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MEK troll farm in Albania
Mujahedin Khalq Organization's Propaganda System

The danger of MEK troll farm bolstering the propaganda of their paymaster

There is at least one more foreign policy opinion writer from the Mujahideen-eKhalq (MEK) whose existence is dubious, based on a study by a social media analyst and statements from a defector from the group. Amir Basiri, who contributed to Forbes 9 times, the Washington Examiner 52 times, OpenDemocracy, Algemeiner, and The Hill once also appears to be a fabrication.

The MEK is an Iranian exile group for which John Bolton, Rudy Giuliani, and other foreign policy luminaries have given paid speeches. Dems like Joe Lieberman and Howard Dean have also spoken on their behalf. But the group has American blood on its hands, has been accused of practicing forced sterilization, and their belief system has been described as a mixture of Marxism and Islamism. Its supporters claim they, and their front group the National Council of Resistance of Iran, are a sort of government-in-exile, despite nearly nonexistent support for the group within Iran. They also have waged a substantial disinformation campaign in the Western press, in particular targeting conservative media.

“Amir Basiri and Heshmat Alavi are two fake accounts,” Hassan Heyrani, an MEK defector told TAC.

“At Camp Liberty, near the BIAP airport in Iraq, I was in the political unit of the organization with some of the persons who grew up in America and Canada. We worked as a team to write the articles analyzing the Iranian regime. The MEK put them in The Washington Post and all the newspapers in Western countries.”

Basiri’s op-eds focus on the need for regime change in Iran which he claimed is “within reach.” The thrust of Basiri’s writing – last placed at the Examiner in October of 2018 – is to encourage American readers to take an interest and sympathize with the plight of Iranian protesters and dissidents. Basiri consistently argued against the Iran nuclear deal, downplayed terrorism against Iran, called for tougher sanctions as a method of regime change and highlighted the necessity of Trump working with the Iranian opposition.

“We are currently looking into the matter, so I won’t comment on this specific byline,” Philip Klein, Executive Editor and Commentary Editor of the Washington Examiner told TAC. “But I will say that we have recently instituted more rigorous vetting of outside contributors, including but not limited to asking for photo identification if necessary. We are especially on guard when it comes to unsolicited foreign policy commentary.”

A request for comment from OpenDemocracy, a site greatly concerned about disinformation campaigns, has not been returned as of press time. Basiri’s articles on Forbes are no longer online. (Update: Julian Richards, managing editor of OpenDemocracy, writes, “This article was submitted to us through our normal process and our editor corresponded with Amir Basiri about the text. In light of the allegations you have made, we have removed the article text from our site for the time being and I have written to the email address that Amir Basiri used to ask for confirmation of his identity.”)

The list of MEK disinformation tactics also includes fake online since-deleted sites such as PersiaNow and ArabEye and questionable sites such as Iran Focus whose domain was formerly registered under the name of an NCRI spokesperson and is now anonymously held.

MEK’s recent influence campaign on Facebook spearheaded by the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) was recently reported on last year by Lachlan Markey at the Daily Beast. Markey explained how NCRI lobbyist Soheila Aligholi Mayelzadeh has helped place paid ads on Facebook reaching between 500,000 to 1.4 million users as part of the campaign to sway US public opinion in favor of MEK and intervention in Iran.

The list of outright fakes recently in the realm of foreign policy analysis is significant: there is the apparent Emirati fabrication Raphael Badani to MEK sock puppet Alavi, first revealed by The Intercept, to deepfake non-existent anti-Palestinian activist Oliver Taylor, whose work was placed at highly-respected publications in the United States and Israel.

As Adam Rawnsley wrote for the Daily Beast, “Badani is part of a network of at least 19 fake personas that has spent the past year placing more than 90 opinion pieces in 46 different publications. The articles heaped praise on the United Arab Emirates and advocated for a tougher approach to Qatar, Turkey, Iran and its proxy groups in Iraq and Lebanon.”

Geoff Golberg is the founder of Social Forensics, which tracks and monitors online social media networks and disinformation campaigns. Golberg’s run-in and exposure of various pro-MEK personas, sock puppets and boosters came just prior to his Twitter suspension in July of 2019, the official reason for which was calling an account he believed to be fake and interfering in Canada’s elections a “moron.”

“Rather than suspending accounts that blatantly violate Twitter Rules, Dorsey instead opted to silence my voice. Specific to Iranian-focused platform manipulation, along with The Intercept, I helped out ‘Heshmat Alavi’ as a sockpuppet propaganda operation run by the MEK. Remarkably, despite initially suspending the fake account, ‘Heshmat Alavi’ has been reinstated by Twitter and continues to disseminate propaganda,” Golberg said, adding that Basiri – whose account is currently suspended by Twitter – is another fake persona which has been on his radar for some time. He produced the following graphic demonstrating the interconnectedness of the two accounts:

interconnection of alavi-basiri accounts - mek fake personas

Golberg said he knows little of geopolitics or political aspects and was led to investigate sock puppet accounts fomenting war with Iran because he noticed many oddities about their networks, followers and tweeting patterns. His further research and analysis led him down a rabbit hole of connections and resulted in death threats, mass reporting of his account and accusations that he sympathized with the Ayatollah’s regime.
Rather than the hype over Russian bots, the real danger on platforms like Twitter is fake accounts and troll farm accounts which amplify hashtags, spread lies and bolster the desired propaganda of their paymaster, Golberg says.

“Despite media coverage that tends to focus on ‘bots,’ which simply means fully-automated accounts, Twitter’s much larger problem is actually fake accounts. There are more than 100K fake accounts that exist solely to create the illusion of widespread sentiment that the US should go to war with Iran,” Golberg told TAC, adding, “Take ‘Sheldon,’ @patrick_jane77, for example, an account that reflects having nearly 120K Followers. Very few of the account’s Followers are authentic accounts, yet given Twitter refuses to enforce their own rules, it is easy to mistake “Sheldon” for being a popular account. Twitter’s entire platform is propped up by misleading or inflated Followers/Following counts. Twitter’s CEO, Jack Dorsey, has built a house of cards and continues to commit ad fraud at a massive scale.”

Golberg sued Twitter earlier this year, alleging that the platform engaged in “deceptive practices” and hasn’t stood by its own terms of service.

Accusations from MEK supporter Hanif Jazayeri that The American Conservative itself and senior editor Daniel Larison act as a mouthpiece for the mullahs are part of a broader campaign aimed at maligning the reputation and integrity of anyone who opposes regime change in Iran. Tweets calling for investigations of TAC also came from noted MEK sock puppet Alavi, MEK spokesman Shahin Gobadi and NCRI’s Ali Safavi.
A barrage of accounts retweeted Jazayeri’s accusations, many with only a few followers and which solely tweet boosting the MEK and supporting regime change in Iran.

It’s worth noting that Heshmat Alavi was following Amir Basiri prior to his suspension, as were others closely connected to the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies such as Jerusalem Post Iran hawk Seth Frantzman, @sfrantzman, Jazayeri and a number of other pro-MEK shills. It is a hall of mirrors amplifying the case for war with Iran, and the ad money from NCRI and pro-MEK accounts seems to have dampened Twitter’s desire to crack down. A request for comment from Twitter was not returned as of press time.

As a matter of journalistic ethics any organization engaging in systematic dishonesty like this has provided a very good reason to blacklist them. Failing to do so will encourage other foreign interests to do the same in the future, so conservative publishers should decline all content and interviews from the MEK in the future. This is not a matter of foreign policy differences: if you wish to see the U.S. pursue regime change in Iran, the MEK does not help make that case. Any publishers or think tanks who are aware of this dishonesty and still treat them like a legitimate opposition group should be considered part of a campaign not wholly different from the last time we were lied into a Mideast war.

By Paul Brian and Arthur Bloom

Arthur Bloom is the managing editor of TAC.

Paul Brian is a freelance journalist. He has reported for the BBC, Reuters, and Foreign Policy, and contributed to The Week, The Federalist, and others. You can follow him on Twitter @paulrbrian or visit his website www.paulrbrian.com.

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Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Advocating on behalf of MEK terrorists, Idiocy or Perfidy?

Idiocy or Perfidy? How We Get Hooked on Foreign Democracy Crusades

Ted Carpenter’s new book raises important questions about who is wagging who.

Gullible Superpower: U.S. Support For Bogus Foreign Democratic Movements by Ted Galen Carpenter, 2019, Cato Institute, 300 pages
For the past 20 years, U.S. foreign policy has been marked by constant lies and unjustified killings, from the 1999 bombing of Serbia and the 2003 invasion of Iraq to Libyan regime change in 2011 and our role in the bloody Syrian war since 2012. What explains this unbroken record of deadly folly?
According to Ted Carpenter, author of the new book Gullible Superpower, Washington policymakers have been deceived by foreign con men who claim to adore freedom and democracy. Carpenter has a far more sagacious foreign policy record over the past 30 years than either the White House or the Washington Post editorial page. His latest work captures, in his own words, “the lengthy, depressing record of U.S. support for bogus freedom fighters and democratic activists.”
Gullible Superpower walks readers through almost 40 years of pro-democracy shams. From Jonas Savimbi’s ludicrous authoritarian pro-freedom movement in Angola to the murderous Kosovo Liberation Army to the boundless rascality of Ahmed Chalabi, Carpenter recounts how the U.S. government bankrolled and supported one fraud after another. He also details how it intervened in Ukraine’s internal affairs, choosing to back the side with neo-Nazi elements in order to topple an elected pro-Russian government. (At least it worked out well for Joe Biden’s son.)
Gullible Superpower swats at some of the biggest connivers of our times. For example, Senator Joe Lieberman claimed that “fighting for the Kosovo Liberation Army is fighting for human rights and American values.” Lieberman did not rescind his endorsement after the former KLA leaders were linked to a scandal involving body snatching and selling human organs. John McCain was canonized as a saint after he died last year, despite or perhaps because of his endless mania for bombing foreign nations. In 2013, Mother Jones tabulated 13 different countries that McCain wanted to bomb, invade, or destabilize.
Carpenter’s book is a blunt call for realism in U.S. foreign policy. But the deck is increasingly stacked against clear assessments of American interests abroad in part because of deluges of foreign funding for Washington advocacy. Oppressive regimes are buying better reputations as think tanks become “a muscular arm of foreign governments’ lobbying in Washington,” the New York Times reported in 2014. The Brookings Institution received a windfall from the government of Qatar to set up a research institute that would devote itself to “reflecting the bright image of Qatar in the international media, especially the American ones”—at least according to the Qatari government. The Atlantic Council, another prominent D.C. think tank, has pocketed cash from Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and NATO. Facebook hired the Atlantic Council to help them decide which “extremist” or “hate” speech it should suppress (though it has thus far eschewed attaching an “Arab Dictator-Approved Censorship” label to such deletions).

Considering the perennial foreign debacles, the question arises: are U.S. policymakers fools, liars, or both? Carpenter’s tone in this book and in his articles over the decades has always been civil. Politeness is a virtue when dealing with reasonable people. However, politeness is only a mixed blessing when chronicling the perfidy of scoundrels.

Gullible Superpowers has an excellent chapter on the Iranian group Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK). That organization sprang up in the 1960s and proceeded to kill Americans in the 1970s and large numbers of Iranians in subsequent decades. NBC News reported in early 2012 that MEK had carried out killings of Iranian nuclear scientists and that it was “financed, trained and armed by Israel’s secret service.”

That was the same period during which a stampede of Washington hustlers took huge payoffs to publicly champion de-listing the MEK as a terrorist organization. As Trita Parsi noted in the New York Review of Books, MEK “rented office space in Washington, held fundraisers with lawmakers, or offered US officials speaking fees to appear at their gatherings. But the MEK did this openly for years, despite being on the US government’s terrorist list.”

Federal law prohibited taking money from or advocating on behalf of any designated terrorist group. Yet a 2011 Huffington Post headline reported, “Former U.S. Officials Make Millions Advocating For Terrorist Organization.” That didn’t seem to matter much to former FBI boss Louis Freeh, former CIA boss Porter Goss, co-chair of the 9/11 Commission Lee Hamilton, former attorney general Michael B. Mukasey, and former homeland security secretary Tom Ridge, who were pocketing $30,000 or more for brief speeches to pro-MEK events.


Glenn Greenwald rightly scoffed that the advocacy “reveals the impunity with which political elites commit the most egregious crimes, as well as the special privileges to which they explicitly believe they—and they alone—are entitled.”
The Obama administration was swayed to cancel the MEK’s terrorist designation in 2012 and Trump administration officials are babbling about MEK’s possible role in ruling Iran after the current government is toppled. MEK apologists continue to portray the group as idealistic freedom fighters devoted to democracy. A simple online search shows that the Farsi translation of the group’s name is “holy warriors of the people.” But as long as the MEK serves the purposes of the Saudi and Israeli governments and their American string-pullers, there will be plenty of Washingtonians who pretend that the Iranian people do not loathe MEK.
Foreign policy experts have become Washington’s preeminent con men. This is a playing field that will likely always be slanted against opponents of foolhardy interventions like Ted Carpenter. Vigorous criticism of foreign policy follies will always be needed. But don’t forget the ridicule.

By James Bovard
James Bovard is the author of Lost Rights, Attention Deficit Democracy, and Public Policy Hooligan. He is also a USA Today columnist. Follow him on Twitter @JimBovard.

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Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Has Giuliani undergone MEK’s brainwashing techniques?

Giuliani’s Cuckoo Praise for the MEK
Josh Kovensky reports on this year’s annual MEK gathering at their strange compound in Albania:

President Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani has joined buckraking forces with former Senator Joe Lieberman (D-CT), speaking at an event in Albania for a bizarre, cultish Iranian group that fashions itself as a government-in-exile for the Islamic Republic.
Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK) — once designated as a foreign terrorist group — hosted the conference at a compound that MEK operates in Albania.

Giuliani delivers pretty much the same speech every time he attends an MEK event, but this year he added the flourish of condemning people that referred to the totalitarian cult as a cult: “These are people that are dedicated to freedom, and if you think that’s a cult, there’s something wrong with you! There’s something missing in your soul!” Then the camera looks out at the crowd of identically-dressed cult members obediently applauding Giuliani’s rote recitation of the cult’s talking points. The video is priceless, as Pouya Alimagham points out here:

Pouya Alimagham

You know you’re a cult when you have to give thousands of dollars in speakers fees to have international figures come to your rallies and expressly say that you’re not a cult—all while your members are dressed exactly the same and clap on cue in unison. #facts #Iran #MEK https://t.co/EzpYJy7y6n
— Pouya Alimagham (@iPouya) July 14, 2019

When Giuliani affirms that the MEK’s agenda “looks just like our Bill of Rights,” you begin to wonder if he has undergone some of the group’s brainwashing techniques. He goes on to praise them as “miracle workers” because of the speed with which they built their creepy compound. The idea that a group that subjects its own members to physical and psychological abuse stands for “human rights” is laughable, and it is a measure of how divorced from reality Giuliani’s speech is that he would make such a claim. “This is a decent organization, this is a good organization,” the president’s lawyer asserts because this is what he has been paid to say. “This is a group we can support,” Giuliani says near the end. It speaks volumes about the horrible judgment and poor ethics of Giuliani and his fellow MEK cheerleaders that they are willing to take money from this group and say these things publicly about them.
The MEK’s paid American boosters are a disgrace, but their participation in these propaganda spectacles is useful in confirming that we can automatically dismiss anything these people have to say about Iran or Iran policy. No one that takes money from a deranged cult hated by Iranians has any business talking about Iran’s political future, and anyone that chooses to echo MEK propaganda has absolutely no credibility on any issue related to Iran. MEK boosters clearly know nothing about Iran and its people, and they definitely don’t care about what the Iranian people think or want. The “decent” and “good” organization that Giuliani praises fought for Saddam Hussein against their own country, it has killed Americans and Iranians in terrorist attacks, and it holds its own members captive and subjects them to brutal and dehumanizing treatment. The fact that he and others advocate for them to have any role in Iran’s government shows their utter contempt for the Iranian people.

The shameless cheerleading for a totalitarian cult might not seem so important, but we should remember that one of the cult’s biggest fans, John Bolton, is now National Security Advisor in charge of making Iran policy. The insane claims that Giuliani and others were making in Albania this weekend aren’t just confined to a bunch of has-beens on the take. Bolton has said many of the same things on many occasions, and I suspect he is fanatical enough in his desire for regime change that he would consider the MEK to be a legitimate ally.

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Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Whitewashing the MEK Makes No Sense

The National Interest has published a strange bit of pro-MEK propaganda by Ilan Berman:

Eliminating that threat, the MeK argues, requires regime change in Tehran. And while many opposition activists advocate “civil disobedience” to achieve this aim, the MeK is convinced that the Iranian regime is simply too brutal, too entrenched and too invested in maintaining its hold on power to be removed solely by peaceful means. The alternative could well be armed resistance, and here the MeK holds a distinct advantage should such action become necessary—both because of the past military-style structure and discipline of its cadres and owing to its past successes against the regime.

Berman does not address much of the relevant criticism of the Mujahideen-e Khalq (MEK) in this article, and he takes the superficial “democratic” rhetoric and agenda of a totalitarian cult at face value. The article is titled “Making Sense of The MeK,” but a previously uninformed reader would come away from reading this with a very distorted and false picture of what the group is and what it has done. For instance, he talks about the MEK’s efforts to cultivate U.S. politicians and former officials, including John Bolton and Rudy Giuliani, but he leaves out the part where they have paid their newfound supporters for their endorsement to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars per speech. Berman says that their “outreach” has succeeded in “garnering endorsements from luminaries on both sides of the U.S. political aisle and in both chambers of the U.S. Congress,” but he doesn’t tell his readers how they managed to get all those endorsements. The ease with which a discredited cult can buy support in Washington should be a cause for alarm, but in this article it is incredibly presented as proof that the cult is a “relevant” part of the opposition.
The MEK’s history of violence and abuse of its own members is never mentioned. The involvement of the cult and its current leader, Maryam Rajavi, in fighting for Saddam Hussein’s government in the Iran-Iraq war never comes up. The group’s past terrorist attacks inside Iran, including the killing of several Americans, have vanished down the memory hole. The group’s suspected involvement in the murder of Iranian nuclear scientists in the last decade is likewise nowhere to be found. These are fairly relevant details if the purpose of the article is to “make sense” of the group, but the real purpose here seems to be to whitewash its past and present and to repeat its talking points.
Berman also fails to mention that the MEK is hated by almost all Iranians in Iran and the diaspora. Assal Rad confirms that the group has no support in her recent article on the group:

According to a 2018 poll among Iranian-Americans, only 6 percent said that they supported the MEK as a legitimate alternative to the current regime in Iran. The history of this enmity can be traced back to the Iran-Iraq War, when the MEK fought alongside Saddam Hussein.

A group that has virtually no support among Iranians anywhere outside of its own membership is obviously not a viable alternative to the current government. A group that sided with a foreign aggressor against their own country is understandably viewed as an enemy by the vast majority of the population. For these and other reasons, the cult is widely viewed as illegitimate and extremely dangerous. The group is sometimes referred to as the Iranian Khmer Rouge for good reason. John Limbert made a similar comparison when he described the cult and its ideology in an article earlier this year:

Following those defeats, the MEK transformed itself into a bizarre cult, with an ideology combining the practices of Jonestown and the Khmer Rouge.

As in many other similarly deranged cults, members are subjected to physical and psychological abuse, cut off from their families outside the cult, and brainwashed to devote themselves to the cult leader. These abusive practices continue inside the MEK’s compound in Albania. Arron Merat wrote about some of this in his extensive report on the cult last year:

Mostafa and Robabe Mohammadi came to Albania to rescue their daughter. But in Tirana, the capital, the middle-aged couple have been followed everywhere by two Albanian intelligence agents. Men in sunglasses trailed them from their hotel on George W Bush Road to their lawyer’s office; from the lawyer’s office to the ministry of internal affairs; and from the ministry back to the hotel.

The Mohammadis say their daughter, Somayeh, is being held against her will by a fringe Iranian revolutionary group that has been exiled to Albania, known as the People’s Mujahedin of Iran, or MEK (Mujahedin-e Khalq).
Rad also describes the torments that the MEK inflicts on its own members:

According to a report by RAND, the group’s disturbing human rights cruelties against its members include physical abuse, seizure of assets, imprisonment, mandatory divorce, emotional isolation, and forced labor—to name but a few. Former MEK members who have escaped the group also report sexual abuse and forced marriages during their captivity. One of their more nefarious practices of authoritarian control over members is removing children from their parents.

If this is what they do to their own adherents, one can easily imagine how much worse their treatment of everyone else would be if they somehow managed to take control of the coercive apparatus of a government. This is the creepy and dangerous group that quite a few Iran hawks want to promote and possibly install as the next government of Iran. Fortunately, Iranians would never accept such a twisted organization as their new political leadership. The disturbing thing is that so many Americans are still prepared to advocate on behalf of such a horrible group simply because it seeks regime change.

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Mujahedin Khalq Organization's Propaganda System

The MEK’s Fake Mouthpiece and Western Credulity

Murtaza Hussain has reported an important story on the ongoing propaganda campaign sponsored by the Mujahideen-e Khalq (MEK) cult. This is the group of discredited Iranian exiles that has been building up its support in the West over the last decade by cultivating ties with and paying many Iran hawks, including the current National Security Advisor John Bolton.

Hussain has found that a prominent online figure, Heshmat Alavi, is a fake persona created by the MEK’s troll farm in Albania to harass and attack journalists and analysts that criticize the cult and oppose war and regime change in Iran:
There’s a problem, though: Heshmat Alavi appears not to exist. Alavi’s persona is a propaganda operation run by the Iranian opposition group Mojahedin-e-Khalq, which is known by the initials MEK, two sources told The Intercept.

“Heshmat Alavi is a persona run by a team of people from the political wing of the MEK,” said Hassan Heyrani, a high-ranking defector from the MEK who said he had direct knowledge of the operation. “They write whatever they are directed by their commanders and use this name to place articles in the press. This is not and has never been a real person.”

Heyrani said the fake persona has been managed by a team of MEK operatives in Albania, where the group has one of its bases, and is used to spread its message online.
The MEK has long been harassing and attacking journalists and analysts that oppose their fanatical regime change agenda and their creepy, abusive organization.

On occasion, I have also been subjected to some of this same treatment on Twitter when I have pointed out the group’s past and its current abuses against its own members, but others have had to endure much worse harassment and threats for a long time. The Alavi case goes beyond unleashing the usual army of bots against the group’s critics.

In this case, the fake persona was able to publish dozens of articles in Western news and opinion outlets promoting the MEK as the main Iranian opposition group and advocating for regime change in Iran:
Alavi, whose contributor biography on the Forbes website identifies him as “an Iranian activist with a passion for equal rights,” has published scores of articles on Iran over the past few years at Forbes, The Hill, the Daily Caller, The Federalist, Saudi-owned al-Arabiya English, and other outlets.

The problem here is not just that the MEK has managed to spread its poison in Western media using this fake persona, but that so many of these outlets readily accepted submissions from a pro-MEK trolling operation. It isn’t surprising that a creepy cult intent on rehabilitating its image in the West would resort to trickery and lies, but it is disturbing how willing so many of these outlets were to lend legitimacy to that effort and broadcast outright propaganda. It is equally troubling how long the MEK was able to get away with this before the deception was uncovered.

The Alavi case is an important piece of a larger story about how advocates of regime change in Iran have been resorting to harassment, intimidation, and smears of Iranian and Iranian-American journalists, analysts, and genuine activists for years. It is similar to the recent scandal involving U.S. government funding of the so-called Iran Disinformation Project that engaged in similar smear tactics and harassment against many of the same people, and it is part of the same phenomenon of shouting down credible opponents of regime change and war in an attempt to control the debate. Fortunately, thanks to Hussain’s story, Twitter has suspended the Alavi account and the fake persona has been outed to the entire world. No doubt the MEK will keep trying to promote their message in Western media outlets, and some will be happy to oblige them, but an important part of their campaign of deception and intimidation has been exposed and stopped.

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Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

The Iran Hawks’ Creepy Embrace of the MEK

Former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge resumes his discrediting advocacy for the Mujahideen-e Khalq:

Which is why I include myself among an incredible cadre of men and women from across every spectrum of life and political affiliation, in Europe and here in America, who have decided to embrace publicly the viable alternative to the clerical regime, the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), and the 10-point Plan advocated by the NCRI’s leader, Maryam Rajavi.

It is rather incredible that so many former government officials and retired officers have embraced a totalitarian cult as the “alternative” to another country’s government, but it has been going on for the better part of a decade now. All of the MEK’s American boosters have proven that they have such extraordinary bad judgment that they should have no business talking about Iran policy (or any other foreign policy issue), and their continued advocacy on behalf of this awful organization is proof of how easily corrupted our foreign policy debates are. The MEK probably does still engage in terrorism, since its members were reportedly the ones responsible for murdering Iranian scientists a few years back, but there is absolutely no question that they are not and never could be a “viable alternative” to the current government. It is an indictment of Ridge and others like him, including the National Security Advisor, that they are so gullible or so obsessed with regime change that they are willing to make such ridiculous claims in public.

Ridge unsurprisingly doesn’t mention that almost all Iranians everywhere hate the MEK and want nothing to do with it. They certainly don’t want them to take over Iran, and I think it’s safe to assume that any attempt to force this group on the people would be met with overwhelming resistance. So much for being “viable.” It is a reflection of many Iran hawks’ ignorance of the country and its people that they think this could possibly work. He omits that Rajavi is a cultish leader who used to fight on the side of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war, and he leaves out the group’s long history of abusing its members that continues to this day in their creepy compound in Albania. Every time that a prominent American shills for the MEK, it is an insult to the genuine Iranian opposition and another reminder that Iran hawks have nothing but contempt for the Iranian people.

In addition to shilling for the cult, Ridge urges the Trump administration to be merciless in its application of sanctions in order to strangle Iran’s economy even more than it already has:

President Trump’s views on Iran are both clear and appropriate, but frankly, I would like to see zero exports of energy. Some say that means the Iranian people will suffer, but they are suffering now. Inflation is at 40 percent, unemployment at 50 percent. The rial has lost 70 percent of its value. And the recent devastating floods engulfing 27 out of 31 provinces are a damning indictment of the mullahs for their 40 years of mismanagement, incompetence and the looting of Iran’s national wealth. We must encourage the president, the administration and Congress to sustain the pressure.

Existing sanctions are responsible for causing much of the suffering that Iranians are already experiencing, and Ridge’s answer to that is to cause even more harm in the vain hope that this will lead to regime change. Toppling the government in Tehran seems to be the only thing that matters to these fanatics, and they don’t care how many millions of people have to be punished along the way.

By Daniel Larison ,

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Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Mattis and Our Bankrupt Iran Policy

James Mattis’ tenure at the Pentagon ends today. Sina Azodi and Barbara Slavin consider what his departure could mean for the future of Iran policy:

The retired Marine general had policy differences with the president about Iran as well. While a supporter of containment, Mattis advocated remaining within the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). His departure tilts the balance in Trump’s national security team in favor of more hawkish individuals who have openly advocated regime change as the ultimate solution to US differences with the Islamic Republic.

When Mattis resigned, I warned that his successor would likely be more of a yes-man and less willing or able to restrain the president’s belligerent tendencies. That might seem like a strange thing to say until we remember that Mattis was responsible for curbing the president’s desire for a much larger military response against the Syrian government in the spring of this year, and according to some accounts he was a major obstacle to an attack on North Korea in 2017. Trump supporters have been quick to credit the president for de-escalation and limited intervention that happened because Mattis restrained him, and they have been equally swift in shifting blame for his escalations of other wars to the people around him. Mattis was unwilling to end our current pointless and illegal wars, but it is also true that he was responsible for keeping Trump from starting new ones.

Mattis shared the administration’s Iran obsession to an alarming degree, but as Azodi and Slavin point out his departure removes one of the only counterweights inside the administration to the much more rabid Persophobes in Bolton and Pompeo. It could also mean one less obstacle inside the administration to an attack on Iran that Bolton and Pompeo have wanted for many years. Azodi and Slavin continue:

Left atop Trump’s national security team is national security adviser, John Bolton, a so-called “offensive realist” who has long pushed for bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities. Bolton also distrusts multilateral agreements and has close ties with the Mujahedin-e Khalq or MEK, an Iranian opposition group with a past history of assassinating American citizens.

The other survivor so far of Trump’s reality show administration is Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. A self-described “counterpuncher,” Pompeo, who replaced the more moderate and less Iran-phobic Rex Tillerson, has also suggested in the past that US should consider attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities.

U.S. forces may be withdrawn from Syria in the coming year (or maybe they won’t be), but that doesn’t mean that war with Iran has become less likely.
By Daniel Larison ,

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The cult of Rajavi

Bolton’s Favorite Deranged Cult

The Guardian has published a lengthy article by Arron Merat on the Mujahideen-e Khalq (MEK), and it details the group’s ongoing abuses and crimes at its new base in Albania. This is what John Bolton’s favorite “opposition” group does to its own members:

    I spoke to about a dozen defectors, half of whom are still in Albania, who said that MEK commanders systematically abused members to silence dissent and prevent defections – using torture, solitary confinement, the confiscation of assets and the segregation of families to maintain control over members. In response to these allegations, an MEK spokesperson said: “The individuals who are described as ‘former members’ were being used as part of a demonisation campaign against the MEK.”

    The testimony of these recent defectors follows earlier reports from groups such as Human Rights Watch, which reported former members witnessed “beatings, verbal and psychological abuse, coerced confessions, threats of execution and torture that in two cases led to death”.

It should be obvious that a group that abuses its own members so cruelly is unfit to hold political power over anyone. It is a disgrace that so many prominent American and European officials and politicians have aligned themselves with such a despicable organization, and it shows how willing many Iran hawks are to overlook the group’s horrific record because it gives them a convenient ally in their pursuit of regime change.

The MEK was removed from the U.S. list of foreign terrorist organizations six years ago, but that wasn’t because the government believed they had given up on using violence to achieve their goals:

    Daniel Benjamin, who was then the head of counter-terrorism at the state department, told me that the US decided to remove the MEK from the list of foreign terrorist organisations not because it believed it had abandoned violence, but to “avoid them all getting killed” if it remained in Iraq [bold mine-DL]. After the MEK was no longer designated a terrorist group, the US was able to convince Albania to accept the 2,700 remaining members – who were brought to Tirana on a series of charter flights between 2014 and 2016.

The Obama administration’s concerns about the safety of the members were understandable, but the de-listing decision was clearly a mistake as many of us said at the time. Unfortunately, that decision has made it easier for a truly awful group to operate and buy more American support.

The cult was heavily dependent on Saddam Hussein during the first decades of their exile, but in recent years they have found a new patron that shares their hostility to Iran:

    “The money definitely comes from Saudis,” says Ervand Abrahamian, a professor at the City University of New York and author of the definitive academic work on the group’s history, The Iranian Mojahedin. “There is no one else who could be subsidising them with this level of finance.”

It is not surprising that the MEK would have to rely on money from Iran’s regional rivals. The group has no support inside Iran and virtually none among Iranians in the diaspora, and so it makes sense that they would have to turn once again to a government that would presumably like to use them to harm Iran. Iranians understandably regard them as traitors for their role in the Iran-Iraq war and in their subsequent attacks on their former country. It is remarkable that a group that served as Saddam Hussein’s henchmen for decades could be so quickly and easily rehabilitated. The article recounts the MEK’s role as internal enforcers for Saddam Hussein’s regime, which used them to suppress the uprisings following the Gulf War:

    Karwan Jamal Tahir, the Kurdistan regional government’s high representative in London, was a fighter for the Kurdish peshmerga in 1991. He told me that he remembers how the MEK arrived in the town of Kalar, about 93 miles (150km) south-east of Kirkuk, just after Saddam had lost control of the north of Iraq after the first Gulf war. “They came in Saddam’s tanks,” he said. “We thought they were returning peshmerga because the tanks were covered with portraits of Kurdish leaders … but they opened fire on the town … It was a big atrocity.”

An organization with a record of committing atrocities is clearly not one that should ever be entrusted with power in the future, but this hasn’t stopped Bolton, Giuliani, and many others from cheering for them and treating them as if they were Iran’s government-in-waiting. Whatever else it may claim to be, the Mujahideen-e Khalq (MEK) is still a deranged totalitarian cult steeped in the blood of many innocent people. The Western politicians and officials that lend legitimacy to this group have discredited themselves on all matters relating to Iran.

By Daniel Larison

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Rudy Giuliani
Mujahedin Khalq Organization as a terrorist group

The Fanaticism of the MEK’s Cheerleaders

Rudy Giuliani shills for the Mujahideen-e Khalq (MEK) again:

We strongly support the largest and most organized Iranian opposition, known as the Mujahedin e-Khalq (MEK).

The MEK has no support inside Iran, and it has scant support among Iranians in the diaspora. They cannot be the “largest” opposition group when they have virtually no supporters outside the ranks of their own totalitarian cult, and it doesn’t mean anything to say that a cult is organized. Giuliani’s lame argument that the MEK must be powerful and influential because the Iranian government hates them doesn’t pass the laugh test. The Iranian government perceives the MEK as their enemy for obvious reasons, but it doesn’t follow that Iranians want to have anything to do with them. Legitimate opponents of the Iranian government hold this group and its Western fans in contempt, and most Iranians don’t desire the regime change that Western Iran hawks and the MEK seek.

Giuliani is just one of many former American officials and retired officers to embarrass and discredit themselves by advocating for the MEK, but he is also one of the most vocal. As the president’s lawyer, he has access to Trump and may be able to influence him on matters relating to Iran, and his fellow MEK booster John Bolton would have no problem with that. It is a measure of how ideological and fanatical many Iran hawks are that they have cultivated a relationship with such an appalling organization.

No matter what one thinks our Iran policy should be, the MEK is not a credible alternative to the current government. Seeking regime change in Iran is folly, but to promote an obnoxious cult as the answer to Iran’s problems is simply insanity. In addition to being a nasty cult, the group is responsible for killing Americans in the 1970s and aligned itself with Saddam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq war. Iranians understandably view them as traitors. Anyone who is cheerleading for the MEK is advertising both his ignorance of Iran and his hostility to the Iranian people.

By Daniel Larison ,Randy Miramontez / Shutterstock.com

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Mc cain and Maryam Rajavi
Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

McCain’s Foreign Policy Record

Sen. John McCain died from brain cancer over the weekend:

    John S. McCain, the proud naval aviator who climbed from depths of despair as a prisoner of war in Vietnam to pinnacles of power as a Republican congressman and senator from Arizona and a two-time contender for the presidency, died on Saturday at his home in Arizona. He was 81.

McCain served in Congress for more than thirty years. In that time, he went from the Vietnam veteran who warned against an unwise entanglement in Lebanon to becoming the most vocal and predictable advocate for every bad military intervention under the sun. The longer he stayed in Washington, the worse he became. His career is nothing if not a cautionary tale to other would-be legislators. He specialized in matters of national security and foreign policy, and yet he had a remarkable knack for misjudging practically every major foreign policy issue of the last three decades.

McCain distinguished himself as a consistent proponent of unnecessary foreign wars in the name of American “leadership,” and the country was always worse off when the president heeded his recommendations. He was a leading cheerleader for the invasion of Iraq and intervention in Libya, and he was wrong about both. He was also a Kosovo war supporter and has been a steadfast defender of U.S. support for the Saudi war on Yemen. When Georgia escalated a conflict with Russia, he insanely proclaimed, “We are all Georgians” and gave the impression that he was willing to risk WWIII over a dispute that had nothing to do with us. Despite his constant demands for more “action,” the U.S. did not intervene in Syria as forcefully or as soon as he wanted. He was even once quoted praising the Saudis for their role in Syria. “Thank God for the Saudis,” he said. He was famously hawkish on Iran (“bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, Iran,” he sang), and in recent years went so far as to jump on the Mujahideen-e Khalq (MEK) bandwagon. This is a record of horrible judgment and even more horrible costs for the people in the countries affected by the policies he supported.

If McCain had his way, the U.S. would have been in even more wars for much longer than we already were, and even his admirers can’t deny that. For the last twenty years of his political career, McCain was an irrepressible champion of reckless U.S. meddling around the world. It was an enormous stroke of good fortune for the U.S. and the world that his 2008 presidential bid failed. If you believe that U.S. foreign policy is far too militarized, overreaching, and destructive, McCain did a great deal to make and keep it that way.

The one big thing that McCain got right in his Senate career was his opposition to torture. Because he had suffered from the use of torture as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, he understandably had no patience for the euphemisms and rationalizations of his pro-torture colleagues. This was the most significant disagreement he had with his party, and in the end it is probably the only issue where his willingness to break with his party from time to time really mattered. McCain had the ability to put principle ahead of party on occasion. Unfortunately, he did not do so all that often, and when it came to foreign policy the principles he followed were usually very bad ones.

By Daniel Larison

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