyh, and FPI’s Eric Edelman among other well-known hawks, will also hold a briefing on the subject July 28, apparently in the belief that a deal may be concluded by then.
On yet another front, The Israel Project launched Thursday its latest web campaign, “No Bomb for Iran,” complete with a scary black-and-white photo of a mushroom cloud and the slogan, “If Iran Goes Nuclear, Terror Goes Nuclear.” It, too, echoes Netanyahu demands to essentially dismantle Iran’s centrifuges (although it doesn’t say all centrifuges), in addition to “roll[ing] back” its ballistic missile program despite the fact that the administration has clearly stipulated that missiles are not now a subject of negotiation.
So, as the US and its P5+1 partners appear to be closing in on a deal with Iran, the hawks are taking wing. Oh, and AIPAC’s board is supposed to meet here next week.
Jim Lobe,
An Iranian diplomat has slammed the US for backing the anti-Iran Mujahedin-e Khalq Organization (MKO), saying the terrorist group has bribed American politicians into showing public support for it.
In a column p
ublished on the USA Today daily on Thursday, Counselor and Head of Press Office for the Permanent Mission of Iran to the UN Hamid Babaei, criticized Washington for removing the MKO from the US State Department’s list of terrorist organizations in 2012.
The Iranian official also highlighted the crimes perpetrated by the MKO members against the Iranian and Iraqi nations and said the support of some American political figures for the terrorists as an Iranian “opposition group” shows “their cluelessness about Iran.”
“Washington lobbyists and former American politicians and officials have accepted millions of dollars from the group…in return for which they have publicly supported” them, wrote Babaei.
He further censured the Western states for sheltering the terrorists instead of bringing them to justice for their crimes.
“It remains unclear why an organization with such a violent history would be allowed so freely to operate in many Western countries,” said Babaei, stressing that the “dual nature of standards against terrorism is likely the greatest threat being faced by international efforts to stop terrorism today.”
The MKO fled Iran in 1986 for Iraq, where it received the backing of Iraq’s executed dictator Saddam Hussein and set up a camp near the Iranian border. The terrorist group also sided with Saddam during Iraq’s eight-year war on the Islamic Republic in 1980-1988.
The group is listed as a terrorist organization by much of the international community and is notorious for committing numerous terrorist acts against Iranians and Iraqis.
The European Union also removed the MKO from its list of terrorist organizations in 2009 after the group filed a petition against the blacklisting in 2008.
Why are Newt Gingrich, Joe Lieberman and Patrick Kennedy hanging with members of a terrorist cult?
Several well-known American political figures appeared at a rally in Paris on June 27 in support of an anti-Iran organization that was until recently formally listed as a terrorist group by the United States and Europe. They included Howard Dean, John R. Bolton, Bill Richardson, Newt Gingrich, former Rep. Patrick Kennedy, and Joseph I. Lieberman. Their appearance and their support for the People’s Mujahedin Organization (MEK) as an Iranian "opposition group" demonstrates their cluelessness about Iran. Considering the group’s history, its popularity in Iran is comparable to an American-led affiliate of Al-Qaeda.
Among the many victims of MEK terror are innocent civilians in Iran, as well as Westerners including Americans. Its violent history, cultic nature and oppression of its own members spans close to four decades. It supported Saddam Hussein’s regime in the 1980s, and its leader even boasted about killing thousands of Iranians while this cult served ex-Iraqi dictator’s expansionist ambitions. The scope of their crimes against the people of Iran and Iraq among others is baffling, and yet many Western countries seem to be unwilling to impose serious restrictions on the MEK the way they do with other terrorist groups.
It has also been reported that some in the American foreign policy community are conflicted about there being a possible role for this group in the future of American policy towards Iran. But one must wonder what state of bewilderment has befallen American foreign policy when such a group is seen as even a potential part of a solution to its policy conundrums in the Middle East.
Some American politicians supporting the MEK have claimed that these accusations are merely allegations from opponents in Tehran. In fact, scores of journalists, government agencies, and think tanks from around the world have catalogued these practices. The U.S. Department of State has stated that the MEK is "responsible for violent attacks in Iran that victimize civilians" including "attacks against clearly civilian targets." Adding that the MEK "joined Saddam Hussein’s brutal repression of the Kurdish rebellion" in 1991. The State Department has also referred to them as a "repressive cult despised by most Iranians and Iraqis." This is the reason why the Iraqi people, Kurds and Shiites in particular despise this group, not Iranian political influence as some have tried to claim.
U.S. based Human Rights Watch (HRW) has extensively recorded the MEK’s oppression of its own members, demanding that they divorce their spouses and "all physical and emotional attachments in order to enhance their ‘capacity for struggle.’" HRW also stated that MEK members are exposed to "solitary confinement to beatings, verbal and psychological abuse, coerced confessions, threats of execution, and torture that in two cases led to death."
Recently the French Foreign Ministry decried the MEK’s "violent and non-democratic inspirations," its ”cult nature" and "intense campaign of influence and disinformation."
U.S. officials attributed their removal from the list of terror groups to what they deemed the MEK’s "public renunciation of violence." But the MEK’s stated renunciation of violence also involved the claim that it had never itself targeted civilians — an assertion the State Department has clearly said is false. After the September 11 attacks, the MEK understood that their fate would lie in the hands of the West and that they could no longer rely on their benefactor, Saddam Hussein. The decision in 2001 to lay down arms and stop murdering civilians was a tactical decision — not a moral epiphany — that can be overturned if the aforementioned strategic calculation was ever to change.
Moreover, in 2009, the State Department submitted information in court stating the MEK had trained individuals "to perform suicide attacks" and a declassified FBI report from 2004 similarly found that MEK cells around the world were "actively … planning and executing acts of terrorism." Most importantly, none of the members of the organization have ever been brought to justice by the Western governments who give them shelter.
Instead Washington lobbyists and former American politicians and officials have accepted millions of dollars from the group, as campaign donation or speakers fees — the exact amounts of which most refuse to disclose publicly — in return for which they have publicly supported the MEK, claiming them to be an opposition group that deserves the protection of the U.S. By undertaking these efforts that the Rand Corporation called "cultic practices and its deceptive recruitment," the group managed to get itself removed from the terror list.
The dual nature of standards against terrorism is likely the greatest threat being faced by international efforts to stop terrorism today. If politicians are to be selective in opposing one terrorist group while supporting another based on their potential geopolitical usefulness, many nations would have many reasons to support various terrorist groups. When fighting terrorism, reaching for moral consistency cannot be seen as a possible option or an inconvenience; it must be considered a necessity.
It remains unclear why an organization with such a violent history would be allowed so freely to operate in many Western countries, raise money, build institutions, and ultimately be allowed to engage in a multi-million dollar political campaign. It’s simply impossible to imagine al-Qaeda or Boko Haram having the same level of freedom to operate.
The principle of the prevention of impunity dictates that acts of terror must not remain without legal consequence and those responsible must be brought to justice. The many victims of the MEK, those who have been killed or maimed and their family members deserve justice and the principles that Western nations claim to be unflinchingly dedicated to in the context of the so-called war on terror are trampled on every day that they accommodate terrorists, rather than contribute to their prosecution.
Hamid Babaei is counselor for the Permanent Mission of the Islamic Republic of Iran to the United Nations.
Hamid Babaei
++ This week, right minded Iranians all over the world have given their attention to the atrocities being inflicted on Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Predictably, only the MEK – out of fear of their Israeli owners – have remained silent on this issue in particular.
++ The mother of a resident in Camp Liberty held hostage by Rajavi has died after her desperate appeal for Rajavi to allow a last phone call with her son was denied. Ironically, although Rajavi did not allow this contact, the MEK announced her death in a statement which refers to her as a Mojahedin Martyr and claiming she was one of their supporters. This nasty ploy of Maryam Rajavi provoked many reactions in Farsi sites about the way she behaves. Hamed Sarafpour sent his condolences to the family and reminds us that it was only a week ago the family had made a last desperate attempt to arrange a phone call. This, he says, is how shameless Rajavi is.
++ Sahar Family Foundation reporting from Tirana during the last week has detailed the situation of ex members there who, although they are freed from MEK control, still face many problems. They live in an apartment block paid for by UNHCR but have been told that at end of a year this funding will be withdrawn and they will have to fend for themselves. This UN support includes a small stipend for food and fuel which already doesn’t cover their basic needs. On top of that they are being harassed daily by MEK operatives who obviously have unlimited financial backing. The MEK threatens them to be silent, but even if they agree to be silent they are then pushed to come back and work for the MEK. The pressure can be triggered by anything such as contacting their families, or a random accusation of being ‘agents of the Iranian regime’. The latest ploy is for the MEK to tell them their picture or name is on Iran-Interlink or Nejat Association websites and if they refuse to write swearing at these sites they will be beaten up because they are “obviously” agents of Iranian Intelligence and the MEK will therefore deal with them as “the enemy”.
++ This week has seen a spate of savage verbal attacks on Mrs Zahra Moini in Cologne, Germany from a variety of MEK sources trying to stop her talking after she became vocal about her experiences with the cult. The MEK threatened to publish information they have about her if she doesn’t cooperate. The MEK also claims she has never been with them and was an agent of the regime when she came to Iraq and they threw her out when they discovered this, and afterwards she was sent to Germany by Iran. Moini has been a resident and citizen of Germany for many years and it is only now that she has become a vocal critic that the MEK are attacking her. Today, a collectively signed open letter has been sent to her by ex members in Albania, reassuring her that many of them knew her in Iraq and witnessed the many difficulties she underwent there at the hands of the Rajavi cult. They have promised to bear witness wherever needed that she and her husband Babak Nik Tale’an were forced to hand-write dictated texts falsely confessing to be agents of the Iranian regime, and that was the condition that they would transfer them back to Germany from Iraq. They remind her that each one of them also has written such false confessions as the MEK forces everyone to do. Iran Interlink has also published photographs of Moini standing with Maryam Rajavi.
In English:
++ Global Research published an analytical article by Eric Draitser titled ‘The Strange Case of Iraq’s Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki against the Backdrop of the “War” against the Islamic State (IS)’. Draitser identifies a clear shift that has taken place in the rhetoric against, and analysis of, Prime Minster Nouri al-Maliki and his government recently. The article states, “It should come as no surprise to anyone who is even moderately aware of how US foreign policy and propaganda has historically operated, that the demonization of Maliki is directly linked to the inability of Washington to control him or, to put it another way, his refusal to accept US diktats… it was Maliki’s refusal to grant the US request to maintain US military bases in the country after the withdrawal which prompted the first round of attacks on him and his government… Maliki also took the absolutely monumental step of closing down Camp Ashraf and killing or expelling its inhabitants. Far from being a camp for “Iranian political exiles” as Western media have attempted to portray, Ashraf was the base of the Iranian terrorist organization Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK), an organization supported wholeheartedly by neocons (as well as most “liberals”) in its continued terror war against Iran. Of course, because Maliki dared to cleanse Iraq of these US-sponsored terrorist thugs, he was immediately convicted in the court of US public opinion which described the operation as an assault on Iranian “freedom fighters.” We know all too well what the US means when it describes terrorists as freedom fighters.”
++ A. Sepinoud and Mazda Parsi on Nejat Bloggers write about the MEK’s seemingly desperate attempts to link itself to ISIS and other terrorist groups in the region apparently as a perverse way of proving that it still exists.
++ Iran’s Tasnim news agency reported that Ali Ashraf Rashidi, Head of Iran’s Evin prison, dismissed as a “lie” the recent media reports that a fire had erupted in one of the jail’s wards last week. MEK media outlets among others reported a fire on July 1 in one of the Evin prison wards. Rashidi explained the incident as “like how two electricity wires may have contact in any house resulting in short circuit and puff of smoke, the same incident happened in the clerics ward”, noting that anti-Iran groups are not expected to provide authentic reports anyway.”
++ Iraq’s Al-Raie International News Agency reported that “Awad Al Awadi, member of the Sadrist Al Ahrar Bloc of the Iraqi Parliament, called on the Iraqi attorney general to request that Interpol issue international arrest warrants for the leaders of the terrorist Mujahedin Khalq Organization (the MKO), in particular Massoud and Maryam Rajavi.” He said, “some of the elements of the MKO who had come from Europe Entered Iraqi territory crossing Turkey borders in order to join ISIS forces in Mosul. Al Awadi stated, ”This is considered a threat to Iraqi national security and the Iraqi Government has the right to pursue the issue via international bodies.”
11 July 2014
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