Charles Davis

U.S. Politicians Provide Material Support for Terrorism – So Where’s the FBI?

Given that New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani ran a whole failed presidential campaign on his supposed war on terror-fighting credentials – he was in office when 9/11 happened, or so I’ve heard — one might reasonably wonder: why is the former GOP candidate flying to Paris and publicly praising the Mujahhideen-e Khalq (MEK), an Iranian exile group that worked side-by-side with Saddam Hussein and killed civilians and U.S. military personnel alike?

The question isn’t actually all that hard to answer. While, sure, the MEK might be designated a terrorist group by the State Department, it is rabidly opposed to the current Iranian government – so much so that the group fled Iran in the 1980s and sought refuge in Iraq, where it worked on behalf of the Iraqi dictator to stage suicide attacks against their own countrymen. So while terrorists, they’re useful terrorists when it comes to furthering U.S. policy goals for the Middle East, or at least that’s the thinking.

Led by Maryam Rajavi, the self-appointed “President Elect” of Iran (you think the 2009 Iranian election was rigged…), the group combines a strange personality cult with a mishmash of Marxist doctrine. And like the Afghan mujahadeen before it – those lovely folks who later formed the Taliban and al-Qaeda – there are plenty of high-profile U.S. politicians, Republican and Democrat alike, willing to lend the group their support.

As The Washington Post reported last week, Giuliani this month traveled to Paris and lavished praise on the MEK leadership. "The United States should not just be on your side," Giuliani proclaimed. "It should be enthusiastically on your side. You want the same things we want" (i.e. dead Iranians).

Joining Giuliani were several top Bush administration officials, including former Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge and Attorney General Michael Mukasey, all of whom decried the fact that the group is listed as a terrorist organization, when all its really want to do is commit acts of terrorism against Persians.

But while the support these top GOP officials offered a bunch of well-financed terrorists was widely reported, there have strangely been no ensuing indictments, no FBI raids, no grand jury subpoenas – nothing.

According to U.S. law, though, that shouldn’t be the case. In June, the Supreme Court upheld a statute that defines “material support” for terrorism so broadly as to include providing any form of “advice” or “assistance” to a group designated by the U.S. government as a terrorist organization – even if that advice consists only of encouraging a terrorist group to stop committing acts of terrorism.

But prosecutions under the “material support” doctrine aren’t meant for the powerful, for people like Giuliani & Friends — they’re intended for those who challenge the powerful. So while top U.S. politicians are free to speak at international conferences sponsored by terrorist groups, pacifists and anti-war activists are subjected to FBI raids for speaking out against their own government’s foreign policy.

Since September, two dozen prominent peace activists based mostly in Chicago and Minneapolis have been served grand jury subpoenas by the FBI, ostensibly as part of an investigation into whether they and their organizations provided material support for terrorist groups in Colombia and Palestine. Federal agents have also raided the offices and homes of around a half-dozen activists, confiscating computer equipment, books and mailing lists.

While American politicians openly flaunt their support for terror, so long as the victims of said terror are poor brown foreigners, activists targeted in the raids have forcefully declared their innocence, charging that they’re being subjected to a witch hunt intended more to intimidate those who dare dissent than uncover actual criminal wrongdoing. Notably, no one has been arrested or charged with a crime.

Activists are far from intimidated, though, with Code Pink co-founder Medea Benjamin telling Change.org that the raids and subpoenas are actually proving to be a rallying cry for the peace movement in the U.S., which had been waning in the wake of President Obama’s election.

In a statement issued Thursday, dozens of pro-Palestine activist groups at colleges across the country denounced the raids as un-American.

“As students at over fifty American universities, we unequivocally condemn the abuse of grand jury subpoenas to chill the exercise of First Amendment rights by university students and anti-war activists speaking and organizing against Israel’s continued oppression of the Palestinian people,” says the statement, signed by chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine. “The abuse of laws criminalizing ‘material support for terrorism’ is unprecedented and, had they been implemented at the time of South African apartheid, would have effectively criminalized broad American support for the anti-apartheid movement.” (Nelson Mandela’s political party, the African National Congress, was listed by the State Department as a terrorist group during the 1980s.)

The folks who brought us color-coded terror alerts and aren’t likely to be indicted anytime soon — again, they support terrorists, but the right kind of terrorists — grassroots activism has the potential to force Attorney General Eric Holder and his accomplice, U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, to back off their campaign of intimidation. If politicians are allowed to promote endless war without consequence, it’s not too much to ask that people of conscience be permitted to publicly oppose them.

Criminal Justice

January 1, 2011 0 comment

Mujahedin Khalq Organization as a terrorist group

MEK; traitors in the eyes of most Iranians

written by Nejat Society

Somebody doesn’t like me

Readers of this blog may not be aware that I am an agent of the Iranian regime. But Rabbi Daniel Zucker, an adjunct professor at Long Island University and long-time apologist for the anti-Iran terrorist organization known as the Mujahadeen-e-Khalq (MEK), has a lengthy and hilarious denunciation of me as such because I had the temerity — and naiveté, apparently — to point out in a recent piece for AntiWar.com that his beloved MEK is widely considered a terrorist cult.

The back story: late last month two American congressmen, Reps. Bob Filner (D-CA) and Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), held a press conference in Washington, DC to call on the U.S. government to offer support to the MEK in an effort to overthrow the Iranian regime. As I wrote in my piece, the lawmakers’ call was rather astonishing given the fact that the U.S. State Department notes the MEK “was responsible for the assassination of several U.S. military personnel and civilians in the 1970’s. Further, as the Council on Foreign Relations observes, “Until 2003 the MEK received funds, arms, and state sponsorship from Saddam Hussein.” Indeed, during the eight year Iran-Iraq war, the MEK even allied itself with the Iraqi dictator’s regime to kill its fellow countrymen, a fact that I noted in the article likely did not endear them to the Iranian public.

And while the MEK’s defenders have claimed the group’s designation as a terrorist organization was a political gesture meant to appease the Iranian government, the Council on Foreign Relations suggests a less conspiratorial reason: "its attacks have often killed civilians." In fact, the more one reads about the MEK the clearer it becomes the group’s exclusion prior to 1997 from the list of groups considered terrorist organizations by the U.S. government was the actual politically motivated decision.

But according to Zucker, had I done my homework and not relied on “an old State Department report” — dated April 2007 — I’d have known that the MEK has “renounce[d] violence” since 2001 and is in fact innocent of all terrorism charges. To bolster his case, he cites the benign-sounding “Iran Policy Committee,” which the website Sourcewatch helpfully points out “is a pressure group meant to influence US government policy towards Iran . . . made up of former White House, State Department, Pentagon and CIA officials.” Many of its principals are also “affiliated to AIPAC and its related think tanks," which should give you a good idea of where Zucker is coming from.

Still, Zucker claims that while the MEK did “indeed receive Hussein’s support”, it came “in the form of asylum from the mullah regime in Tehran”, because Saddam was of course well known for protecting political dissidents (he was just that kind of guy). That the MEK was willing to murder their fellow Iranians — and helped suppress uprisings among Iraq’s Shia and Kurdish populations — I’m sure was just an afterthought.

“It would behoove Davis to study a little bit of Iranian history, at least of the last 30 years, before venturing to write about Iranians”, Zucker continues, taking me to task for following “the regime line that the [MEK] undermined its credibility with the Iranian masses by fighting against the regime in the Iran-Iraq War. However, he fails to explain how the [MEK] has so many supporters inside Iran that it can continually supply the West with revelations about Iran’s secret nuclear and missile programs, as well as extensive lists of Iranian agents in Iraq.”

That fighting against one’s own countrymen in a war that killed hundreds of thousands of people might undermine the MEK’s credibility within Iran is not something I feel needs citation, but what the hell. As the Jamestown Foundation notes — observing the obvious — “The [MEK’s] alliance with Iraq’s former Baathist regime during the Iran-Iraq war was a huge strategic blunder from which they could never hope to recover. The sight of [MEK] forces aiding the Iraqi war effort turned them into perennial traitors in the eyes of most Iranians. This perception of the [MEK] still persists, more than 15 year after the ending of the war.” Put another way, "the MEK is universally hated in Iran," as Mideast professor Juan Cole succinctly puts it.

As for the MEK’s ability to provide the West with “revelations about Iran’s secret nuclear and missile programs,” I’d just point out that the U.S. intelligence community doesn’t actually believe Iran has a secret nuclear program, as Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair testified to Congress in March and which I’ve pointed out ad nauseam ever since.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the MEK has thanked Zucker for his slavish devotion to the group by inviting him "to Paris to address the 2005 and 2006 President Maryam Rajavi Freedom Convocations," as he notes in his bio. Rajavi is the leader of the MEK and declares herself "Iran’s future president for the transitional period following the mullahs’ overthrow."

Charles Davis, Cult Watch
http://charliedavis.blogspot.com/search/label/Cult%20Watch

July 18, 2009 0 comment

Mujahedin Khalq Organization as a terrorist group

US Lawmakers Call For Supporting Terrorists In Iran

written by Nejat Society

The Obama administration should be doing more to support Iranian resistance groups — including the Mujahadeen-e-Khalq (MEK), a "cult-like" terrorist organization that has engaged in suicide attacks against their own countrymen, according to the U.S. State Department — in an all-out effort to affect regime change in Tehran, two American lawmakers said at a recent press conference in Washington, DC.

The lawmakers’ call for greater U.S. support for self-styled resistance groups opposed to Iran’s government comes as the Islamic regime has accused groups protesting the recent disputed presidential election of receiving Western backing.

At a Capitol Hill press conference on June 26th, Rep. Bob Filner (D-CA), chairman of the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee, declared that the U.S. government, which has imposed stringent economic sanctions on Iran since the 1979 Islamic revolution and supported Iraq’s invasion of the country in the 1980s, had too often sought "to mollify or appease those in charge" of that country. Instead, Filner argued the U.S. should explicitly side with Iranian "resistance groups", including the MEK, which he described as a "democratic, non-nuclear, secular group fighting for freedom for all the people in Iran."

The U.S. State Department notes that the MEK "advocates the violent overthrow of the Iranian regime and was responsible for the assassination of several U.S. military personnel and civilians in the 1970′s," and that the group maintains "the capacity and will to commit terrorist acts in Europe, the Middle East, the United States, Canada, and beyond."

Following the Iranian revolution the MEK fled Iran for neighboring Iraq, where it received support from Saddam Hussein’s regime to launch "suicidal, mass wave attacks against Iranian forces." The MEK’s fighting on behalf of the Iraqi regime in a war that killed hundreds of thousands of Iranians is generally seen as undermining their credibility among the Iranian public.

Human Rights Watch has also accused the group of perpetrating serious human rights abuses, including torture, at a number of secret prison camps.

Nonetheless, citing the internal unrest in Iran over last month’s disputed presidential election and the fact that an invasion "is not an option today," Filner said the U.S. government should be doing much more to support "one of the biggest resistance groups in Iraq, the so-called MEK.
"They say, ‘Let us do the job; get out of our — just get out of our way,’ because we have not helped the internal resistance movements," Filner said. "We can help internal resistance movements in Iran, and we should not stand in their way of trying to get rid of the present regime."

Joining Filner in the call for greater U.S. support for the MEK was Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), who briefly fought alongside the Afghan mujahideen in their war against the Soviet Union. Though declared "freedom fighters" by the Reagan administration, the mujahideen proved to be fertile recruiting grounds for the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

Conceding that, like the Afghan mujahideen, the MEK is not "perfect," Rohrabacher said that "during the American revolution there were a lot of imperfect organizations around too. But the fact is, the mullahs are what now — they are the ones who are murdering their people. They are the ones who are threatening world peace."

Rohrabacher also rejected the premise of a question about whether overt U.S. support for terrorist groups opposed to the Iranian government might undermine future U.S.-Iran negotiations.

Filner and Rohrabacher appeared at the press conference with Soon Sansami, currently the executive director of the Women’s Freedom Forum. Previously she was the spokesperson for the National Council of Resistance, identified by Filner as "the umbrella Iranian internal resistance movement in the United States." The U.S. Treasury Department lists the group as a "Specially Designated Global Terrorist" organization and one of many "aliases of [the] MEK."
Antiwar .com

July 3, 2009 0 comment