Justin Raimondo

The War Party never takes a holiday

Hoaxes, Hype, and Hysteria

While Americans were barbecuing over the Labor Day weekend, the Usual Suspects were busy cooking up new wars, from Iraq to Ukraine. While this is nothing new – after all, evil never sleeps – one thing I did notice: the stunning lack of imagination on their part. It was, in effect, the equivalent of a bunch of summer reruns: tired formulaic retreads that weren’t all that convincing in the first place.

Take the latest war propaganda centered on the alleged "threat" to our precious bodily fluids supposedly posed by ISIS, the War Party’s latest bogeyman. As polls showed a stubborn reluctance on the part of the American people to re-invade Iraq, the neocons came up with a not-so-new one: they claim a laptop computer ostensibly captured from ISIS by the "good" jihadists – the so-called Free Syrian Army, which is armed and trained by the US – contains plans for constructing "weapons of mass destruction," i.e. biological weapons. They’re even calling it the "laptop of death" – a phrase that ought to ring a bell for those who follow these sorts of things.

That’s the same phrase used to describe yet another purloined laptop, this one supplied by the Mujahedin-e-Khalq, an Iranian terrorist group that, for years, has been feeding the War Party bogus "intelligence" about Tehran’s nonexistent nuclear weapons program. That tall tale was debunked in 2011 – yet another case of MEK cobbling together old outdated data, adding a dash of forgery, and shaking well enough to fool the credulous.

You can’t teach an old dog new tricks, but what if the dog can pass off an old hoax as a new one? And that’s why I’m here: to remind you.

Speaking of America’s Good Jihadists, a.k.a. the Syrian Free Army, I was struck by this nugget from an account of the killing of Douglas McAuthur McCain, an American fighting for ISIS in Syria, in the New York Times:

"The rebels who killed him were fighting for the Free Syrian Army, a rival group backed by the United States, and they went on to behead six ISIS fighters – but not Mr. McCain – and then posted the photographs on Facebook."

Yes, these are the "moderate" Syrian rebels, backed by your tax dollars and the prestige of the United States government. Oh, but don’t worry, kids: they’re our barbarians – so beheading is okay, even praiseworthy, since they’re doing it on behalf of spreading "freedom" and "democracy."

And speaking of hoaxes, here’s a biggie: they’re telling us that the long-awaited Russian invasion of eastern Ukraine has finally arrived! Yay! You can almost hear the sigh of relief all the way from Washington. The War Party’s journalistic camarilla – which has been telling us for the past six months or so that Putin’s move was "imminent" – yelped "we told you so!" in unison. Neocon hysteric Anne Applebaum screeched that this proved that we have to prepare for "total war" with nuclear-armed Russia – which, she claims, is planning to "use nuclear weapons to bomb Poland and the Baltic countries."

There’s just one problem with this alleged "invasion" – there’s zero evidence for it. Normally when one country invades another, troops pour over the border, missiles strike their targets, and the invaders proclaim their victory. So where are the Russian tanks, the missiles raining down death, the tens of thousands of troops marching in to take possession of their newly-conquered territory?

They’re nowhere to be seen. The best NATO could come up with was a series of murky satellite photos showing a column of military vehicles going somewhere from some place else – and that’s it. Apparently the Ukrainian army is so under-equipped that the poor things don’t even have a single cell phone camera to take a quick shot of the invading hordes. (This just proves they need more American aid!) Washington avers that one thousand Russian troops are now in Ukraine – but why would Putin send in such a paltry "army" and risk defeat? Why not just send in the troops, as he did in Crimea, and be done with it?

Oh, but the new cold warriors have a ready answer for the absence of solid evidence: this, we’re told, is no regular old-fashioned conquest. In this case, it’s a "new" kind of invasion – a "stealth invasion." Which just goes to show that words can be twisted to mean their exact opposite.

Yet this "stealth" angle elides an important element of any invasion plan: the political benefits to be had at home. These are, by the way, the only benefits to be had if Putin decided to annex ramshackle east Ukraine, with its profitless Soviet-era industries and desperately poor populace. So why isn’t he up there beating his chest and scoring points by telling the Russian people he’s the kind of strong leader who can stand up to the West?

The War Party has sunk to a new low: they’re stealing from Hollywood! If this isn’t outright plagiarism of the plot of "Wag the Dog," then it’s damned close. If I were the producers of that movie, I’d sue – but that’s just me.

While our war propagandists lack originality, you have to give them credit for persistence: these guys never give up. When one lie is exposed, another quickly takes center stage – and if the War Party does this in the belief that the memory of the American people is lamentably short, then who can fault their logic?

That’s why Antiwar.com is a vitally important resource for those of us who want to put an end to our foreign policy of global intervention. Our online archives are a detailed record of the War Party’s now-debunked fabrications, a charge sheet stretching all the way back to the mid-1990s.

And our readers apparently realize the value of this resource – because, unlike the War Party’s bought-and-paid-for "journalists," we depend on a growing base of grassroots supporters to keep this operation afloat and expanding.

Amid all the navel-gazing discussion by "mainstream" scribes about how to sustain a news operation in the face of a technology that has changed the face of journalism, Antiwar.com’s success in building a new model has gone largely unremarked. As mainline journalists bemoan the decline of their industry, Antiwar.com has pointed the way forward for new media by building a news organization that abandons the old subscriber-advertiser-dependent revenue stream and bases itself, instead, on reader donations.

Of course, bloggers have been doing this, with the by-now-traditional "tip jar," for years, but I believe we were among the first to apply it to a broader-based news-and-opinion site – and make it work.

It has worked for over fifteen years. Every time we pass the goal in our quarterly fundraising drives I feel an immense satisfaction in the fact that our readers have given us yet another vote of confidence.

From where I sit, it looks as though our late summer fundraising drive is very close to the goalpost. My thanks to all who gave: I can’t even begin to express the depth of my gratitude. And I want to point out that none of us here at Antiwar.com take your support for granted: we work overtime to earn your support by reporting the facts as we understand them and never failing to question the "conventional wisdom" – no matter where it takes us.

Antiwar

September 11, 2014 0 comment

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Hillary’s Terrorists

Hillary Clinton is about to delist a dangerous terror group

On May 21, 1975, Col. Paul Shaffer, a military attaché to the US mission in Iran, kissed his wife Hillary Clinton is about to delist a dangerous terror group and two children goodbye, and entered a waiting car with his colleague, Lt. Col. Jack Turner, whose wife was getting their three children ready for school. It was the last time the families of these two US servicemen would see them alive.

As the Iranian driver pulled into a side street to avoid traffic a car blocked their passage and another car rammed them from behind. Three gunmen appeared and fired at the two Americans pointblank, killing them instantly: the three escaped in a third car, leaving a leaflet on the blood-drenched seat. The leaflet denounced “US imperialism” and bore the imprint of the Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK), or “People’s Crusaders,” a Marxist-Islamist group led by Massoud and Maryam Rajavi.

All in all, the MEK killed 6 Americans in Iran: Lt. Col. Louis Lee Hawkins, an Army comptroller, cut down by gunman in front of his Tehran home, and William Cottrell, Donald Smith, and Robert Krongard, all employees of Rockwell International. They wounded Air Force Gen. Harold L. Price, and tried and failed to kidnap the US ambassador, Douglas MacArthur II. After the Iranian Revolution, the MEK supported the takeover of the US embassy in Tehran, opposed the release of the diplomats – calling a mass demonstration in protest – and demanded their execution.

Today, the MEK is campaigning to be taken off the US State Department’s list of terrorist organizations – and they’re on the brink of success. According to the Wall Street Journal:

“Senior U.S. officials said on Monday that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has yet to make any final decision on the MeK’s status. But they said the State Department was looking favorably at delisting MeK if it continued cooperating by vacating a former paramilitary base inside Iraq, called Camp Ashraf, which the group had used to stage cross-border strikes into Iran.”

What the article fails to mention is that those “cross border strikes into Iran” took place during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, when the MEK enjoyed the patronage of Saddam Hussein: MEK cadre fought on the Iraqi side during that conflict. They also were useful to Saddam in repressing internal enemies of the regime: after the 1991 Gulf war, MEK fighters were used by Saddam to crush uprisings in the south and in Iraqi Kurdistan. Maryam Rajavi told her followers: “Take the Kurds under your tanks, and save your bullets for the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.”

MEK has been described as a cult, most notably in a scary report by Human Rights Watch, a fascinating Al Jazeera video report, and in a remarkable piece by Elizabeth Rubin in the New York Times. Rubin relates the testimony of Salahaddin Mukhtadi, an Iranian historian living in exile, who says dissident MEK members “are locked up if they disagree with anything. And sometimes killed.” In the MEK cult, having particular friendships is strictly forbidden: sitting and talking together is considered a crime, especially when the subject is one’s past life before joining the cult. Wives are ordered to divorce their husbands, celibacy is mandatory, and families are broken up: nothing must come between the members and their devotion to the cause. Forced confessions and “criticism sessions” occur on a daily basis, in which participants are subjected to group abuse called “ideological cleansings.”

After the American invasion and occupation of Iraq, Massoud Rajavi ordered his followers to greet the Americans as liberators – and promptly went into hiding. He has not been seen since, but is said to retain his control over the cult, using his wife, Maryam – who has been proclaimed the self-styled “President” of Iran by the group –as a front. The US government took charge of the MEK facility, known as Camp Ashraf, and, although the Bush administration continued to characterize the group as a terrorist organization, President Bush cited Massoud’s cult as the source of “intelligence” on Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program. Prominent neoconservatives began agitating for utilizing the MEK the way the Bush administration had used Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress, but efforts to openly put them on the CIA payroll stalled, along with the administration’s war plans. Somebody in the Bush administration must have figured out that funding and supporting a terrorist group that had killed Americans would not sit well while we were conducting an international “war on terrorism.”

However, it turns out the Bush administration secretly brought MEK cadre to the US for military training, including communications intercepts and other clandestine cloak-and-dagger stuff: the program supposedly ended just before the Obama administration took office. Apparently the MEK were turned over to the Mossad, who utilized them to carry out the assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists in Iran.

The MEK’s campaign to get their terrorist group legitimized has been characterized by large cash payments to prominent politicians and public figures in both parties: the list of MEK endorsers reads like a political Who’s Who of Washington bigwigs. The payments are ostensibly for speaking engagements at MEK rallies, but the size of these disbursements – ranging upward from $50,000 – indicates some good old-fashioned bribery.

There is an awful lot of MEK cash sloshing around the halls of Congress, and the cultists haven’t been shy about handing it out. Whether the Clinton Foundation or some Clinton-affiliated “charity” has partaken of the MEK’s largesse is presently unknown, but, as they say at the National Enquirer, “inquiring minds want to know.”

It’s fair to ask: where is all this unaccounted for cash coming from? While the Rajavi-ites use the familiar methods employed by cults to strip their members of all their assets – see the Al Jazeera video for a heart-rending account of how a major MEK spokesman ripped off his own elderly parents – it seems likely that, during their sojourn as Saddam Hussein’s favorite assassins, the MEK received compensation from the Iraqi dictator for slaughtering the Kurds and other regime opponents so efficiently and ruthlessly. Which means people like former Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell, who has shilled for the MEK, and former Democratic party chairman Howard Dean, are recipients of Saddam’s gold.

Like so much of US foreign policy, the idea that the US would legitimize a crazed cult like the MEK sounds like the plot of a bad thriller. Yet it’s all about the timing: as the US-Iran nuclear talks loom, the prospect of our State Department in effect legalizing the MEK and its activities in the US is an open provocation that could possibly shut down the sensitive negotiations – and pave the way for war with Iran. No doubt hardliners within the Obama administration are using the MEK issue as a backdoor way to torpedo the Baghdad talks: whether they will succeed remains to be seen. As one State Department official told the Wall Street Journal: “To make that assertion on your own that the MeK will be removed is a realistic one. But in policy making you never know for sure what will happen.”

I have to add that the MEK, while claiming to have “renounced” terrorism, exists in an atmosphere seething with violence, and my own experience with them has borne this out. Whenever I have written about them I have invariably received emails from MEK supporters laden with explicit threats of violence. This is to be expected from members of a psycho cult, but in the case of the MEK it’s not like they’ve never killed any Americans before. Just ask the families of Paul Shaffer, Jack Turner, Louis Lee Hawkins, William Cottrell, Donald Smith, and Robert Krongard.

Antiwar.com

May 16, 2012 0 comment

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Israeli Backed MEK terrorists and Washington War Party

The Armageddon Network, How the war party is ginning up war with Iran

The War Party is bound and determined to drag us, kicking and screaming, into a military conflict with Iran – and they have constructed a vast network of agents inside both parties, and inside the government, to accomplish exactly that.

The nexus of this network is the government of Israel and its intelligence services, which is coordinating an increasingly frantic campaign to bring the Iran issue to a head. From all indications, it appears as if the goal is to ignite the conflict before the 2012 presidential elections.

This is not a covert conspiracy, but rather an open one: the Israelis have threatened, time and again, to take military action against Iran. They claim the Jewish state faces “another Holocaust,” and that Iran poses an “existential threat” to Israel’s very existence. The latest wrinkle is that officials in Tel Aviv reportedly told Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, on a recent visit to Israel, that they wouldn’t necessarily be informing the White House until after the Israelis had launched their fighter jets and missiles.

Perfectly understandable: After all, why should the Israelis – who drain us of $3.5 billion a year in “foreign aid” – give us a few minutes warning of Armageddon? Why should they care that the price of oil would immediately skyrocket to $200 a barrel, and make driving to work an economic impossibility? Such considerations are irrelevant, since every single major politician in America is pledged to maintain the one-sided “special relationship” at all costs. Yes, even at the cost of America’s economic demise, for the oil shock would send our already reeling economy into a tailspin – and it would be a long time before we hit bottom.

Of course, the Israelis may not want to pursue this course to the end: a parasite that kills its host is essentially committing suicide. So while this may be a subject of debate within the Israeli national security establishment, with senior military and intelligence officials disdaining Netanyahu’s attack plans as “the stupidest idea I ever heard,” in America no such discussion is allowed. Listening to the Republican frontrunner last Saturday night, at a “debate” devoted to foreign policy, Mitt Romney sounded as if he were running for President of Israel rather than US commander-in-chief:

“Well, let’s– let’s start back from there and let’s talk about where we are. This is, of course, President Obama’s greatest failing, from a foreign policy standpoint, which is he recognized the gravest threat that America and the world faces – and faced was a nuclear Iran and he did not do what was necessary to get Iran to be dissuaded from their nuclear folly. What he should have done is speak out when dissidents took the streets and say, ‘America is with you.’ And work on a covert basis to encourage the dissidents.”

What “dissidents” is Mitt Romney talking about? Surely not the Green movement, led by figures who have praised Iran’s pursuit of nuclear energy and oppose attempts by the West to stop it. Does Romney even know what he’s talking about? Probably not, but his advisers surely do, and indeed one in particular seems to have a very specific idea of which “dissidents” the Romney administration will be funding and otherwise encouraging.

Mitchell Reiss, president of Washington College in Maryland, and one of Romney’s top foreign policy advisers, has emerged as a spokesman for the Mujaheddin-e-Khalq (MEK), the so-called People’s Mujaheddin of Iran, a weird cult-like group [.pdf] of Iranian exiles generally despised by ordinary Iranians. MEK originated in the early days of the revolution that overthrew the Shah, and its cadres not only participated in the taking of the US embassy, which led to the hostage crisis of 1979, but also carried out assassinations against US diplomats and agents throughout the region. After losing out in the post-revolutionary struggle for power in Tehran, the group fled to Iraq, where they were succored for years by Saddam Hussein, who allowed them to set up military camps from which they conducted terrorist raids on Iran. MEK troops fought alongside the Iraqis in their war with Iran, and were used to ruthlessly suppress rebellions by Shi’ites in southern Iraq. After the US invasion, they were confined to their camp, where they remained a military “asset” in Washington’s ongoing campaign to destabilize Iran.

The group is led by Maryam Rajavi, who has already proclaimed herself “president” of Iran, and is worshiped by her followers. Although her husband, Massoud Rajavi, is the titular commander-in-chief of the “National Liberation Army,” a large percentage of the officers in their Camp Ashraf compound are women, and females constitute a majority of the fighters. A 2004 FBI report [.pdf] concludes:

“The MEK practices daily ‘cult-like’ activity to include daily confessions in front of their peers…dissolution of marriages, and removal of children from parents… fighters are separated from their children who are sent to Europe and brought up by the MEK Support Network. Investigation has learned that these children are then further indoctrinated into the organization and are often used for various social benefit fraud such as was revealed during joint FBI/Cologne Police Department investigation in Germany.”

Shipped off to the welfare states of Europe, the unfortunate children of these fanatics are used as cogs in the MEK money machine, producing a steady flow of welfare checks flowing into the group’s coffers. Members are indoctrinated from birth to worship Maryam, who claims her edicts come from God, and are kept in conditions that included, in one case in Germany, of a child being chained to her bed. As the FBI reported:

“In one case one of the children was chained to a bed and only after her escape and report to local police was the fraud scheme discovered. Interviews of some of these MEK children found children fully indoctrinated into a ‘cult-like’ organization with no regard to the welfare of the child. These children are then returned to the NLA to be used as fighters upon coming of age. Interviews also revealed that some of these children were told that their parents would be harmed if the children did not cooperate with the MEK. Open source reporting from defecting MEK members has revealed that MEK fighters are often told the same story about their children should they take issue with MEK leadership and desire to leave the organization.”

MEK claims it has foresworn terrorism, but a 2004 FBI report states that a “Los Angeles investigation has determined that the MEK is currently actively involved in planning and executing acts of terrorism.” US diplomatic and intelligence officials maintain the MEK “trained females at Camp Ashraf in Iraq to perform suicide attacks in Karbala.”

For these reasons, and more, the MEK and its numerous front organizations have remained on the US list of terrorist organizations, whose activities are proscribed in the United States. Romney aide Reiss is part of a campaign to get MEK delisted – an effort that is so lavishly funded one wonders where all the money is coming from. There’s no doubt where it’s going to, however: a long list of leading “experts” and prominent politicians in both parties and on both sides of the political spectrum have pocketed hundreds of thousands of dollars in “speaking fees” handed out by an organization apparently flush with cash. A 2002 FBI report notes what the agency found when it raided the Falls Church, Virginia headquarters of the group:

“The indoor swimming pool had been drained and a floor placed over the drained pool. The area above the pool was divided into offices. In each of these offices, a hatch in the floor led into the drained swimming pool. This area was used for storage of materials…”

Among the materials discovered were “signed, blank checks,” and the report states, “Confidential sources have reported to the FBI and that the NCRI and the PMOI use the signed, blank checks to pay their expenses and fund their activities.”

From its Paris headquarters, where technical legal maneuvers have allowed the MEK to operate openly, and its base at Camp Ashraf, in Iraq, where the “military wing,” called the “National Liberation Army,” is based, the cult’s very well-funded tentacles reach into the very halls of Congress, where a bipartisan caucus loudly calls for delisting the group. Those signed blank checks sure come in handy. As one US diplomat told the Christian Science Monitor:

“Your speech agent calls, and says you get $20,000 to speak for 20 minutes. They will send a private jet, you get $25,000 more when you are done, and they will send a team to brief you on what to say.”

The Monitor reports:

“The contracts can range up to $100,000 and include several appearances…. The speaking events have created some extraordinary spectacles, including that of US heavyweights sharing the stage with the MEK’s self-declared ‘president-elect’ Maryam Rajavi. At a mid-June MEK rally in Paris, for example, Mrs. Rajavi was flanked by five rows of former top US and European officials.”

Dozens of prominent figures have been paid huge sums to shill for these former hostage-taking anti-American terrorists, including:

•Michael Mukasey
•Ed Rendell
•Andrew Card (another Romney adviser)
•Gen. James Conway
•Tom Ridge
•Gen. Hugh Shelton
•James Woolsey
•Howard Dean
•Rudy Giuliani
•Porter Goss
•Lee Hamilton
•Michael Hayden
•Bill Richardson
•Louis Freeh
•Gen. Peter Pace
•Gen. Wesley Clark
•Gen. Anthony Zinni
And, of course, John Bolton. Even P.J. Crowley, who opposed the delisting campaign while at State – and who claims his speaking fee didn’t influence his speech – was lured by the smell of cold hard cash. “We’ve never seen this kind of money,” says Trita Parsi, of the National Iranian American Council. “At one conference with 10 speakers, if they average $50k a pop, that is half a million dollars just in speaker fees.”

Where is this largesse coming from – and why is it being allowed to influence the American political process if it comes from overseas?

The major coup claimed by the MEK is the revelation of Iran’s previously unknown nuclear facilities at Natanz, but it is widely known that this information was passed on to them by Israel’s intelligence agency: the Mossad and the MEK have a longstanding history of cooperation. The recent bombing at an Iranian missile base, which killed 21 Iranian soldiers, is being attributed to the MEK, and the Iranians charge the mysterious “terrorist” plot targeting the Saudi ambassador in Washington and supposedly planned by Iran was actually set up by the Rajavi cultists.

The Israel lobby is an octopus with many tentacles, of which MEK is merely one: they are all attached to the same body, however, and that is the government of Israel, and its intelligence services. If, in some alternative universe where Congress isn’t “Israeli-occupied territory” our lawmakers followed the money, I have no doubt the cash flow could be traced back to its source.

The results of such an investigation would hardly be shocking. Israel is waging an intense campaign to drag us into war on their behalf, and they aren’t trying to hide it. What they are intent on hiding, however, is the way in which our Congress, our public officials, and our political culture are being bought off by their proxies. We ship billions to Tel Aviv, and they ship it back to us in the form of propaganda and relentless pressure to bend the White House and Congress to their will.

That’s what’s so “special” about the “special relationship” – the same relationship a tapeworm has to a stomach.

The Israelis have a trump card, one they’ll only play if they have a reasonable expectation of success, and that is to launch an attack on their own that would inevitably bring in the US. This would happen because Israeli fighter jets on their way to bomb Iranian targets would have to pass over Iraqi territory: however, what assurances do they have the Americans won’t interfere? As Zbigniew Brzezinski put it in an interview:

“We are not exactly impotent little babies. They have to fly over our airspace in Iraq. Are we just going to sit there and watch? … We have to be serious about denying them that right. That means a denial where you aren’t just saying it. If they fly over, you go up and confront them. They have the choice of turning back or not. No one wishes for this but it could be a ‘Liberty’ in reverse.”

However, it looks like we just may be “impotent little babies,” at least if we take Joint Chiefs chairman Mike Mullen’s comments as indicative. Wired.com reports:

“In a town hall on the campus of the University of West Virginia, a young Air Force ROTC cadet asked Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen to respond to a “rumor.” If Israel decided to attack Iran, the speculation went, those jet would need to fly through Iraqi airspace to reach their targets. That airspace is considered a ‘no-fly’ zone by the American military. So might U.S. troops shoot down the Israeli jets, the airmen asked the chairman, if they breached that airspace?

“Mullen tried to sidestep the question. ‘We have an exceptionally strong relationship with Israel. I’ve spent a lot of time with my counterpart in Israel. So we also have a very clear understanding of where we are. And beyond that, I just wouldn’t get into the speculation of what might happen and who might do what. I don’t think it serves a purpose, frankly,’ he said. ‘I am hopeful that this will be resolved in a way where we never have to answer a question like that.’

“The cadet followed-up: ‘Would an airmen like me ever be ordered to fire on an Israeli – aircraft or personnel?’

“Mullen’s second answer was much the same as his first. ‘Again, I wouldn’t move out into the future very far from here. They’re an extraordinarily close ally, have been for a long time, and will be in the future,’ the admiral said.”

An Israeli attack on Iran would almost certainly provoke assaults on US positions in Iraq, including the huge US embassy and the thousands of mercenaries left in place after the phony US “withdrawal.” Indeed, avoiding such a scenario as described above may very well be a major motivating factor behind the US decision to pull our so-called “combat troops” from Iraq. That’s one way of ensuring that Mullen will never have to answer “a question like that.”

Millions of dollars – a great portion of them your tax dollars coming back to haunt you – are being pumped into the effort. Emboldened by greed, enabled by our avaricious political class, a network of organizations and highly-placed individuals is pushing us down the road to Armageddon. The Armageddon Network is working overtime to drag us into war with Iran, and they don’t lack the funds to do so.

They need all the cash they can get, because the War Party faces a difficult task: they must convince a war-weary American public, disheartened by economic bad news on every front, to sit passively while the elites take us to war. The overwhelming majority oppose another war, and they certainly would be more vehement in their opposition if they knew the economic consequences of such a foolhardy move. They may never know, however, until it hits them – and by then it will be too late.

That’s why we here at Antiwar.com are pushing back – hard. No, we don’t have the tremendous financial resources available to the War Party. We don’t have millions to fund a full-time staff, and sponsor lavish conferences where the bribed and the deluded appear to sing our praises. We don’t have overseas allies with bottomless budgets. We don’t have any of that – all we have is you.

We are fighting, day and night, to bring the truth to the American people, and avoid the catastrophic results of war with Iran, but the Armageddon Network has us outspent by a factor of at least 10,000-to-1. We need you, our readers and supporters, to even up the odds just a little bit.

You may have noticed that this is the first day of our seasonal fundraising drive: it’s just a coincidence that it falls at the very moment when the War Party’s efforts are reaching a frenzied crescendo and their war cries are drowning out the voices for peace. It’s time for the antiwar majority to step up and be heard – now more than ever. Your tax-deductible donation will give us the resources we need to continue debunking the War Party’s lies, and countering the all-pervasive influence of foreign lobbyists.

In short, we need your help and we need it now – because your contribution could very well make the difference between war and peace. Unlike the MEK and its front organizations, we don’t have a cache of signed blank checks hidden in the basement that we can pull out to pay the bills. We just have you. So please – give what you can as soon as you can. Stop the Armageddon network – give today.

Anti War

November 16, 2011 0 comment

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

The Uses of Political Violence

Rep. Peter King (R-New York) is the kind of in-your-face demagogue that only the state of New York could have elevated to high office. From his perch in the 3rd congressional district, in Long Island, King holds forth like a cruder version of Rudolph Giuliani, if you can imagine it. Yet we don’t have to imagine it, because it will be on full display when Rep. King, in his capacity as chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, presides over hearings on “the radicalization of the Muslim-American community.”

Those hearings portend a circus, in the course of which we’ll be subjected to a very public airing of the malignant views of people like Robert Spencer, Pamela “the shrieking harpy” Geller, and Frank Gaffney, a rogues gallery of anti-Muslimologist “experts” whose hate-filled rantings will further poison the atmosphere of an America itching for a lynching.

Although the neoconservatives were generally discredited in the wake of the Iraq war, when the complete failure of their policies – and prophecies – became all too apparent even to many of them, the dead-enders among them have sought to make a comeback by transferring their war on Muslims from the Middle East to the home front. The Ft. Hood massacre was a godsend to them, and they took full advantage of the opportunity. The “ground zero” mosque controversy was another shot in the arm for this movement, and Rep. King did not disappoint on that front: When it comes to crude bigotry and religion-based divisiveness, we can always rely on King to sink to the occasion, far lower than practically anyone else.

So the hearings will be a farce, a show trial of the Muslim community in which the mere act of putting up a defense gives the prosecution a legitimacy it could never achieve on the merits of the case. Because there is no organized pro-al Qaeda, pro-terrorist tendency in American Islam to speak of, at least so far. Which is why the FBI has had to resort to entrapment in prosecuting alleged homegrown “terrorists.” The last one was a confused Somali teenager, lured by the FBI into planning a bombing that never came off: the Ft. Hood shooter, although supposedly “inspired” by the American-born radical Islamist Anwar al-Awlaki, was a lone gunman, and not part of a terrorist cell or a larger network. The Obama administration made strenuous efforts to link the Times Square bomber to the Afghan Taliban, but since Faisal Shahzad pled guilty, that aspect of the case – which never held together very well – didn’t have its day in court. Indeed, all the domestic “terrorist” events since 9/11 have been committed by the prototypical lone gunman, and linked to psychological rather than political issues in the killer’s mind.

Yet there were and are those who have a direct interest in establishing all sorts of links where none exist: the Obama administration to further its foreign policy goals and justify a war, ambitious prosecutors who want to score points and make a name for themselves, and cretins like Rep. King, who have an ideological agenda they want to pursue to the very end, which is the prospect of us treating American Muslims much like Franklin Delano Roosevelt treated the Japanese-American community during World War II. Indeed, one particularly vicious neocon wrote an entire book justifying the Japanese internment camps in order to set up American Muslims for a similar scenario.

I’m not the only one who has pointed out Rep. King’s own flirtations with political violence – such as his open support for the Irish Republican Army and its front group, Noraid – but I hasten to add that such hypocrisy is merely a reflection of a more general double-standard when it comes to political violence.

We have the example of former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani, former secretary of homeland security Tom Ridge, former White House homeland security adviser Frances Townsend and former attorney general Michael Mukasey traveling to Paris to endorse the Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK – Peoples’ Mujahideen), an organization characterized as a terrorist group by the US State Department. MEK has attacked US military and diplomatic personnel, and has been described by former members as a cult: ideologically, the MEK started out as a far leftist group, but like the neocons who have taken up its cause, has traveled to the other end of the political spectrum, offering itself up to the US government in much the same way as Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress (INC) became the instrument of US war plans in Iraq.

MEK’s American supporters want to use it as a battering ram against the Iranian regime, and yet this exile group has even less credibility than the Chalabi organization did: what support they had inside Iran evaporated when they fled to Iraq and took up with Saddam Hussein, whose government succored and armed them. MEK fought in the Iran-Iraq war – on the Iraqi side. That hasn’t stopped American neocons from riding this particular hobbyhorse: “For your organization to be described as a terrorist organization is just really a disgrace,” bloviated Giuliani at the Paris confab – although the families of those Americans murdered in cold blood by MEK might disagree. That a former US Attorney General would endorse a group with American blood on its hands is what ‘s really disgraceful, but Mukasey shamelessly declared that the US ought to provide “all possible technical and covert support to those fighting to end oppression in Iran,” i.e. put the MEK on the CIA payroll. Townsend, too, made no bones about her support for the group and its terroristic mission: “If the United States truly wants to put pressure on the Iranian regime, it takes more than talk and it takes more than sanctions,” she said to the assembled terrorists.

If terrorists can be utilized as an instrument of US foreign policy, then they become “freedom-fighters,” as Ronald Reagan dubbed the Afghan forebears of the Taliban during the 1980s, when they were fighting the Soviets with American help. This attitude is shared by the Obama administration, which has not only stood by while prominent Americans have rallied to MEK’s cause, but has also failed to distance Washington from other US-linked groups engaged in terrorist activities against Iran, such as Jundallah, a Sunni extremist sect carrying out attacks in Iranian Baluchistan.

More than that, Obama’s Justice Department has been actively going after Americans who travel abroad in support of left-wing “terrorist” groups, such as FARC and the Palestinian resistance. In October of last year the Justice Department raided the offices of the Antiwar Committee in Minneapolis, and also the homes and offices of left-wing activists in Chicago and North Carolina, and subpoenaed 19 people to appear before a grand jury fishing expedition.

Their crime? They had traveled abroad to engage in solidarity work with FARC and Palestinian resistance groups, which are on the State Department’s list of “foreign terrorist organizations” alongside the MEK. Unlike Giuliani, Townsend, Mukasey, and Ridge, the left-wing activists rounded up by Eric Holder don’t have top level connections in Congress and the Washington think-tanks, they don’t have editorial support from the Murdoch media empire, nor do they have the financial resources required to fight an all-out assault by the Justice Department. So they are harassed and prosecuted, while those with powerful connections and political pull go free – although both groups have engaged in exactly the same sort of activities.

Which just goes to prove, once again, that there are two sets of laws in latter-day America: one set for the powerful, and another for the powerless. Political violence is something that the US empire encourages when it is in its interests to do so, and condemns when its interests are threatened by unauthorized free-lancers. In every case, our rulers seek to use this kind of violence as their instrument, and this operating principle is underscored by the reaction, in some quarters, to the assassination of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.

The dead bodies were still on the ground in the parking lot of that Safeway store in Tucson when the left wing of the blogosphere was howling for “tea party” blood, blaming everyone from Sarah Palin to Ron Paul for the heinous crime. “Hate speech” had “incited” the assassin, one Jared Lee Loughner, a 22-year-old nutbag who lived not far from the murder scene. The local sheriff used his fifteen minutes of fame to opine that none of this would’ve happened if not for certain people “on the radio.” The Huffington Post was ablaze with commentary linking Loughner to the “tea party” – because, after all, both Loughner and the tea partiers are “anti-government”! Having just been walloped, big-time, in a national election, the “progressives” were quick to call for “right-wing” blood. A Democratic official told Politico on Sunday that “they need to deftly pin this on the tea partiers … just like the Clinton White House deftly pinned the Oklahoma City bombing on the militia and anti-government people.”

At a time when free speech is under assault on every front, “liberal” groups and politicians are eager to make the case for laws against “hate speech,” hopeful that this will put out of business right-wing talk radio and other manifestations of political incorrectness, or at least have a chilling effect. After all, they opine, just as we are the “only” Western country that doesn’t have socialized medicine, so we are practically alone among our European cousins in not having “hate speech” laws.

The attempt to characterize Loughner as a tea partier has absolutely nothing to do with anything he said or wrote: indeed, quite the opposite is the case. If we look at his YouTube videos, they are simply incoherent, ranting about how Loughner is into “conscience dreaming,” and railing about government “brainwashing” – typical paranoid ravings without any real political content, either right or left. A series of tweets by a former friend, one Caitie Parker, show that when she knew him, in 2007, he was a radical leftist – and his YouTube video featuring a flag-burning (hardly a tea party-ish type of activity) is certainly suggestive of that, although I wouldn’t draw any firm conclusions one way or the other.

Because what we are talking about here is not ideology, but psychopathology – although I’ll be the first to admit that the two often intersect. In this case, however, there is absolutely no indication – so far – that politics had anything to do with it. A mentally unstable individual, who disrupted classes at Pima Community College, where he was a student, with sudden outbursts, simply fixated on a public figure, and acted on his delusions. Yet the swiftness with which the “progressive” crowd glommed on to Loughner as a symbol of everything they think is wrong with this country indicates just how ready we are for a real honest to goodness witch hunt: how we are itching for a lynching, if only someone with all the requisite characteristics of a lynch-worthy victim would turn up.

To a ruling class pining for a “crisis” – one that will put them in the drivers’ seat and allow them to get away with smearing their enemies and repressing the opposition – the Tucson massacre is a golden opportunity, and you can bet your bottom dollar they’ll take full advantage of it.

For the ruling class, the uses of political violence are many and various – even if the violence isn’t being committed (this time) by our overseas allies or our own CIA. We hear a lot of babbling about how this means we have to tamp down the supposedly appalling “polarization” of our society, tamp down the “rhetoric,” and learn to love the middle ground.

“Extremism” is the enemy of the day, and anyone who wanders off the straight and narrow is a dangerous potential “terrorist.”

Bullshit. Of course our rulers – who are teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, both financial and political – don’t want any polarization. Instead, they want us to calmly accept our fate under their system, and go down quietly. They don’t want WikiLeaks exposing their overseas criminality, they don’t want anyone questioning their own criminal activities on the home front, and if you rock the boat you’re an “extremist” with “terrorist” inclinations, a candidate for the no-fly list and an investigation by Homeland Security.

This is the world they’re working to create: an America where speech is regulated, where the internet is controlled by the government, and the only political violence allowed is that engaged in by the US military on a massive scale, and practiced on nonwhites, preferably overseas. Are you ready to live in that world? I’m not, but then again, I may not have much choice in the matter.
Aniwar.com

January 11, 2011 0 comment

USA

Scooter Libby and World War III

How the Libby trial could impact US foreign policy

Cowed into funding a war neither they nor the majority of Americans believe in, congressional Democrats are taking the line that what’s needed are some "benchmarks" “ well-defined criteria by which to assess whether our efforts are paying off. The idea is to make continued U.S. support contingent on the Iraqis measuring up to these benchmarks. Hillary Clinton even says we should withdraw aid providing for the security of elected Iraqi political leaders if they fail to make the grade. Now that’s a way to kill someone off without leaving any fingerprints! (And a good lesson to any other would-be U.S. sock puppets who think they can take the money and run.)

The big problem with this approach, however, is that it fails to understand the dynamics of our continued presence in Iraq. In testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee given on Feb. 1, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the hawkish former national security adviser to Jimmy Carter, made a statement that should have set off alarm bells and sent everyone rushing for the lifeboats:

"If the United States continues to be bogged down in a protracted bloody involvement in Iraq, the final destination on this downhill track is likely to be a head-on conflict with Iran and with much of the world of Islam at large. A plausible scenario for a military collision with Iran involves Iraqi failure to meet the benchmarks; followed by accusations of Iranian responsibility for the failure; then by some provocation in Iraq or a terrorist act in the U.S. blamed on Iran; culminating in a ‘defensive’ U.S. military action against Iran that plunges a lonely America into a spreading and deepening quagmire eventually ranging across Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan."

Every moment we stay in Iraq increases the likelihood of war with Iran “ that, in my view, is the most powerful argument, aside from this one, for a rapid withdrawal. No sooner had Brzezinski uttered these words than the administration began a concerted campaign to blame the Iranians for U.S. failure in Iraq, and accused Tehran of having a direct hand in the killing of American troops.

We hear much about these accusations on the front pages of American newspapers, but what we don’t hear about are acts of terrorism directed at both civilian and military targets by Iranian "dissidents," who are reportedly receiving covert U.S. assistance. These groups include the Jundallah organization in Baluchistan, said to be affiliated with al-Qaeda, and the sinister, cult-like Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK), a shadowy Marxoid group that was supported by Saddam Hussein and still maintains a presence at Camp Ashraf [.pdf] in Iraq, as well as enjoying a wide array of bipartisan support in Congress.

Jundallah recently struck southeastern Iran, in Sistan-Baluchistan, with a series of attacks, including a car bomb in the provincial capital of Zahedan. The Iranians claim that the Jundallah militants are trained in Pakistan, and Iran has displayed samples of alleged captured armaments with "Made in USA" stamped all over them. The leader of Jundallah reportedly announced the attacks on MKO-TV, the satellite television station run out of Great Britain by the MEK, a few minutes before they started.

In an interview with the Telegraph, a Jundallah guerrilla fighter sounded very much like he was advertising his services to U.S. policymakers:

"Asked whether the satellite telephone he was holding might not lead to his being located, he allowed himself a smile. ‘We are not fighting against America,’ he said. Support for Jundallah was growing, he said. ‘There are hundreds of others who are desperate to sign in, but we ask them to wait because we do not have enough weapons or camps.’"

That was last year: surely by this time the Jundallah "freedom fighters" have more than enough weapons and camps, courtesy of Uncle Sam. Scott Ritter, in his book Target Iran: The Truth About the White House’s Plans for Regime Change, has described CIA-MEK cross-border operations, in which the Americans “ and the Israelis “ are conducting provocations that could lead to an open conflict with Iran. The focus of these efforts, he says, is on Baluchistan and Khuzestan.

With strong bipartisan support, Congress recently appropriated millions of dollars in aid to Iranian "resistance" groups, with practically no oversight as to how that money is being used “ and the scramble for American gold is on. The American front group for the MEK, the National Council of Resistance, has plenty of high-level contacts in Washington, just as Ahmed Chalabi did in the run-up to war with Iraq. The MEK and other Iranian exile groups are busily lobbying for a similar gig as the administration escalates its plans for "regime change" in Tehran.

The Iraqi government has recently reiterated its position that the MEK is a terrorist organization, an opinion shared by the European Union and the U.S. Department of State. However, not everyone in the U.S. administration agrees. And what are we to make of the near-total redaction of a mysterious document that came to light in the Libby trial “ a memo to Libby from John Hannah detailing "views of MEK leaders on continuing role in Iraq"? That’s all we’re allowed to know: aside from a reference to MEK briefing slides, the rest is blanked out.

The Office of the Vice President (OVP), which sponsored Chalabi, is just as intimately connected to the campaign to gin up a war with Iran as it was with the effort to lie us into war with Iraq. It is reasonable to assume the OVP is just as supportive of the MEK, and may even be directing its activities in collusion with its allies in the Pentagon.

Given that U.S. foreign policy is, to a large degree, driven by domestic politics, the motive on the part of the administration to escalate provocative covert actions inside Iran has never been greater. With Scooter Libby likely to be convicted and Fitzgerald’s sights increasingly turned on Cheney, the War Party, cornered, has every reason to lash out in one last desperate bid to save its political skin.

Fitzgerald, by all indications, is coming for Cheney. After the trial but before the sentencing, Fitz will make a strenuous effort to "flip" Scooter and use his testimony to target the vice president. Murray Waas reports in the National Journal that Cheney wasn’t taken in with Libby’s Tim Russert fabrication for a moment:

"At the time that Libby offered his explanation to Cheney, the vice president already had reason to know that Libby’s account to him was untrue, according to sources familiar with still-secret grand jury testimony and evidence in the CIA leak probe."

The Fitzgerald probe is a dagger pointed at the dark heart of the administration, the OVP, and the climactic moment of this epic battle is fast approaching. In the early days of the investigation, left-liberal bloggers were exulting in the possibility that they would see Karl Rove frog-marched out of the White House, but the trial has shown that Rove and Libby were antagonists rather than allies. Before it’s all over we may yet see the vice president frog-marched out of the White House “ at least metaphorically, in the form of an indictment with Dick Cheney’s name on it.

What better way to distract attention away from this coming political bombshell than by dropping some real bombs on Iran?

In the midst of the regional conflagration feared by Brzezinski, prosecuting the Vice President for obstruction of justice and/or perjury would be problematic, at best. In any case, the widening of the war would drive the story off the front pages “ think of this as a grand-scale version of Clinton’s bombing of the Sudanese pharmaceutical factory just as the Monica Lewinsky was returning to the grand jury.

U.S. war plans against Iran have apparently been in the making for quite some time, but the ratcheting-up of both the rhetoric and the actual war preparations indicates a new level of seriousness on the part of this administration. While most reports reassure us that the decision to go to war has not yet been made, one wonders what turn of events would push the key decision-makers, Bush and Cheney, over the line. A direct threat to one “ or both “ of them coming out of the Libby trial may be all the impetus they need. A cornered rat is dangerous.

by Justin Raimondo – February 21, 2007

February 26, 2007 0 comment