Fake Newsman: Anti-Iran Forbes “Writer” is a People’s Jihadi Front

“Heshmat Alavi” who has published anti-Iran screeds in Forbes, the Daily Caller and other substandard rightwing venues, does not, according to The Intercept, actually exist.

The name is a front propaganda efforts of the People’s Jihadis (Mojahedin-e Khalq or MEK). The MEK has committed numerous acts of terrorism in Iran and then collaborated with Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. It was listed as a terrorist organization the the US until a few years ago and it is mysterious why it was ever taken off the list. My own suspicion is that bribes were taken or influence peddling was practiced.

NBC news once reported that the People’s Jihadis has links to the Israeli intelligence organization, Mossad. Others have alleged Saudi money and support.

Rudi Giuliani, John Bolton and Mike Pompeo, who now make US foreign policy, have taken large bribes from this terrorist organization.

The idea of blacklisting the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps as a terrorist organization (nonsensical because it is a national guard, not a non-state actor) was first recently floated by the non-person “Heshmat Alavi” in the non-news-source “Daily Caller.” Then Trump followed through. Putin’s hold on the Trump administration is feeble as a kitten’s compared to that of People’s Jihadi cult leader Maryam Rajavi in Albania.
The Young Turks interview the Intercept Washington Bureau Chief on the story:

The post Fake Forbes Newsman is an MEK Front appeared first on Nejat Society.

Hence we find Rudy Giuliani addressing their annual convention and pledging regime change in Iran.

Giuliani only has experience of two kinds of regime change. Disastrous and more catastrophic. He thought invading and occupying Iraq would be a swell idea.

Personally, I never liked the Islamic Republic of Iran. But I try to be objective. Its government is less Draconian than Saudi Arabia’s, a close American ally, and certainly than North Korea’s, with which Washington is now making nice. Regime change as a project has a long record of failure and blowback. George Kennan’s essay on containing the Soviet Union is worth revisiting here. He pointed out that the social and economic conditions in mid-20th century Russia and China were not at all similar to those in the US, so why should we assume they would have the same form of government? Where they threatened US interests, he said, they should be contained. Otherwise, he implied, there was nothing to do but leave them alone internally. In contrast to all the coup-plotters that followed him (e.g. Iran 1953), and in contrast to the architects of the Vietnam War, Kennan’s vision actually succeeded as policy.

The other thing to say is how ridiculous it is that Trump and Giuliani have conspired to keep out of the US ordinary Iranians who want to pursue an education or business here, but are openly consorting with an organization that has been on the US terrorist watch list!

Although the People’s Jihadis were inexplicably removed from the State Department list of terrorist organizations a few years ago, they have a sordid and violent past of shootings, assassinations and bombings. They were even given bases in Iraq by dictator Saddam Hussein, from which they launched terrorist operations (blowing up children on schoolbuses e.g.) against Iran.

It isn’t just a matter of politics making for strange bedfellows. The tens of thousands of dollars in fees that Rudy Giuliani, John Bolton and other Trump intimates have taken from the People’s Jihadis makes them more or less employees of this terrorist organization.

Even Nancy Pelosi has come out for the People’s Jihadis.

It is the damnedest thing.

When I visited Iran in summer of 1976, the newspapers were full of dire warnings about “Islamic Marxists.” They meant the People’s Jihadis, who were then blowing things up and sniping and committing terrorism to overthrow Mohammad Reza Pahlevi, Iran’s CIA-stalled puppet king. After the 1979 Revolution and through the 1980s, the People’s Jihadis or MEK or MKO went into opposition and the ayatollahs attempted to crush it. Thousands were killed or jailed, and the jihadis took to the streets, sometimes spraying machine gun fire on foot or on the backs of motorcycles. In 1981, they set off an enormous explosion that killed At one point in 1988 the regime committed a prison massacre of them. Saddam Hussein gave them a base from which to commit terrorism inside Iran.

That the chief high Poobahs of the US government on both sides of the aisle have now rehabilitated this political cult with its violent past tells you all you need to know about the poisonous atmosphere in Washington. My suspicion is that if you dig a little you will find the Israel lobbies complicit in all this, as well.

But as politics it is not only evil but stupid. The Iranian public long ago decided against the People’s Jihadis, whom they view as glassy-eyed terrorists. The young people in Iran may want a different society, but it certainly is not Maryam Rajavi’s cult.

Although the official Press TV is an Iranian propaganda organ, in this particular case it is not clear to me that its point of view is very far from that of the Iranian public. It is worth seeing the other side here:

Iran’s Press TV: “Trump lawyer Giuliani steals show at anti-Iran event”

Juan Cole

The post Trump Luminaries at Iranian Jihadi Cult Conference in Paris appeared first on Nejat Society.

Commenting on the speech (full transcript here), JStreet wrote: “With their decision to violate the historic JCPOA arms control agreement, the president and his ‘war cabinet’ have created a strategic disaster of their own making and undone the major accomplishments of the previous administration. They have made the US, Israel and the world less safe.”

Short history of Iran’s nuclear activities: 1957 to the JCPOA

After 12 years of intensive talks, initially between Britain, France and Germany (the EU-3), and finally between Iran and the five permanent members of the Security Council plus Germany (P5+1), Iran and the leading world powers reached a landmark agreement. The nuclear deal (officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or JCPOA) was the result of the efforts of the greatest experts in nuclear non-proliferation, including experts from the IAEA and departments of energy and intelligence service of all those countries.

Iran’s nuclear programme had started in 1957 with the help of the United States as a part of the Atoms for Peace program, when a “proposed agreement for cooperation in research in the peaceful uses of atomic energy” was announced.

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Mohammad Reza Shah’s government started an ambitious nuclear program. It established the Tehran Nuclear Research Centre in 1967, with a US-supplied 5-megawatt nuclear research reactor, which was fueled by highly enriched uranium.

Iran was one of the first countries to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1968. The NPT allows all member states to engage in peaceful nuclear activity, including full range of processing, so long as they refrain from manufacturing nuclear weapons.

In return, the five recognized nuclear states (the United States, Russia, China, Britain and France) promised to move towards the elimination of their nuclear weapons in “good faith”. Not only have they not fulfilled this requirement, on the contrary, they have continued to develop more and more deadly and sophisticated nuclear weapons, and they have also been joined by India, Pakistan, Israel and recently by North Korea.

In 1974, with US backing, the Shah approved plans to construct up to 23 nuclear power stations, producing 23,000 megawatts of electricity. US and European companies competed against each other to help build those reactors.

In 1975, the Erlangen/Frankfurt firm signed a contract worth up to $6 billion to build the first nuclear power station in Bushehr. President Ford signed a directive in 1976 offering Iran the chance to buy and operate US built power stations, including a U.S.-built reprocessing facility for extracting plutonium from nuclear reactor fuel.

After the Islamic Revolution, all those programmes were suspended, including the Bushehr power station that was nearly complete.

The start of the eight-year long Iran-Iraq war further delayed the resumption of the nuclear program. Eventually, in 1981 during the presidency of the late Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, Iranian officials decided that the country’s nuclear development should continue.

They turned to the Western countries that had promised to build reactors in Iran to resume their work, but all of them refused to cooperate.

In 1983, IAEA officials were keen to assist Iran in various aspects of reactor fuel fabrication, chemical engineering and design aspects of pilot plants for uranium conversion, corrosion of nuclear materials, LWR fuel fabrication, and pilot plant development for production of nuclear grade UO2. However, contrary to NPT regulations, the United States directly intervened to discourage IAEA assistance to Iran.

Finally, Iran turned to China, but under US pressure China too dropped her nuclear commerce with Iran.

However, Iran was successful to persuade Russia to complete the Bushehr reactor, which was completed after long delay and at great cost to Iran. Faced with this situation, Iran decided to conduct her own work on nuclear enrichment, in which she succeeded.

The United States imposed unilateral sanctions on Iran and forced other countries to follow suit. Iran was taken to the Security Council, which also imposed crippling sanctions that cut Iran’s oil exports by half and cost Iran billions of dollars in lost revenue.

Iran continued with her nuclear programme and increased the number of her centrifuges, despite threats of war, crippling sanctions, cyber sabotage, the assassination of her nuclear scientists by Israeli agents, etc.

It was only after President Barack Obama agreed that as a member of the NPT Iran was entitled to a peaceful nuclear programme that intense negotiations started, resulting in the JCPOA.

While establishing her right to engage in nuclear activity, Iran accepted the harshest conditions as confidence-building measures. The agreement reduced Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile by 98 percent and restricted the level of enrichment to 3.67 percent.

Given that an enrichment level of more than 90 percent is needed to build a nuclear bomb, the deal makes it impossible for Iran’s uranium to be weaponized.

Under the deal, Iran also reduced the number of its centrifuges from 20,000 to a little over 5,000, far below the number that would be needed for manufacturing a single bomb, even if she wanted to do so. Iran closed the Arak reactor, which was capable of producing plutonium, and agreed to severe restrictions on research and development activities in other facilities.

In short, the agreement made it virtually impossible for Iran to build a single bomb.

Some of Pompeo’s intolerable conditions

1) Pompeo demands that: “First, Iran must declare to the IAEA full account of prior military dimension of its nuclear programme, and permanently and verifiably abandon such work in perpetuity”.

This is something that was pursued under PMU or Possible Military Use during the talks. The IAEA studied all those allegations, including taking soil samples from Parchin military base where the Israelis had claimed that nuclear activity had been conducted. The IAEA decided that there had been “no diversion” of nuclear material for military use.

Iran has agreed to abandon work on nuclear weapons in perpetuity, and all the talk about so-called “sunset clauses” is baseless. In addition to being a member of the NPT, Iran has also joined the “Additional Protocol”, which requires continuous, unannounced inspections of all her nuclear sites, and she has also given an undertaking never to produce nuclear weapons.

The prohibitions do not stop at the end of the “sunset clauses”, but will continue in perpetuity.

The IAEA that is the only legal body in charge of monitoring the deal has, on eleven separate occasions, certified that Iran has fully complied with the terms of the deal.

2) “Second, Iran must stop enrichment and never pursue plutonium reprocessing. This includes closing its heavy water reactor.”

Demanding that Iran should stop enrichment goes against NPT rules. As for “never pursuing plutonium reprocessing”, this is precisely what Iran has agreed to do under the JCPOA, and has destroyed her heavy water reactor.

3) “Third, Iran must also provide to the IAEA full unqualified access to all sites throughout the entire country.”

This is again another provision of the JCPOA, which the IAEA has used on many occasions.

4) “Iran must end its proliferation of ballistic missiles and halt the launching or development of nuclear-capable missiles.”

This is yet another misleading and illegal demand. Like any other country, Iran has the right to defend herself (UN Chater Art 51) and as she is unable to acquire advanced military equipment that the United States has readily sold to all Iranian neighbours, Iran’s missiles are her only means of deterring a military aggression.

Iran does not have intercontinental ballistic missiles as she has limited the range of her missiles to 2,000 kilometres. They are not designed to carry nuclear weapons, and in any case Iran does not have nuclear warheads.

5) Pompeo accused Iran of spreading terrorism in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, etc.

Iran has been fighting against ISIS and other terrorists in Iraq and Syria at the invitation of the governments of those countries. It is up to the Syrian government to ask Iran to withdraw her forces from that country, not for a US Secretary of State to dictate to other countries what they should and should not do.

All experts agree that the mantra of “Iran-backed Houthis” is exaggerated propaganda, as Iran’s contacts with the Houthis and influence over them is minimal.

It is Saudi Arabia and members of her coalition who, with American support, have been bombing Yemen, killing and wounding tens of thousands of innocent people and creating the world’s greatest humanitarian catastrophe there.

What this is really about: Obsession with revenge and regime change

President Trump and his three senior officials, Mike Pompeo, John Bolton and Rudy Giuliani, seem to be preparing the ground for a disastrous war with Iran.

Their hostility towards Iran does not seem to have anything to do with Iran’s nuclear programme, but has everything to do with an obsession for regime change.

Speaking at the Aspen Security Forum, Mike Pompeo boasted that “one of the first things the President did is to go build a coalition of [Persian] Gulf states and Israel to help find a platform which could uniformly push back against Iranian expansionism.”(1)

When he was still a member of Congress in 2016, Pompeo called for action to “change Iranian behaviour, and, ultimately, Iranian regime.” (2)

In the past, he has called for strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities.(3)

Some of his hostility towards Iran seems to have been based on his hatred of Islam. In 2015, Pompeo, then a Congressman, attacked Barack Obama, who, according to him, took the side of the “Islamic East” in its conflict with the “Christian West”. “Every time there has been a conflict between the Christian West and the Islamic East, the data points all point to a single direction,” he said.

Some of his hostility towards Iran seems to have been based on his hatred of Islam. In 2015, Pompeo, then a Congressman, attacked Barack Obama, who, according to him, took the side of the “Islamic East” in its conflict with the “Christian West”. “Every time there has been a conflict between the Christian West and the Islamic East, the data points all point to a single direction,” he said. (4)

John Bolton is another strong advocate of regime change in Iran.

In an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal on 15 January 2018, entitled “Beyond the Iran Nuclear Deal: US policy should be to end the Islamic Republic before its 40th anniversary”, Bolton condemned the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran as a “massive strategic blunder.”

However, he went on to say that American policy, “should be ending Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution before its fortieth anniversary.”

He continued: “Recognizing a new Iranian regime in 2019 would reverse the shame of once seeing our diplomats held hostage for four hundred and forty-four days. The former hostages can cut the ribbon to open the new U.S. Embassy in Tehran.” (5)

The former Mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani, who is now a member of Trump’s legal team has also been a fervent advocate of regime change in Iran.

Speaking at a conference of the terrorist, cultish group, the Mojahedin-e Khalq Organisation, in Washington on 5 May 2018, Rudy Giuliani openly said that Washington’s policy was regime change in Iran, and he even promised that next year they would celebrate the event in Tehran. (6)

This obsession with the past and a deliberate decision to bring about a regime change in Iran will have incalculable costs.

Let’s not forget that prior to Iraq war, Paul Wolfowitz, one of the authors of that war, predicted that it would be a “cake walk”, that it “would pay for itself”, and that “US forces would be welcomed with roses”.

Fifteen years after that disastrous war, American forces are still operating in that country, and the war which has cost trillions of dollars to US taxpayers has killed and wounded millions of innocent Iraqi people, shattered that country and has given rise to a number of vicious terrorist movements.

It should be clear to everyone who is familiar with the Middle East that a war against Iran will not be like Iraq, it will be much worse. It will kill hundreds of thousands of innocent people, will set the Middle East on fire and will do a great damage to Israel and other US allies that she seemingly wishes to support.

During his confirmation hearing at the US Senate, Mike Pompeo was asked if Russia was a unique country. He replied: “This [US] is a unique, exceptional country. Russia is unique, but not exceptional.” (7)

This kind of aggressive, bullying, threatening, demanding and illegal language has not been heard from a responsible government official since before the Second World War.

The concept of Americans being unique and exceptional and almost chosen by God, and referring to other nations as inferior, in the way that President Trump referred to the Latinos as animals, is not far removed from the concept of a superior race and Der Untermensch, or subhuman people.

If we wish to avoid the horrors of the Second World, we must put an end to this kind of arrogant mentality.

It is time for the Europeans, for all the peace-loving Americans and for millions of concerned people across the world who will be paying the cost of this misadventure to stop this madness before it is too late.

Notes

1. Aspen Security Forum, The View from Langley, July 20, 2017.
2. “Rep. Mike Pompeo: One year later, Obama’s Iran nuclear deal puts us at increased risk”, Fox News Opinion, July 14, 2016.
3. Raphael Ahren, “With anti-Iran, pro-Israel stances, Pompeo may become Jerusalem’s new darling”, The Times of Israel, 14 March 2018.
4. Peter Beinart, “Mike Pompeo at State Would Enable Trump’s Worst Instincts”, The Atlantic, Nov 30, 2017.
5. “Beyond the Iran Nuclear Deal: US policy should be to end the Islamic Republic before its 40th anniversary”, Wall Street Journal, Jan 15, 2018.
6. “Rudy Giuliani speaks at Iran Freedom Convention”, CBSN, May 5, 2018.
7. USA: ‘US exceptional, Russia is not’ – Trump’s Sec of State pick Pompeo on YouTube here.

Reprinted with author’s permission from The Transnational

Farhang Jahanpour,Juancole.com

The post Why Pompeo’s Iran speech was So Outrageous appeared first on Nejat Society.

Here is what I said:

Iran’s clerical leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei will not allow development of a nuclear weapon. He has repeatedly given fatwas or considered legal opinions that making, stockpiling and using nuclear weapons contravenes Islamic law. In formal Islamic law, you cannot target civilians. The Qur’an says, “Fight those who fight you.” In Iran’s Shiite Islam, by the way, only defensive jihad or holy war is allowed. An atomic bomb, as the US demonstrated at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, kills very large numbers of innocent civilians. Khamenei can’t climb down from decades of such fatwas without undermining his clerical authority and hence the foundations of his entire regime. Saying he secretly wants a bomb is like asserting that Pope Francis has a covert condom factory in the Vatican basement.

Iran has never had the aim of creating a bomb or it would have one by now.

The Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps and hard line scientists and engineers tried to finesse Khamenei. They seem to have convinced him to allow them to developing facilities and experiments leading to expertise and capabilities with regard to nuclear weapon production. This capability amounts to what specialists call nuclear latency or the “Japan option.” That is, if the world knows you could slap together a nuclear bomb tout de suite, they are less likely to invade you. Everyone knows Japan has stockpiles of plutonium and technical know-how, and that they could produce a nuclear weapon in short order if they felt really threatened. Trump even encouraged them to go this route.

The Iranian hard liners likewise wanted a deterrence effect via a short time-line to a break-out capacity, i.e. potential bomb production, especially after the US invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. As long as they didn’t actually make a bomb, they could escape the ayatollah’s wrath.

Because of Obama’s severe sanctions from 2012, a short time-like to break-out incurred unacceptable costs for nuclear doves like Rouhani, who got Khamenei’s ear and warned him of civil unrest a la 2009 if sanctions continued. Iran was kicked off currency exchanges and had trouble selling its oil, being forced to reduce exports by 1 mn. barrels per day, from 2.5 mn. b/d down to 1.5. (It is back up to exporting 2.6 million barrels per day of petroleum and condensates, but the price has collapsed).

The compromise reached in the JCPOA by the UN Security Council plus Germany was that Iran could keep latency, i.e. the expertise for a Japan option, but had to lengthen its time-line to break-out. It bricked in and abandoned its planned heavy water reactor at Arak. It limited the number of its centrifuges. It destroyed stockpiles of uranium enriched to 19.5% for its medical isotopes reactor. It consented to regular inspections of its facilities by the UN. (Plutonium signatures can be detected months later and no matter how you try to vacuum up the particles, so Iran really can’t cheat as long as it is inspected).

Iran retained latency capabilities and nothing in JCPOA forbade them. What JCPOA insisted on was a long production time-line rather than a short one, i.e. 6 to 8 months rather than a few weeks.

As long as Iran does not ramp up production capabilities to shorten the break-out time-line, it is in compliance.

The cult, the Mojahedin-e Khalq or MEK, i.e the People’s Jihadis, is now pushing a line that something sinister is going on at the Parchin military base. The UN inspectors visited it in 2015 and are not interested in going there again. The Non-Proliferation Treaty excluded inspections of military facilities at US and USSR insistence, and the JCPOA followed that legal tradition. The MEK, which is a small terrorist organization that wants to overthrow the Iranian government in favor of its mixture of Shiite fundamentalism and Marxism, has some sort of shadowy and creepy relationship with AIPAC and the Israel lobbies. Giuliani regularly speaks for big bucks at their meetings. This sort of thing is much more suspicious than the Russian connection.

If, however, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the agency charged with inspecting Iran, wanted to visit Parchin again, centrist President Hassan Rouhani would allow it. Transparency benefits him.

The IAEA does not want to visit Parchin because they think the optics of such a request at this time would aid Trump hawks in undermining JCPOA.

By signing the deal, Iran gave up substantial deterrence effects of nuclear latency for the sake of ending sanctions and reducing tensions, by accepting a long break-out time-line. That is, its leaders accepted a situation where the country was somewhat more likely to be invaded or the government overthrown by hostile great powers like the US.

Iran has received almost nothing in return. The GOP Congress, taking its cue from the Israel lobby, has actually ratcheted up US sanctions on Iran, which is a violation of the JCPOA. Moreover, the Trump people have rattled sabers and spooked European investors. Nobody wants to be sanctioned by the US Department of the Treasury, which has in the past fined European firms billions of dollars for doing business with Iran. There has been a small uptick of Iranian trade with Europe and Asia, but the hard liners are slamming Rouhani for giving away the country’s security and returning empty-handed.

Now Trump is inventing some special US certification procedure for Iran compliance, which is not in the JCPOA, and is aimed at undermining it. I doubt Europe will go along with this scam. Maybe someone should inspect the unsafe thousands of US nuclear warheads. Iran does not have any.

Nuclear Israel is threatening to bomb Damascus over Iran’s Syria presence, and is pressuring Russia to expel Iran. The JCPOA weakened Iran vis-a-vis Israel by reducing the deterrence effects of latency. The world community, which tried to reduce Iran to a fourth world country for merely doing some nuclear experiments, has actively rewarded Israel for flouting the Non-Proliferation Treaty and building a stockpile of some 400 nuclear warheads, with which it occasionally menaces its neighbors.

So yes, all this strengthens hard liners and weakens Rouhani.

But China and Russia want the JCPOA and Iran is unlikely to try to get a bomb both for this reason and because of Khomeinist commitments (Khomeini, the father of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, called nukes the tools of the devil, and his successor, Ali Khamenei, agrees).

However, hard liners could try to shorten the break-out window again if they felt the West had severely violated the terms of the deal.

Truthdig

The post What Will Iran Do if Trump Tears Up the Nuclear Agreement? appeared first on Nejat Society.

Things Like Ted Cruz’s Threat to Kill Iran’s Ayatollah Are Why Iranians Don’t Trust the U.S.

Ted Cruz said Friday at the Value Voters Summit conference in Washington, D.C., “If you vote for me, under no circumstances will Iran be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons. And if the ayatollah doesn’t understand that, we may have to help introduce him to his 72 virgins.”

Neoconservatives keep highlighting Ayatollah Khamenei’s negative statements about the United States and his continued suspicion of Washington’s motives and bona fides, as if those are reasons for which the nuclear deal is a bad idea. It is the other way around. If the UN Security Council can implement in a fair way the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action for inspecting Iran’s civilian nuclear enrichment activities so as to make impossible down the road any weaponization of the program, it will start the process of overcoming decades of American dirty tricks and dastardly plots against the Iranian people.

The US

1. destroyed the Iranian economy in 1951-1953 with a US-imposed global boycott of Iranian petroleum because Iran wanted a 50/50 split on profits from its oil and the British government and what is now BP wanted to continue to pay them just a small fee annually.

2. And when Iran was weak, roiled and divided because its economy had been destroyed, the US acting on behalf of the British government and BP sent CIA field officer Kermit Roosevelt into Tehran to liase with far right wing Iranian generals and to buy crowds and to overthrow the elected government of Iran. Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh was put under house arrest and died a broken man a few years later. The US built his replacement, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, into a vicious capitalist dictator with a US-trained secret police and thousands of prisoners of conscience.

3. The US backed the Iraqi invasion of Iran, a naked act of aggression, from at least 1983 and put the US navy at the service of Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime in a covert naval war on Iranian vessels.

4. This posture of aggressive war against Iran led to the shooting down of a civilian Iranian airliner in 1988, Iran Air flight 655, by the USS Vincennes, killing 290 persons. The US had no business fighting Iraq’s ugly war of aggression for it in the first place, in the service of which it was targeting Iranian jets. Some argued that a simple visual check from the deck would have sufficed to rule out Iran Air 655 as a military target, but no such precaution was taken. The captain of the Vincennes was not so much as reprimanded for 290 counts of manslaughter.

5. In the 1980s the group the MEK (Mujahedin-e Khalq or People’s Jihadis) committed several dramatic acts of terrorism. In 1981 it bombed the HQ of the ruling civilian Iranian party and killing over 70 high officials, including several cabinet members and a supreme court justice. Saddam Hussein gave the group a camp in Iraq from which they struck into Iran in the 1980s, when the US was actively allied with Saddam. After the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, the US kept the camp in place, essentially deploying a terrorist group against Iran. Several mysterious bombings took place in Iran after 2003. The State Department delisted the MEK as a terrorist organization, apparently under Israeli pressure, in 2012, and the MEK has now bought a number of US congressmen (there is an obvious overlap between politicians supported by the Israel lobbies like AIPAC and politicians who support the MEK).

So Cruz’s threat to send Khamenei to paradise, i.e. murder him, is not actually crazy talk from an American politician. Apparently we actually are the owners of Iran’s oil and gas and if they insist on trying to own it themselves, we’ll be happy to overthrow their government, support wars of aggression on Iran by brutal dictators, collaborate with terrorist organizations to murder civilians and scientists, etc. etc. Also, unlike France, South Korea, Japan, the Netherlands, etc. they are not allowed to have, like, science or fuel for their nuclear reactors and apparently not allowed to make electricity with such reactors.

And that is why Khamenei is risking so much in making a deal with the United States, which has seldom honored international law or even basic human decency when dealing with that country.

Truth dig,

The post Why Iranians don’t trust US (stop using Mojahedin Khalq terrorists) appeared first on Nejat Society.

Judge Katherine Forrest ruled,

“The statute at issue places the public at undue risk of having their speech chilled for the purported protection from al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and ‘associated forces’ – i.e., ‘foreign terrorist organizations.’ The vagueness of Section 1021 does not allow the average citizen, or even the government itself, to understand with the type of definiteness to which our citizens are entitled, or what conduct comes within its scope.”

The vagueness is such that prominent figures such as Rudy Giuliani have palled around with the MEK (Mojahedin-e Khalq or People’s Holy Jihadis) of Iran, which was on the terrorism watch list for years, with no adverse reaction from the government. But now the Israel lobbies have succeeded in getting the MEK, which has a secret alliance with Israeli intelligence, removed from the list! So could you meet them before? Report on their views? Now? Note that remaining on the list is Lebanon’s Hizbullah, a national liberation organization that got back Lebanese territory from an illegal Israeli invasion and occupation that killed tens of thousands of people.

If we let the US government determine to whom we can speak and what we can say, assuming our words represent no clear and present danger of provoking violence, we may as well just trade in our US passports for an Iranian one.

You know, the Right Wing in Congress has been pulling this stuff for decades, and it only stops when the real Americans put their feet down. Ted Kennedy used to just rule this kind of bullcrap out of bounds in the Senate. But apparently Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi just don’t care, and neither does Barack Obama. There are a whole series of bad decisions that the three of them could have stopped if they had bothered.

The post NDAA Provisions attacking Freedom of Speech Struck Down appeared first on Nejat Society.

The MEK was given a base in eastern Iraq by Saddam Hussein, who used the some 4,000 guerrillas who gathered there to harass the Islamic Republic of Iran. The MEK had its origins in an Islamic-Marxist guerrilla group of the 1970s that fought the forces of the Shah. It joined in the revolution against the Shah in 1978-79 but broke with the Ayatollah Khomeini regime and turned to a massive campaign of bombing and sniping against it. In return, the regime killed suspected MEK members. The group evolved into a political cult, with insistence on glaze-eyed absolute obedience to the leader, Maryam Rajavi, and cult-like practices such as forced marriages and divorces (not to mention the long history of violence inside Iran).

When the US occupied Iraq, some in the Pentagon adopted the MEK at Camp Ashraf near the Iranian border for use against Iran. The MEK has bought a lot of big American politicians and seems to have promised the Israelis it would recognize Israel if it ever came to power in Iran; figures connected to the Israel lobbies have hypocritically campaigned to have the MEK delisted as a terrorist organization, despite it long and bloody record of attacks on civilians. As recently as this year, NBC quoted unnamed US government officials alleging that the MEK has been assassinating Iranian scientists in Iran.

Hersh reveals a trail of blatant hypocrisy on the part of the US government. “Our” terrorists are not terrorists even if they have blown up non-combatants, but national liberation groups such as Hizbullah in Lebanon are designated terrorists. Government officials have even brandished the word “terrorism” to describe perfectly peaceful protesters and dissidents inside the US, while JSOC was flying dyed-in-the-wool terrorists to Nevada for training.

The USG Open Source Center translated a report in the MEK newspaper regarding the hobnobbing of Rudy Giuliani, John Bolton and others with the MEK leadership in Paris recently:

“– On 24 March, the NCRI secretariat website published a report on an international conference held in Paris to address MEK concerns and issues, which was attended by NCRI President-elect Maryam Rajavi as well as former high ranking officials from the United States and Europe including Rudy Giuliani, Tom Ridge, John Bolton, Patrick Kennedy, and Colonel Wesley Martin.. According to the report, the issues raised included the adoption of a “decisive policy” against Iran’s regime, protection of the rights of Camp Ashraf and Liberty residents, and the elimination of MEK’s “terrorist label.” Rajavi said that “the only way to prevent an Iranian atomic bomb or the occurrence of an unprecedented conflict” was “regime change” by the Iranian people and resistance. On the issue of Camp Liberty, Rudy Giuliani said: “Let us go there. Let us see it with our own eyes.” He added: “Currently the enemy of stopping Iran becoming nuclear is appeasement. This wrong perception has made Iran more determined in becoming nuclear. Let us stop appeasement. Let us stop the efforts for negotiations. Stop writing letters to the ayatollahs. Let us rise up and say as Americans that we are for regime change in Iran and we will take every step necessary to stop Iran becoming nuclear” (National Council of Resistance of Iran in Persian — Website of an exiled political umbrella coalition of Marxist and Islamist organizations — Mojahedin-e Khalq Organization (MEK or MKO), National Liberation Army of Iran (NLA), People’s Mojahedin of Iran (PMOI), National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), and Muslim Iranian Students Society (MISS); on US State Department’s list of terrorist groups since 1997;

As Sheila Musaji points out, lots of American Muslims are in jail for ‘material support of terrorism,’ but American politicians and pundits get a free pass for actively supporting the MEK– which, remember, is definitively on the terrorism watch list.

Note to the US government and the Neocons: George Orwell’s 1984 was a dark political satire, not a blueprint for how you should do things.

The post US Pentagon Trained Iranian terrorists in Nevada appeared first on Nejat Society.

10. The new Republican majority in the House of Representatives will attempt to stampede Obama into keeping troops in Iraq, delaying any withdrawals from Afghanistan, and launching a military strike on Iran. Just last week, Rudy Giuliani, Fran Townsend, and other members of the Permanent War Party flew to Paris to lobby on behalf of the Iranian terrorist organization, the MEK (Mojahedin-e Khalq), which they want to use against Tehran the way Bush used Ahmad Chalabi against Iraq. Obama will have to be firmer with the GOP hawks than has been his wont if he is to prevent them from embroiling this country in a series of unwinnable and ruinous wars and police actions.

9. The US should avoid becoming involved in sectarian and tribal troubles in Yemen, a remote and rugged country where feuds are common and profits from the feuds rare. Wikileaks cables have already revealed that the US has engaged in drone strikes in that country and wants to use bombers, for which the president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, offered to take the credit.

8. Although so far the wikileaks revelations have been merely embarrassing, and have had few high-level repercussions, it is not impossible that they contain bombshells that might yet provoke major diplomatic crises and even high-level resignations or the fall of governments. Obama should develop contingency plans for such eventualities. At the same time, Obama should forbid the US government from acting pettily toward the released cables or trying to punish members of the public who read and use them. He should develop strategies for supporting a more open government and less secrecy (most of these cables did not even need to be classified). And, he should use diplomacy to resolve disputes caused by undiplomatic cable language.

7. The peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestine Authority have collapsed in mutual recriminations, with the Palestinians now set on a course of using diplomatic and United Nations pressure to punish Israel for aggressively colonizing the Palestinian West Bank. Hostilities could break out if the Palestinians unilaterally declare a state in summer of 2011, as they now plan to do. If that declaration has no practical consequences, and given the disappointment of the collapse of negotiations (about which the Netanyahu government was not very serious) , the inaction could provoke a third Intifada or uprising. Such a development could also lead to a renewal of fighting between Hamas in Gaza and Israel. Another wild card is Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who wants to find a way to strip Palestinian-Israelis of their citizenship, something they say they would resist. The measures the right wing Likud government would likely take to repress the Palestinians could inflame popular passions throughout the region and revive militant groups that had been in decline.

6. President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan is acting increasingly erratically, accusing the US of being his country’s enemy and threatening to join the Taliban. His circle is also engaging in corruption on a vast scale, endangering the legitimacy of the government further after the irregularities in both the presidential and parliamentary elections. Obama’s counter-insurgency strategy in Afghanistan depends heavily on having a credible and reliable local partner, and it is increasingly unclear that Karzai could be so characterized. A rethink of counter-insurgency and a more modest counter-terrorism strategy might be the only way to deal with this threat.

5. As the US draws down its troops in Iraq, the danger of Kurdish-Arab violence over the disposition of oil-rich Kirkuk province and other Kurdish-majority areas in Arab Iraq will rise. The Iraqi Army, mostly Arab, has come into armed conflict with the Kurdish paramilitary, the Peshmerga, a development that was curbed through the institution of joint patrols with American troops, who act as a buffer. As the US military departs, the question of how the buffer will be maintained arises.

4. The Obama administration was successful in tightening the financial noose on Iran during 2010, but Iran could fight back like a cornered rat. On June 9, it succeeded in pushing through a United Nations Security Council tightening of sanctions. Just this week, India announced that it would cease allowing transfers of payments to Iran via the Asian Clearing Union system. But the sanctions won’t prevent India from buying Iranian petroleum, of which it imports about 400,000 barrels a day. With petroleum prices firming up as Asia and Germany come out of the economic doldrums, the Iranian state will have a large cushion against American pressure. The danger in the increased US pressure on Iran is that it will take revenge by sabotaging US grand strategy in the Middle East. Iran is already blocking fuel shipments to Afghanistan, which likely hurts NATO and the US as much as it hurts the Afghans. Iran could easily also play spoiler in Lebanon via its ally, the Hizbullah militia, and in Iraq as US troops draw down. Obama is engaged in a tightrope walk, and if he puts too much pressure on Iran, he could easily be pushed off.

3. Pakistan’s relative stability in 2009 was shaken in 2010 by a series of catastrophes on an almost biblical scale. The Pakistani army fought a series of fierce engagements in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas against the Tehrik-i Taliban Pakistan (Taliban Movement of Pakistan), but the latter have shown resiliency and have struck back with bombings against the officials and tribal elders who joined the government in fighting them. The TTP or other militants have also bombed a string of religious processions and sites all over the country, targeting Shiites, Sufi mystics, and members of the Ahmadiyya sect. In July through September, massive flooding put a fifth of the country under water, affecting 20 million of Pakistan’s 170 million people. The damage to Pakistan’s economy is incalculable, and the international community has made clear that it will only cover a small portion of the damage. Then, in just the past month, the government itself has turned unstable, as the coalition on which it depends for its majority came into doubt. Even if the government survives, its margin in parliament will be reduced and it will be weakened. The US has been slow to deliver the various kinds of quite substantial civilian economic aid it has promised, and aid delivery should be expedited and targeted toward areas that would shore up the government (e.g. Swat Valley).

2. Turkey, a NATO ally, is emerging as a major player in the Middle East. Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu’s doctrine of peaceful relations with neighbors, however, has set Turkey at odds with the US in some respects. Turkey is seeking a freed trade zone with Jordan and Syria, adding to the one already established with Lebanon, and Ankara’s rapprochement with Damascus makes Washington uncomfortable. Likewise, Turkey opposes increased sanctions on Iran, and, indeed, is seeking to much expand its trade with Iran. Turkey is far more sympathetic toward the Palestinians, including Hamas, under the Justice and Development Party (which is not Islamist but has some Muslim themes, a rarity in secular-dominated Turkey) than it had been in the past. This sympathy has led the government to demand an apology (not forthcoming) from Israel for killing 9 Turkish citizens in international waters in a botched commando raid on an aid ship headed toward Gaza. The US would be wise to accommodate Turkey’s new initiatives, which are stabilizing for the Middle East, even if Ankara is not always cooperative with particular Washington priorities.

1. Egypt, after decades of being unproblematic for the US, may be on the verge of being a foreign policy challenge of some magnitude. President Hosni Mubarak is advanced in age and could pass from the scene soon. He is grooming his son, Jamal, to be his successor, but the wikileaks cables suggest that the powerful Egyptian military intelligence chief is not happy with this idea of dynastic succession. On the other hand, US cables also suggest that the Egyptian military is declining in power and modernity. Although the government successfully repressed its radicals during the past two decades, they are back in the streets again, as with today’s car-bombing of a Christian church in Alexandria, which killed 21. More serious challenges come from the Muslim Brotherhood,, which could do well in an election that was not rigged against them. Likewise, Egypt’s labor and middle class movements have shown themselves capable of mounting significant campaigns in recent years, deploying new communications tools such as facebook. A more democratic Egypt, like a more democratic Turkey, may not be willing to be complicit with Israeli oppression of the Palestinians. Obama should not take Egypt for granted, but rather should have some subtle and culturally informed contingency plans if its politics abruptly opens up. Above all, the US must not stand in the way of democratization, even if that means greater Muslim fundamentalist influence in the state.

The post MEK Among Top 10 Middle East Challenges for U.S. Policy appeared first on Nejat Society.