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Mujahedin Khalq Organization as a terrorist group

Sydney hostage-taker was affiliated with Mojahedin Khalq

Australia’s best-selling newspaper, The Australian has published a report saying the Sydney cafe attacker Man Haron Monis was “linked” to the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK, a.k.a MKO).

The report adds that the revelation is contained in documents from an Iranian associate’s refugee claim in 2003, which collapsed after Monis refused to divulge significant details about his own past and then suddenly vanished.

“According to Refugee Review Tribunal documents obtained under Freedom of Information laws, Monis’s associate claimed he would face death if he were deported to Iran because of his close relationship with Monis, whom he believed had tried to abolish the Iranian regime.

The report continues that the asylum-seeker, whose name is not released, cited ¬reports Monis was affiliated with MKO.

“MKO members assassinated three US army officers and three American civilians in Iran in the 1970s, and were involved in the overthrow of the Shah in 1979,” the report adds. “In 1981, after falling out with the ruling Islamic Republican Party, the MKO bombed its Tehran headquarters killing 71 people. The US listed the MKO as a terrorist organisation in 1997, but it was delisted in 2012.”

The report goes on to say that the documents indicate the asylum-seeker and Monis “were friends in Iran in the 1990s and were reunited in Australia.”

The report concludes that Monis was contributing to preparing “the asylum-seeker’s application”, attending his refugee interview with the Immigration Department’s delegate in about 2003. But when the delegate asked him whether information relevant to his case could be disclosed to the applicant, Monis asked the delegate not to reveal a very significant aspect of his own claims to the applicant, and then he simply disappeared.

Habilian association reporting from The Australian, Sydney

January 22, 2015 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

And the Winner of the ‘War On Terror’ Financed Dream Home 2014 Giveaway Is…

Oceanfront views, 24-hour doorman, heated pool, and perhaps best of all, a “private tunnel to the beach.” This $3 million Palm Beach, Florida penthouse could be yours, but unfortunately it isn’t because this prize has already been claimed by a former high-level U.S. official who helped pave the way for the over decade-long “war on terror,”which has been a near complete catastrophe.

Iraq is aflame, the Islamic State is on the rampage, the situation in Afghanistan worsens by the day, and thousands of Americans—and many more Iraqis and Afghans—have died during the post-9/11 conflicts. Meanwhile, the combined cost of the “war on terror” comes to an estimated $1.6 trillion.

But if the American people got screwed on the deal, a lot of former senior government officials who played important roles in this debacle have done quite well for themselves. It’s New Year’s Eve and I need to write a final sendoff to 2014, so I thought I’d take a look at the fortunes (literally) of some of these figures: Former CIA director George Tenet and former FBI director Louis Freeh (I’ll cover former Department of Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge in a New Year’s post).

Consider Tenet. As head of the CIA, he missed multiple signs of a major Al Qadea attack directed against the United States, called the case against Saddam building Weapons of Mass Destruction a “slam dunk,” and approved the Bush administration’s torturing of terror suspects.

In any fair world Tenet would be tried for criminal incompetence. Instead, he got the Presidential Medal of Freedom and after resigning in 2004 (at which point his agency salary was south of $200,000), he received a $4 million advance to write a memoir. In it, he confessed to “a black, black time” a few months after 9/11 when he was sitting at home in his favorite Adirondack chair thinking about the tragedy that killed 3,000 Americans on his watch and asked, “Why me?”

Tenet has received millions more in his current role as managing director of a privately held New York investment bank and as a board director and advisor to intelligence and military contractors. Meanwhile, he collects fat speaking fees to talk about “current global threats to U.S. security and what the future holds for the U.S., our allies and interests around the globe.” (Top Secret: Here’s where he gets his best intelligence.)

Not bad for the son of Greek immigrants who before entering government service in 1982 (as legislative director to then-Senator H. John Heinz III) worked at the American Hellenic Institute and the Solar Energy Industries Association. When he headed the CIA, Tenet lived in a ranch house in Potomac, Maryland, which he bought in 1986 for $179,000. He currently splits his time between New York and the affluent D.C. suburb of Bethesda, where he reportedly lives in a neighborhood “known for its tree-lined streets, vintage brick homes, and atmosphere oozing with understated luxury.”

Then there’s Louis Freeh, Tenet’s counterpart at the FBI during the run-up to 9/11. (He resigned a few months before the attacks.) The former FBI director was seriously injured in a car wreck this August, but told police he had no idea what happened because he’d been asleep at the wheel, which is a perfect metaphor for his FBI stewardship. (And let me sincerely say I wish Freeh a speedy recovery, but the metaphor is precise.) Like Tenet, Freeh failed to act on a mountain of evidence pointing towards 9/11, i.e. an April 2001 memo sent to him by his assistant director that cited “significant and urgent” intelligence of “serious operational planning” for terrorism attacks by Islamic radicals linked to Osama bin Laden. He also botched cases involving Richard Jewell, Wen Ho Lee, and Robert Hanssen.

Freeh resigned from the FBI two months before 9/11. When he worked there he was making an annual salary of $145,000 and lived “in a heavily mortgaged house in Great Falls, a Virginia suburb,” according to an old and admiring New Yorker profile. He and his wife now own at least four lavish estates worth many millions of dollars, including a residence in Wilmington, Delaware, a six-bedroom summerhouse worth more than $3 million in Vermont, and a beachfront penthouse at 100 Worth Avenue in Palm Beach, Florida, which was bought for $1.4 million and now has an estimated value of $3 million.

How’d that happen? Well, Freeh is one of many former U.S. officials who got paid big speaking fees (reportedly up to $50,000 a pop) by a creepy Iranian group called the People’s Mujahedin, also known as Mojahedin-e-Khalq, or MEK, to successfully advocate for its removal from the State Department’s list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations. He also opened up a consulting firm whose clients have included Saudi Arabia’s Prince Bandar, who the U.S. Department of Justice accused of taking massive bribes from a British defense contractor. That’s right, Freeh represented a prince from America’s old pal Saudi Arabia, home to fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers, and whose export of Wahhabism is credited with giving rising to the Islamic State.

Freeh is also hired to conduct investigations, like the controversial report he produced about Penn State’s football program. Nasser Kazeminy, a Minnesota businessman who in 2008 was accused of bribing former Senator Norm Coleman, also hired Freeh to conduct a “thorough investigation” of the allegations against him in the hopes of clearing his name.

In 2011, Freeh issued a public statement saying that his investigation had “completely vindicated” both Kazeminy and Coleman. Sure, Kazeminy had bought Coleman $100,000 worth of presents, but, Freeh said at a press conference, “There was no quid pro quo in the gifts. There was no wrongdoing.” Freeh also met with the Justice Department – which was investigating the bribery charges but declined to bring a case—on Kazeminy’s behalf.

Oh yeah, about Freeh’s Palm Beach penthouse. As I discovered through Florida property records, Freeh’s wife co-owns it with Kazeminy, which kind of makes you wonder about just how thorough and impartial his investigation was. The quit claim deed giving Freeh’s wife one-half ownership of the penthouse was signed nine days after Freeh’s vindication of Kazeminy.

Freeh declined to comment for this story.

Ken Silverstein, The Intercept

Photo: Sotheby’s

Email the author: kensilverstein@firstlook.org

January 3, 2015 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq Organization's Propaganda System

Rajavi’s Cyber Army: The MEK’s Twitter Legions

When confronting the Mujahedeen/Mojahedin Khalq, or MEK, MKO, etc, a crucial aspect of it which has been repeatedly overlooked, is its online activities. While there is an abundance of information and readily available studies revealing the cultic nature of the group (which the neocons consistently ignore) and the “limited exit options” (to put it mildly) it offers the members once entering the organisation, few have stopped to point out another aspect of this bizarre organisation – maybe because the knee-jerk reaction of many expat members is to brand them an “agent of the mullahs”.

The public face of the faux-dissident group is, of course, the charismatic, beaming face of Maryam Rajavi. She is an impressive orator, conversant not only in her native Persian, but also in fluent French and English, and supremely confidant, an impressive saleswoman for any group. Her ostensible support for democracy, coupled with these factors, makes supporting her and her organisation more than tempting for many western politicians, who simply see the enemy of their enemy as an immediate friend.

Online, Mrs Rajavi would appear to be just as vibrantly abuzz with followers and interest as she tries to portray herself to be offline. She has several Twitter accounts which ceaselessly promote her statements and messages, which are posted on several different websites (just in case you didn’t see the first few million posts emphasising them) on the MEK’s official website (which is of course, mojahedin.org), on the website for the unofficial MEK political wing (the ‘National Council of Resistance’), and on her own personal website. Translations are in English, French, Farsi and Arabic.

For someone who hasn’t exactly won Hassan Rouhani’s seat yet (although her and her husband have had a damn good try), her website gives the impression that, far from leading an organisation widely hated by Iranians, she’s halfway there – a multitude of tabs are devoted to her views, works and statements, photographs of crowds of supporters bearing the images of herself and her husband appear, she is shown in videos sitting and giving statements, you name it. Her branch of the “resistance”, in reality, has more presence among the diaspora than within Iran.

It’s when you start looking at her most basic of platforms, namely her English language Twitter profile, that something first strikes you as amiss. Some tweets are clearly posted by Maryam Herself, others possibly posted by her staff. Not that there’s anything wrong with that of course.

But take a look at those retweeting her, and those who very occasionally reply; those who can reply and challenge her views without being blocked after a period of time, that is. 90% of those retweeting her are accounts with nearly identical features.

Of course, when on the internet, like-minded people, especially those who strongly support parties or causes, will naturally act in a like-minded way; changing their pictures to similar ones, using similar backgrounds and slogans, etc.

But these accounts are literally identical in almost every respect. Similar pictures, similar slogans, similar lack of any personal touch whatsoever, and all devoted to either retweeting or paraphrasing Mrs Rajavi’s every word.

Don’t believe me? Check this one, ‘royaraha’, for example. This account has no description, a bland background of flowers with the avatar of a horse, 86 followers and devotes all its time to retweeting; the vast majority of its retweets are retweeting… Other accounts, also automaton-like. Then there’s another, Nakba Nejati, with an avatar of a killed MEK member, exactly 86 followers, no description, and devotes all its time to retweeting Maryam and other like-minded accounts; many, again, also automated. Here’s another, with the bland stock image of a bird, which is exactly the same as the previous two. Here’s another… and another… and another. There are literally hundreds, if not thousands of these accounts; some bearing pictures of Maryam Rajavi in abundance, some not. Some with descriptions praising the Rajavis and the MEK/NCRI, some without, yet with avatars depicting the two, and acting in exactly the same manner.

Long story short; Maryam isn’t retweeted by hundreds of adoring fans, but by hundreds (if not thousands) of seemingly automated accounts (“bots”, to internet-savvy types) save for the occasional account which may or may not be operated by the person they claim to be – like-minded activists, neocons and right-wing types who seem to genuinely want to believe in the group, etc. It was well known that the MEK has a very limited following within Iran, but I didn’t imagine that it was so irrelevant to the Iranian political climate that even the tweets of the leaders would need propping up with more falsehood and lies.

A shot of one of the automated accounts, frantically/automatically dedicated to retweeting Maryam.

To make matters worse, many of the MEK accounts are using the names, images, and personas of MEK members killed by the Iraqi and Iranian regimes. In other words, not only has the MEK thoroughly milked them for their ‘blood and breath’ (MEK members have to swear to give their breath to Massoud Rajavi, and blood to Maryam Rajavi) during their lives, but it continues to use them to further an agenda when they’re dead, too. Avatars of many of the accounts depict dead members, with one even seemingly using a screenshot from a ‘martyrdom’ video! One was also ostensibly ‘in memory’ of a fallen activist… Only to spend all its time retweeting Maryam & frantically retweeting ‘friends’ and fellow ‘martyrs’.

Here’s yet another account…

A possible source of these various cloned accounts becomes obvious when some wider reading is done. According to Iran Interlink, former MEK fighters resettled by the MEK in Albania and other nations continued to be harassed by the group into doing its bidding, and had to once again attempt to escape them, even though they had long since left the prison camp of Ashraf (named after Rajavi’s deceased wife). They were asked to ceaselessly post online propaganda for the group, despite no longer being members:

According to Iran interlink, Several Iranian residents in Europe who have contact with their friends in Tirana are now reporting that the MKO agents are exerting huge pressure on the disaffected members, who have been moved to another building block, to sign a petition against these fifty nine people and denounce them as “agents of the regime”. The MKO agents make efforts to buy the recently defected individuals in Albania back to the cult. Except for a few who have money from their families the rest must rely either on $200 per month from the UNHCR or alternatively the MEK will give them $500 per month on condition they work on the internet (to promote the MEK) and not work against them in any way. They threaten the refugees to death if they do not cooperate with them.

Thus, it seems like yet another vile twist has been added – that the MEK forces its mistreated members, which have ostensibly been freed from its grasp, to blindly retweet and comment ceaselessly online, from countries where they should be at last living in freedom and dignity, in support of the group which held them captive for so long.

It may not surprise those familiar with the MEK at all. Its policy of renting/coercing supporters into staging public acts of fealty (to the point of instructing members to set themselves alight in the streets should their beloved leaders come to any harm) comes in a variety of forms. To ensure that Maryam Rajavi’s annual mass “all for freedom” gathering doesn’t turn out to be a sparsely-populated washout, the MEK offers to bus willing students, activists, and anyone it can cajole into coming along – by offering them a “free” holiday to Paris, with all expenses paid, on condition that they come to the gathering to make its size seem impressive. The testimony of Alina Alymkulova, a Kyrgyz student, contains an overview of their methods. Here’s an outtake:

I arrived at a bus station in Prague along with a friend, a fellow student from Kyrgyzstan. Just as the trip organizer said last night, there were eight buses waiting to take us to Paris.

Most of the “protesters” were young and obviously students like me. I met many Russians, Ukrainians, Czechs, and students from Asian countries who were all recruited via the Internet.

More than an hour later we were still at the bus station. People kept coming. It was cold and rainy, and some people began to drink alcohol to keep warm. Some others started to chant slogans: “Freedom to Iranian parrots!” and “Organizers should bring beer!”

I approached two Russian girls to see if they might have a better idea about the purpose of our trip. “To defend the rights of Iranian women,” said one of the girls. “To meet handsome Frenchmen,” said the other. “Who cares about Iranian women?“

As we can see, the MEK offers “limited exit options” not only to its own imprisoned members in Camp Liberty, but also to anyone attending its large “gathering” (drawn more from foreigners than Iranians) in the free world too.

1:16 p.m.: The buses took us to some strange place not far from Charles de Gaulle Airport. We were given papers explaining where to go and what to do. Cameras were not allowed. As we exited the bus, I resigned myself to the idea that running away was not an option — people were guarding the area.

In another instances, for demonstrations around Europe and America, the MEK has paid an array of people – from miscellaneous citizens to beggars – to go to their demonstrations and don disconcerting t-shirts showing pictures of the would-be Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu, in order to beef up the size of their demonstrations.

An African-American beggar, part of the MEK’s rented crowd at a demonstration in front of the UN headquarters in New York. When asked about why she was there, she claimed that she was offered “20 dollars and a meal”.

It isn’t just the demonstrators who are often hired to go to these events either. Speakers are paid tens of thousands of dollars to speak on behalf of the group for as little as a few minutes. The MEK’s speakers in the past have even included figures such as former New York Mayor Rudi Guliani, former house speaker Newt Gingrich, and Vermont Governor Howard Dean. In other words, neocons who see the enemy of their enemy (the Iranian regime) as a firm friend. According to CSM, their methods of hiring speakers are as follows:

“‘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 contracts can range up to $100,000 and include several appearances.”

Such big money seems to have been crucial in the de-listing of the group as a terrorist organisation (it was backlisted in 1997) in September 2012 by Hilary Clinton, then Secretary of State.

An Iranian flag, thrown in the bin by someone at Rajavi’s “gathering”. Presumably by one of the hired “demonstrators”.

Former Pennsylvania governor Rendel, among others put under investigation for receiving money from the MEK prior to delisting, may have received up to $150,000 for around eight appearances. True to form, the bottomless pockets of the MEK were not only filled by the diaspora, but largely from of payments dished out by the then-genocidal war chest of Saddam Hussein. Israel too, has used the MEK as mercenaries, in exchange for MEK assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists. Funding has also come from the UAE and Saudi Arabia, which previously used the MEK as auxiliaries with which they hoped to carve up Iran, should the MEK’S charge of the Rajavi brigade have been successful in 1998.

In short, as long as the MEK continues to have no traction within Iran, no amount of bots will save it from the murderous irrelevance that it increasingly finds itself plunged into.

Ben Allinson-Davies, Unfettered Freedom For All!

December 4, 2014 0 comments

Maryam Rajavi

Parliamentarians lose Maryam Rajavi court battle

Eminent parliamentarians have lost a Supreme Court battle over Home Secretary Theresa May’s decision to ban a dissident Iranian politician from Britain.

An appeal by the cross-party group of 15 MPs and peers, led by Liberal Democrat Lord Carlile, was rejected in a majority ruling by justices at the UK’s highest court today.

They had previously lost actions in the High Court and Court of Appeal over the exclusion of Maryam Rajavi.

The politicians wished to invite Mrs Rajavi, who is now living in Paris, and is recognised internationally as an expert on Iranian political affairs and the position of women in Islam, to address meetings to be held in the Palace of Westminster to discuss ”democracy, human rights and other policy issues relating to Iran”.

Their complaint related to the “interference with their rights” in relation to freedom of expression, caused by exclusion decisions by the Secretary of State.

Mrs Rajavi, who has been excluded from the United Kingdom since 1997, also unsuccessfully appealed alongside the parliamentarians against decisions made by the Home Secretary to maintain her exclusion.

The Home Secretary stated that lifting the exclusion would cause significant damage to the UK’s interests in relation to Iran and place British people and property in Iran and the region at risk.

Both the High Court and Court of Appeal held that the exclusion was “justified and proportionate”.

The Supreme Court dismissed the appeal by a majority of 4-1.

Lord Sumption, who dismissed the appeal, said the UK “has had a uniquely difficult relationship with Iran for at least a century and a half”.

He said: “The passage of time heals many things, but in an ancient and distinctive national culture like Iran’s, injured pride can subsist for generations.

“In recent years, the participation of the United Kingdom in international sanctions against Iran and a number of violent incidents have revived old suspicions at a time when negotiations with Iran about middle eastern issues, nuclear non-proliferation and human rights have assumed considerable importance for British interests and global security.”

It was against this background that the Home Secretary, on the advice of the Foreign Office, decided that it was not conducive to the public good to allow Mrs Rajavi to enter the UK.

Mrs Rajavi, who has close links with Iranian opposition organisations, is not excluded from any other European country and engages regularly with parliamentarians in the European Parliament.

The bid to lift the ban on her entering the UK began in 2010. Dismissing the latest challenge, Lord Sumption said that “on the undisputed facts before the Secretary of State it has not been shown that she was guilty of any error of principle”.

Lord Neuberger, president of the Supreme Court, said: “I consider that it is not open to a court on the facts of this case to conclude that the decision of the Home Secretary to refuse entry to Mrs Rajavi was unlawful.”

Government may weigh rights against national security without courts’ interference

Crown Office, November 14 2014

Mujahedin-e-Khalq-OrganizatR (on the application of Lord Carlile of Berriew QC and others) (Appellants) v Secretary of State for the Home Department (Respondent) [2014] UKSC 60 – read judgment

The exclusion of a dissident Iranian from the UK, on grounds that her presence would have a damaging impact on our interests in relation to Iran, has been upheld by the Supreme Court. (My post on the Court of Appeal’s ruling is here).

At the heart of the case lies the question of institutional competence of the executive to determine the balance between the relative significance of national security and freedom of speech. The exclusion order was imposed and maintained because the Home Office is is concerned with the actual consequences of Mrs Rajavi’s admission, not with the democratic credentials of those responsible for bringing them about. The decision-maker is not required by the Convention or anything else to ignore or downplay real risks to national security where they originate from people acting for motives which are contrary to the values of this country.

The following summary of the facts is partly based on the Court’s press release. References in square brackets are to the paragraphs in the judgment.

Background facts and law

Mrs Maryam Rajavi is a dissident Iranian politician, resident in Paris. She has close links with Iranian opposition organisations, including Mujahedin e-Khalq, otherwise known as the People’s Mojahedin Organisation of Iran. MeK is a political organisation founded in 1963 by opponents of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, which participated in the Iranian revolution of 1979 but subsequently fell out with the regime led by Ayatollah Khomeini. It was formerly a proscribed terrorist organisation under Section 3 of the Terrorism Act 2000 but is now designated as non-violent. It goes without saying that the lifting of this proscription is not accepted in Iran, where MeK remains an illegal organisation.

In 1997, the Home Secretary excluded Mrs Rajavi from the UK on the ground that her presence “would not be conducive to the public good for reasons of foreign policy and in light of the need to take a firm stance against terrorism”. That exclusion remains in force. In December 2010, Lord Carlile of Berriew, together with two other members of the House of Lords, asked the Home Secretary for a meeting to discuss lifting the exclusion to enable Mrs Rajavi to address meetings in the Palace of Westminster. After seeking the advice of the Foreign Office, the Home Secretary replied in February 2011 stating that she had concluded that Mrs Rajavi’s admission to the UK would not be conducive to the public good. She set out detailed reasons for this decision, noting in particular that

It is widely recognised that the MeK was actively concerned in terrorist activities between the 1970s and 2001. Acts committed by the MeK during this period include attacks on western interests …The MeK’s history of terrorist violence until June 2001 and involvement in the Iran/Iraq war, where it was fighting with Iraqi forces against Iran, continues to resonate today. It has resulted in there being little support for the group among the general population in Iran, including anti-regime organisations, demonstrators and oppositionists.

Lord Carlile and other members of the House of Lords wrote a letter threatening judicial review, which elicited a response from the Home Office asserting that Articles 9 and 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights were not engaged but that the decision was in any event justified and proportionate. Lord Carlile and others then went ahead with judicial review proceedings, arguing that the decision contravened their freedom of belief and expression rights under the Convention. Mrs Rajavi herself later joined as a claimant. The Home Secretary issued second and third decisions in October 2011 and January 2012, supported by evidence from the Foreign Office, stating that lifting the exclusion would cause significant damage to the UK’s interests in relation to Iran and place British people and property in Iran and the region at risk. It is now common ground that Article 10 is engaged in relation to both Mrs Rajavi and the members of the House of Lords. But was the Home Secretary’s decision justified and proportionate? Both the judge and the Court of Appeal held that it was. The claimants appealed to the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court dismissed the appeal by a majority of 4-1 (Lord Kerr dissenting).

Reasoning behind the Court’s decision

Lord Sumption delivered the leading judgment. The other three majority judgments give similar reasons, but with differences of nuance.

The threshold argument

The claimants argued that the Home Secretary’s reasons were legally irrelevant, because they depended on the potential reaction of a foreign state which did not share the values embodied in the Convention. The Supreme Court unanimously rejected this argument. Iran’s reaction was plainly factually relevant to the decision, and the correct emphasis was on the democratic values to be protected, not the circumstances prompting the need for protection [14-18, 63, 144-146].

Was the Home Secretary’s decision justified and proportionate?

A predictive judgment of the executive about the likely reaction of a foreign country to a decision of the United Kingdom government is ordinarily entitled to a large measure of respect from the courts both (i) because the constitutional separation of powers assigns such judgments to the executive, and (ii) because the executive has greater institutional competence in this area by virtue of its greater specialised experience and the wider range of advice available to it (see my previous post on Lord Sumption’s recent lecture on this very topic, particularly his point about the overuse of the word “deference” in this context).

A threat to British persons or interests is one potential consequence which in an age of widespread international lawlessness, some of it state-sponsored, is unfortunately more common than it used to be. The existence and gravity of the threat is a question of fact. It cannot rationally be regarded as any less relevant to the public good because it emanates from a foreign state as opposed to some other actor, or because that state does not share our values, or because the threat is to do things which would be unlawful by our laws or improper by our standards, or indeed by theirs. [15]

…The future is a foreign country, as L P Hartley almost said. They do things differently there. Predicting the likely consequences of a step which the evidence suggests will be viewed in Iran as a hostile act, cannot be a purely analytical exercise. Nor can it turn simply on extrapolation from what did or did not happen in the past. There is a large element of educated impression involved. The decision calls for an experienced judgment of the climate of opinion in Iran, both inside and outside that country’s public institutions. The exercise is made more difficult by the intense political emotions engaged in Iran, combined with a large element of irrationality and the involvement of potentially violent mobs. The consequences of a failure to engage with this complex and unstable society are sufficiently serious to warrant a precautionary approach. [46]

Lord Sumption cites with approval Lord Hoffmann’s observation in another exclusion case, on the question of institutional competence of the executive in matters of national security, where “the cost of failure can be high”.

“This seems to me to underline the need for the judicial arm of government to respect the decisions of ministers of the Crown on the question of whether support for terrorist activities in a foreign country constitutes a threat to national security. It is not only that the executive has access to special information and expertise in these matters. It is also that such decisions, with serious potential results for the community, require a legitimacy which can be conferred only by entrusting them to persons responsible to the community through the democratic process. If the people are to accept the consequences of such decisions, they must be made by persons whom the people have elected and whom they can remove.” (Secretary of State for the Home Department v Rehman [2003] 1 AC 153)

The Human Rights Act 1998 did not abrogate the constitutional distribution of powers between the organs of the state which the courts had recognised for many years before it was passed. And even in the context of Convention rights, there remain areas

which although not immune from scrutiny require a qualified respect for the constitutional functions of decision-makers who are democratically accountable. Examples are decisions involving policy choices (R (Alconbury Developments Ltd) v Secretary of State for the Environment, Transport and the Regions [2003] 2 AC 295 at paras 75-76); broad questions of economic and social policy (Wilson v First County Trust Ltd (No 2) [2004] 1 AC 816 at para 70); or issues involving the allocation of finite resources (Wandsworth London Borough Council v Michalak [2003] 1 WLR 617 at para 41 (Brooke LJ)).

Where qualified rights under the Human Rights Convention are engaged, such as the Article 10 rights at issue in this case, the court must decide for itself whether they have been interfered with and if so whether the interference is justifiable. In this case, according to Lord Sumption, the executive’s decision was rational, there were no grounds to challenge the good faith or the evidential base of the decision, and the Secretary of State had committed no error of principle, nor had she underrated the value of Article 10 rights or overstated the risk [19-47, 51].

It does not follow from the court’s constitutional competence to adjudicate on an alleged infringement of human rights that it must be regarded as factually competent to disagree with the decision-maker in every case or that it should decline to recognise its own institutional limitations. [32]

The other judges agreed. In Lord Neuberger’s view, the Home Secretary’s decision was proportionate and the Article 10 rights did not outweigh the risks she had identified [70-74]; in Lady Hale’s opinion, on the basis of evidence now some years old, it had not been shown that the article 10 right claimed was sufficiently important to put at risk the UK’s “fragile but imperative” relationship with Iran [98-109]; and Lord Clarke concluded that there was no evidence before the court permitting it to doubt the strength of the Home Secretary’s reasons [111-117].

It is important to understand the reasons why the United Kingdom has had a more difficult relationship with Iran than other countries have, which still affect the way that it is perceived there. Lord Sumption, taking a characteristically scholarly approach, noted the particular historical context of this fraught association, following British control of the country’s natural resources in the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, a succession of British-orchestrated coups, and two extended British military occupations, all of which

have combined to leave an enduring imprint on political sentiment. The passage of time heals many things, but in an ancient and distinctive national culture like Iran’s, injured pride can subsist for generations. In recent years, the participation of the United Kingdom in international sanctions against Iran and a number of violent incidents have revived old suspicions at a time when negotiations with Iran about middle eastern issues, nuclear non-proliferation and human rights have assumed considerable importance for British interests and global security.

However sensitive this position may be, it remains the case that the UK has diplomatic relations with Iran. There is a British Embassy in Tehran and an Iranian Embassy in London. As the Secretary of State told the appellants in her letter, the UK has a strong interest in working with Iran on major policy issues including nuclear counter-proliferation, wider issues in the Middle East and human rights. Cooperation between both countries on issues of mutual importance also include reciprocal visa services (both diplomatic and public), consular services and cultural/educational exchanges. Allowing Mrs Rajavi into this country would only exacerbate the perception that “the UK is supportive of anti-Iranian extremist activities, including the sort historically carried out by the MeK.” The lifting of her exclusion may well “result in accusations, however unjustified, of double standards in respect of the condemnation of terrorism”:

The presence of a British Embassy in Tehran means that staff there are particularly vulnerable to anti-Western sentiment in general and anti-UK sentiment in particular. There is substantial concern that if bilateral relations were to deteriorate as a consequence of the lifting of the exclusion order, there could be reprisals that put British nationals at risk and make further consular cooperation even more problematic.

Accordingly, although the Court of Appeal was wrong to approach the issue on the usual domestic judicial review grounds, the appeal was dismissed.

Lord Kerr’s dissent

Lord Kerr acknowledged that the courts should accord respect to the executive’s assessment of the risks and consequences of Mrs Rajavi’s being admitted to the UK, though it is not required to “frank” that decision. However, it was for the court to assess the importance of the right infringed. In his view, contrary to Lord Sumption’s position, the court was both competent and constitutionally required to make such an assessment and it would be an error to attach special weight to the Home Secretary’s view on this point [150-162]. In this case, only the most compelling and pressing circumstances would justify a restriction on the right. The Home Secretary had identified solid countervailing factors, but the court should take into account the fact that these matters are unpredictable and that any retaliation would be perverse and rooted in anti-democratic beliefs. The risks could not be precisely identified but the interference with the Article 10 right is direct and immediate [163-180].

Lord Sumption dealt with this dissent in his speech. He pointed out that the central issue on this appeal was exactly how the court is meant to determine where the balance lies between national security on the one hand, and freedom of expression on the other, if

1. it has no means of independently assessing the seriousness of the risks or the gravity of the consequences were they to materialise, and

2.the Secretary of State is not shown to have committed any error of principle in her own assessment of them.

For that is indeed the position in which the court finds itself. We are not in point of law bound to accept the factual assessment of the Foreign Office about the impact on our relations with Iran of admitting Mrs Rajavi to the United Kingdom. But if we reject it we must have a proper basis for doing so. In this case, there is none. …We have absolutely no evidential basis and no expertise with which to substitute our assessment of the risks to national security, public safety and the rights of others for that of the Foreign Office. [49]

Lord Kerr was, in effect, urging “nothing less than a transfer to the courts of the constitutional function of the Home Secretary, in circumstances where the court is wholly incapable of performing it.”

Hillingdon & Oxbridge Times,

November 16, 2014 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Think helping to fight ISIS will get you off terrorist list? Think again

The role of Syrian Kurds in the U.S.-led fight against the Islamic State has prompted calls for the removal of an affiliated Kurdish guerrilla group from the U.S. blacklist, bringing fresh scrutiny to a terrorist-designation process that some critics call arbitrary and outdated.

So far, the U.S. government’s response to the fighters of the Kurdish Workers Party, the PKK, could be summed up as: Thanks for the help, but you’re staying on the list.

Shedding a U.S. foreign terrorist designation is a long and complicated undertaking – a feat accomplished by just a handful of the dozens of groups that have landed on the list since its inception in 1997. A designation means that a group has earned the dubious label – and economic sanctions – of being named a “tier-one” foreign terrorist organization. Tier-two members are banned from entry to the United States; tier-three groups are undesignated but closely monitored.

Several organizations have languished on the State Department’s tier-one list even though they’re essentially defunct, with their leaders killed, jailed or engaged in peace talks with the governments they once attacked. Others on the 59-member list have been weakened but are still considered threatening. And, of course, there are the active, high-profile groups that in American minds are synonymous with terrorism: the Islamic State, al Qaida and Hezbollah, for example.

Those three, as well as the PKK, are among a half-dozen U.S.-designated groups now involved in the conflict over the Islamic State’s cross-border fiefdom. The battle is stirring up an unprecedented soup of militants, with five tier-one terrorist groups – both Sunni and Shiite Muslim – on the same side as the United States against the Islamic State, itself a designee. The Obama administration’s unsavory de facto partners against the Islamic State include the Lebanese militants of Hezbollah and the Nusra Front, the Syrian branch of al Qaida.

It’s a fairly unique set of circumstances. The closest you have is Af-Pak,” said a State Department official involved in designations, referring to Afghanistan and Pakistan. He spoke on condition of anonymity so as to freely discuss the sensitive topic. “But even there the groups are mostly working cooperatively. Here, you see them at direct loggerheads.”

It’s that opposition to the Islamic State, which is also known as ISIS or ISIL, that the PKK is hoping to leverage in order to wriggle off the tier-one list. The group has waged a guerrilla war for Kurdish rights in Turkey for 30 years and was blacklisted in the United States more than a decade ago. The PKK is closely affiliated with the group known as the PYD, whose fighters are on the front line of the ferocious battle to keep the Islamic State out of Kobani, a Syrian Kurdish town on the border with Turkey.

Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson even used the group’s fight against the Islamic State recently to rebut claims from Republicans in Congress that terrorists had been caught crossing the Mexican border; Johnson said the four men in question had claimed membership in the PKK – “an organization that is actually fighting against ISIL and defended Kurdish territory in Iraq.”

U.S.-Turkish relations already are fraught, with Washington trying to nudge Ankara toward a more active role in the anti-Islamic State coalition. That task would become only more difficult were the United States to de-list a top enemy of the Turkish government. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan made it clear this month that he wasn’t pleased with recent American overtures to the Syrian Kurds, sowing anger in Washington as lawmakers demanded to know which side Turkey, a NATO ally, was on in the war against the Islamic State.

A U.S. diplomat met with a leader of the PYD for the first time last month, ending a longtime U.S. policy of steering clear of the group because of its PKK ties. The State Department has played down the meeting as exploratory and stressed that, under U.S. law, the PYD and PKK are separate entities, though “we’re certainly aware” of the connections, as a spokeswoman put it.

The State Department designations official said that tier-one groups are reviewed every five years and that the PKK was just reassessed in 2013, with a determination that it still belonged on the list. That makes it difficult, he said, to find legal grounding for a fresh assessment so soon. He said there was no de-listing effort under way, despite lobbying that notes the Syrian Kurdish fight against the Islamic State.

“The idea that ‘This group’s being very helpful against ISIL so we should remove the designation’ – that wouldn’t merit a sufficient case, in our view, for de-listing,” the official said.

The main criticism of the process is the seemingly arbitrary way that groups get on and, more rarely, off the list.

Why, for example, is Nusra Front designated when Ahrar al Sham, another militant jihadist group in Syria with alleged al Qaida connections, is off the list? Or take the case of Iranian-backed Shiite militias that once waged a deadly insurgency against U.S. forces in Iraq – Kata’ib Hezbollah was designated, but an equally egregious group, Asaib Ahl al Haq, wasn’t.

In both cases, officials have said that designation possibilities were floated but vetoed because national security officials determined that it was more useful to keep them off the list. In the case of Asaib Ahl al Haq, the Iraqi and Western authorities released more than 400 members – including the leader – in negotiations that resulted in the release of British hostage Peter Moore in 2010.

While the State Department official wouldn’t address Asaib or other specific cases, he acknowledged that adding a group to the list is “an extremely interagency process,” with an element of horse trading as national security officials weigh the benefits and costs of a designation. The final step is the personal approval of the secretary of state.

“There could be any number of reasons a designation is denied,” the official said. “Sensitive law enforcement equities, intel equities and diplomatic priorities – those can all be reasons a designation doesn’t go forward.”

Though Americans are most familiar with the Arab and Muslim factions on the list, the roster is diverse and truly global, including the Japanese religious cult behind a deadly chemical attack on the Tokyo subway and two separate splinter groups from the old Irish Republican Army, or IRA.

Latin America’s longest-running war involves another longtime member of the terrorist list – the FARC, a Marxist-Leninist guerrilla group that’s been weakened considerably in recent years and is now engaged in peace talks with the Colombian government under the auspices of Cuba.

Also on the list is Shining Path, the Peruvian communist guerrillas who launched a string of massacres, bombings and assassinations in the 1980s. Another perennial is ETA, the Basque separatists who for more than four decades have targeted Spain’s political class and tourism industry with bombings and assassinations.

The LTTE, better known as the Tamil Tigers, remains on the list, even though the guerrilla organization that gained notoriety for its suicide attacks was defeated by Sri Lankan government forces in 2009 and has been declared finished.

Europe’s second-highest court ruled this month that the European Union’s decision to place the Tamil group on a list of terrorist organizations was procedurally flawed and must be annulled, according to news reports. The Tamil Tigers had challenged the EU’s decision in 2006 to blacklist the group and freeze its assets, perhaps the harbinger to a similar campaign in the United States.

That was the path taken by the Mujahedin e Khalq, or MEK, a deep-pocketed Iranian dissident group that ran by far the most ambitious campaign to get off the terrorist list. After legal victories in Europe, the group hired top lawyers and paid high-profile speakers tens of thousands of dollars a pop to raise awareness of the MEK cause in the United States.

A Washington lobbying firm received nearly $1 million to work on getting the MEK off the terrorist list, according to an investigation of the group’s payouts by the British newspaper The Guardian. The MEK cultivated an image of a pro-democracy, Western-friendly supporter of the ouster of Iran’s theocratic government; detractors describe it as a cult-like militant group with only fringe support among ordinary Iranians.

Over time, so many retired generals, politicians and Cabinet members began agitating for the MEK’s removal from the blacklist that the Treasury Department investigated whether the officials were providing illegal support to designated terrorists.

In the end, the group’s litigation forced the hand of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. In 2012, she faced a court-imposed deadline: Either justify keeping the group on the list or approve a removal. She chose to de-list the group.

By then, officials have said, the MEK no longer met the key criteria for designation and, more importantly, removing the label gave the United States more room to intervene to protect the group’s Iraq encampment from the crackdowns of the Iran-friendly government in Baghdad.

But the official line that lobbying played only a small role in the MEK’s de-listing rings hollow when that case is compared with other designees who slipped from the headlines years ago. One seemingly outdated presence is Abu Nidal, the Palestinian guerrilla group whose eponymous founder was shot and killed in muddy circumstances in Iraq in 2002. Even the State Department’s annual terrorism review calls the group “inactive.”

Abu Nidal was last reviewed in 2009, so it’s due a fresh assessment, the State Department official said. Without speaking to specific cases, he added that groups that might appear benign to the general public sometimes are still engaged in activities that the U.S. monitors through classified channels.

“There’s a rationale for keeping on groups that might seem defunct,” he said, “and it’s not just based on unclassified information that’s available to the public.”

Hannah Allam, Tribune

November 6, 2014 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Training Syrian rebels in SA reminder of training MEK terror group in Saddam’s Iraq

News Analysis: Providing arms, training to rebels will exacerbate Syria crisis

DAMASCUS — Washington’s recent decision to arm and train the Syrian rebels, who will supposedly fight the Islamic State (IS) terror group, will only exacerbate and prolong the Syrian crisis in what analysts said would be like “casting oil on a smoldering fire.”

Unlike the situation in Iraq, where the administration of President Barack Obama is coordinating and cooperating with the Iraqi forces in their battle against the IS militants, Washington has turned a deaf ear to the calls of the Syrian government for cooperation on battling the IS in Syria, seeking instead to cooperate and deal with the so-called “moderate” Syrian rebels by agreeing to arm and coach them to be able to confront the IS in Syria.

Obama, who is leading an international coalition of reportedly 50 countries to fight the IS, said that the Syrian opposition forces were fighting both the brutality of Islamic State terrorists and the “tyranny” of the administration of President Bashar al-Assad.

“We will provide training and equipment to help them (moderate rebels) grow stronger and take on IS terrorists inside Syria,” said Obama, who is a staunch critic of Assad that repeatedly called for his departure and questioned his legitimacy.

The Congress on Thursday backed Obama, authorizing the military to arm and train moderate Syrian rebels. The U.S. move, while failing to surprise the Syrian politicians given the fact that the U.S. has always been in favor of the opposition, was seen as a policy toward prolonging the crisis in Syria by attempting to replace the IS fighters with others who will remain loyal to their Western patrons and would keep fighting against the Syrian government.

Maher Murhej, a Syrian politician and head of the Youth Party, told Xinhua he wasn’t surprised by the recent U.S. move, pointing out that the training of the Syrian rebels has already started.

“My information is that the new Congress decision has sanctioned the financing of the rebels, and regarding the training, I have information that training camps have already been opened in Saudi Arabia two weeks ago, namely in the city of Ha’il in northwestern Saudi Arabia, to train Syrian rebels of the Islamic Front and Islam Army groups,” Murhej said, noting that there is no such a thing as “moderate” rebels as the vast majority of the armed militant groups are radicalized.

Saudi Arabia overtly agreed last week to host training camps for “moderate” Syrian rebels, agreeing thus on Obama’s broad strategy to combat the IS group, which has captured large chunks of territories in Syria and Iraq over the past few months.

Meanwhile, Murhej pointed out that the American strategy aims at keeping the Syrian government busy with fighting the rebels for years to come as it is seeking to replace the IS fighters with other rebel groups that would continue fighting the Syrian government troops.

Obama has recently sanctioned to strike the IS positions in Syria, akin to what his air force is doing in Iraq. However, the conundrum for Obama was that he didn’t want to make a move against the IS that could play in the hands of the Syrian regime, meaning that he wouldn’t want to weaken the IS so that the Assad troops can fill in the void.

Instead, the U.S. president decided to arm the “moderate” rebels so that they could be able to fill in the void that the IS may leave after the U.S. strikes on their positions in Syria, analysts said.

Still, the new approach may take at least a year to train the rebels and weaken the IS fighters, which means that the Syrian crisis is likely not going to see an exit or an end in the near future.

“After getting done with the IS, the West wants to leave other rebels to keep fighting the Syrian government… they want an armed insurgency that could last for years in Syria,” Murhej said, adding that “the superpowers are not only working on prolonging the crisis in Syria, actually they are drawing a new strategy for the future in the region. They are talking about camps that would be permanent so we are looking at 10 to 15 years of insurgency in Syria.”

Murhej drew a comparison between the current hosting of the armed rebels by Saudi Arabia and what happened at the times of the late Iraqi President Saddam Hussain, who had hosted on Iraq soil the Mojahedin-e-Khalq movement (MEK), an Iranian opposition movement in exile that advocated the overthrow of the Islamic Republic of Iran. During the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, the group was given refuge by Saddam Hussein and mounted attacks on Iran from within Iraqi territory.

“They (superpowers) are attempting to create a similar group to the Islamic State but this time under the commandership of the West,” Murhej said.

Xinhuanet

September 23, 2014 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

America supports terrorism

In 1998, five Cuban counterterrorism agents were arrested in Miami and held in solitary confinement for 17 months. Then — after a dubious seven-month-long trial in which no hard evidence was ever presented — the group was convicted and given the equivalent of more than four life sentences.

The agents were then shipped off to five different maximum-security prisons spread across the United States so as to eliminate any possibility for communication.

What did these five Cubans do to deserve this sentence?

The Cuban Five, as they have become known, were in pursuit of known terrorist Luis Posada Carriles, who was responsible for the 1997 hotel bombings in Havana.

But as it turned out, Posada was a CIA operative. In order to protect its valuable asset and cover up the job, the U.S. government arrested the Cuban Five and denounced them as spies.

Exiled Cubans like Posada have a long and bloody history of terrorism against Cuba. Likewise, America has a long and bloody history of actively supporting those terrorist attacks.

After Posada escaped from Cuba, the CIA trained him in explosives and sabotage. He remained a CIA operative for many years, even helping to organize the failed Bay of Pigs invasion.

Posada is also widely assumed to be the mastermind behind the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner. Seventy-three civilian passengers died on that plane. Posada was eventually allowed to walk free.

Meanwhile, three of the five Cubans who were trying to catch Posada remain locked in maximum-security prisons.

None of this guarantees that the Cuban Five weren’t spies. It’s possible that their imprisonment was entirely justified, and that the sensitive nature of the case warranted classifying the incriminating evidence.

But the more likely explanation is that since the United States had an economic and political interest in toppling the Castro regime, and since terrorism from Cuban exiles advances that goal, the U.S. government had made it a priority to thwart Cuban counterterrorism agents at any cost.

And so it goes for U.S. foreign policy around the world. America picks and chooses which terrorists to condemn and which to support, often wavering between the two depending on the prevailing incentives.

The case of the Cuban Five was not an isolated incident. The United States supports terrorism wherever and whenever it’s strategic to do so.

Back in 1959, some sources say, the CIA hired a young Iraqi assassin to eliminate Prime Minister Abd al-Karim Qasim. The assassin was a then-unknown thug named Saddam Hussein. When Hussein botched the job, the United States supposedly set him up with money and protection within the Ba’ath Party. Then in 1963, the Ba’ath Party organized a CIA-backed military coup that would eventually place Hussein in power. At the time, America sought to bolster its position in the Cold War by exerting control over Iraq, even if it may have meant forging an alliance with Hussein, a known terrorist and newly established dictator.

America was consistently one of the staunchest supporters of the Hussein regime, even going so far as to provide Iraq with vital military intelligence that was used to administer chemical weapons in the Iran-Iraq War. Not only did the U.S. government know Hussein was using lethal chemical weapons like nerve gas and sarin, we actively supported him. With the help of American intelligence, Hussein’s wanton usage of chemical weaponry killed thousands and won the war for Iraq.

The alliance with Hussein ended abruptly once he invaded Kuwait. Hussein became more useful as an enemy than an ally, so the American propaganda machine took Hussein and turned him into the terrorist and dictator we know him as today. Though America’s aim in aiding terrorist activity is often regime change or political upheaval, U.S. politicians are sometimes willing to support terrorism just for the extra campaign money.

Iranian terrorist group Mojahedin-e-Khalq has largely been beyond reproach from American politicians, despite the widely held belief that the group was responsible for the assassination of several Iranian nuclear scientists. A host of top-ranking U.S. officials, including the likes of Rudy Giuliani, Frances Townsend and Howard Dean, have all publicly defended MEK. Why? MEK has been funneling tens of thousands of dollars into their pockets in exchange for their support. And following America’s lead on the issue, Israel’s secret service has also provided MEK with extensive financing, training and weapons.

Which leads me to what is perhaps the most well-documented and notorious case of U.S.-sponsored terrorism: funding for Israel’s military.

By America’s own definition, Israel is perpetrating acts of terrorism against Palestine. Israeli airstrikes have purposefully targeted Palestinian hospitals and schools in a crusade to crush the Palestinian people in a barbaric war of expansion. This is “premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets,” as the U.S. State Department defines terrorism.

While there is no doubt that Palestine also commits acts of terrorism, as Noam Chomsky has put it, Palestinian terrorism is “very small as compared with the U.S.-backed Israeli terrorism. Quite typically, violence reflects the means of violence. It’s not unusual. State terror is almost always much more extreme than retail terror, and this is no exception.”

To date, Israel’s aggressive invasion of the Gaza Strip has killed more than 2,100 Palestinians — around 75 percent of whom were civilians — while fewer than 80 Israelis have died.

And behind the scenes is America: Israel’s generous benefactor who watches from the sidelines as Palestinian women and children are brutally murdered.

In 2013 alone, the United States gave a whopping $3.1 billion in military aid to Israel. That amounts to nearly a quarter of Israel’s entire defense spending, which includes F-16 fighter jets, smart bombs, Apache helicopters and white phosphorous munitions.

America has no moral justification for this, only a political motivation. Simply put, American politicians support Israeli terrorism because American voters are overwhelmingly pro-Israel.

These examples are by no means the only instances of U.S.-backed terrorism. If the price is right, the United States has shown that it will support any amount of terrorism, anywhere in the world. But it doesn’t have to be that way. In America, it’s not dictators and tyrants that are supporting terrorism. It’s elected officials, and their power is vulnerable every election year. So while they’re the ones bankrolling terrorism, we’re the ones keeping them in office.

But, as of right now, the evidence is undeniable: America supports terrorists. Unless we do something about it, America will continue to support terrorists. And at some point, the lines start to blur, and if you squint just right, it starts to look an awful lot like America itself is the terrorist.

Sam Hillestad, The Brown Daily Herald

September 14, 2014 0 comments

Former members of the MEK

A Former MEK Member Speaks About the ‘Cult’ of Extremism

Interview with Massoud Banisadr

In 1979, Masoud Banisadr was a young postgraduate maths student at Newcastle University, watching political upheaval in his homeland of Iran on the nightly news. After the fall of the Western-backed Shah, wanting to play his part in a new society he joined Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK), an Islamic Marxist revolutionary organisation.

But a couple of years after the revolution, the MEK began to clash with Ayatollah Khomeini’s theocratic regime and were soon deemed an enemy of the new Iran. MEK suicide bombings and assassinations followed. In 1981, thousands of MEK members went into exile, and by 1986 had established a tight-knit paramilitary organisation in Iraq led by husband-and-wife team Masoud and Maryam Rajavi.

Banisadr became the MEK’s PR man, moving between Camp Ashraf, their headquarters in Iraq, Geneva and Washington DC, trying to win over Western politicians. He finally left the group in 1996, went into hiding and now lives back in England.

The United States removed MEK from its list of terrorist organisations in 2012, but Banisadr still considers it a fanatical cult acting under the warped leadership of the Rajavis. He argues that any terrorist organisation is either a cult or “has no option but to become one in order to survive”.

I spoke to Banisadr about the power of cults, and how this might help us understand why young men in the UK are vulnerable to joining the Islamic State and other extremist groups.

An MEK oath ceremony at Camp Ashraf in Iraq, taken around 2002 by a member who has since left and does not wish to be named.

VICE: You were once a high-ranking member of MEK. Why do you now see the organisation as a cult?

Masoud Banisadr: There was a charismatic leader, Rajavi. There was a black-and-white world view imposed; followers cutting themselves off from family; followers losing their personality. There was mind manipulation. At Camp Ashraf in Iraq there were talks lasting for days on end. I remember one task where we had to write down our old personality in one column on a board, and the new personality in a different column. I remember a guy who said, “My brother works in the Iranian embassy in London. Before I loved him as my brother, now I hate him as my enemy. I am ready to kill him tomorrow, if necessary.” And everyone applauded.

How did you justify violence?

I was fortunate not to be involved in any violence. But all group members accepted MEK suicide bombings and killings in Iran to be revolutionary acts. This was the brainwashing. And later, in my role as official representative, I would justify and explain these acts as the only means we had to defend ourselves. I was a nice person, well-mannered, and could argue very rationally with politicians. So I was a good salesman.

Why did MEK members divorce their wives?

In 1990, Rajavi said all members must divorce their spouses. My own wife had already left the group by then. All members accepted these terms, and it [applied to] everyone except the leader and his wife Maryam. In a single day, everyone became celibate. Someone asked, “What about sex in the afterlife?” He replied, “I know your trick – you want to fantasise about the afterlife. But no – you must be prepared to forget about sex, about spouses, about love.”

No sex?

No sexual thoughts. The idea was that we were in a war to take back Iran, so you cannot have a family until the war is won. This was the excuse the outside world would hear, but inside we were told your spouses are a barrier between you and the leadership. We were ordered to surrender our soul, heart and mind to Rajavi and his wife.

Masoud meeting trade union leaders at an International Labour Conference in Geneva in 1987 (published in an MEK newspaper).

How did you manage to leave the organisation?

What saved me was seeing my daughter. In 1996 I came to London to arrange some meetings. I saw my daughter, after many years of not seeing her. I had totally forgotten about the guy who was the father, the old Masoud. I only knew Masoud, the MEK member. The old Masoud wanted to hug her, but the group member – living under strict rules where men and women never interacted – knew he should not. I was fortunate that I had a bad back problem, so I was allowed to go and recuperate in hospital. And in those two weeks, being around ordinary people, seeing ordinary families, I allowed feelings for my own family to come back. And so, finally, I decided to leave the group.

Where did you go?

I had to go on the run for a time. I learned how to hide myself around the UK until they gave up looking for me.

What do you think it is that makes young people vulnerable to extremist causes?

Well, terrorism is like a virus. It attacks us through our weaknesses. It kills our personality, our individuality, like a cult. I think there are three stages. The first stage is the injustice of the world. Young Muslims see injustice, become angry and want to react. Then comes along a powerful ideology, and the Wahabi ideology offers a very simple, black-and-white world view, and a very narrow-minded interpretation of jihad, offered as a solution to young Muslims. But both these stages are not enough to make someone a terrorist, a human bomb or a fighter for a caliphate. A third stage is required: the mind manipulation, which robs someone of their personality, makes them identify entirely with the group and cuts them off from their parents and society.

So radical ideas alone aren’t enough to go off and fight for, say, the Islamic State?

If you’re a young Muslim and you feel like a nobody, it’s appealing to hear that we can return to the time of Prophet Mohammed – [that] we will be powerful again and feel proud of ourselves. This can make you radical – even prepared to be violent – but you will not stay a fighter or become a martyr without being entirely cut-off from family and the values of the society you were brought up in. That requires the mind-manipulation that goes on in a destructive cult.

Where does the Islamic State fit in? Do you consider it a cult as well as a terrorist organisation?

The signs are there. The leader – Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi – is charismatic and has unlimited ambition. He has been introduced as the leader of all Muslims, the Caliph. Normal leaders want political power. Cult leaders want something more than governing a city or country – they want to govern history. They want to change the structure of humanity. For a while they were calling themselves ISIL – Islamic State of Iraq and Levant.

They wanted control of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel. Now they call themselves the Islamic State. They want whatever they think was once part of the Islamic empire, so they claim Spain, Portugal, North Africa, India and part of China and Russia. They want the whole world, to make everyone Muslim. This is not normal leadership; this is heading towards cult. There is no limitation you can deal with, politically.

What would you say to British parents who have children fighting in Syria or Iraq?

It’s very difficult, very delicate. If a parent says anything critical against a radical preacher, or about an organisation like Islamic State, that’s when a person’s mind becomes defensive. It is difficult to argue rationally. So if a parent has contact, they should not try to talk about politics or religion. They should show only kindness and love. This is the member’s weakness. Feelings do not die away, even if personality has changed. So the parent has to let them know they will be there, waiting. There has to be a pathway back to a life where family love is there, something that has nothing do with ideological thinking. Unconditional love unlocks the mind manipulation that has taken place.

Thanks, Masoud.

Adam Forrest, Vice.com

September 6, 2014 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq Organization's Propaganda System

Beware of the MEK

The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Based on news reports, a number of U.S. officials and former officials have adopted this motto in recent months. They seem to believe the prospect of the nuclear issue being solved and rapprochement with Tehran so threatening that they have rushed to Iran’s great foe: the People’s Mojahdein Organization (MEK).

The MEK is a cult-like dissident group, based outside of Iran, primarily in Iraq and France for much of the past three decades. It was considered a terrorist group by the United States until 2012 and by the European Union until 2009, when it was removed from the list of terrorist organizations and became increasingly viewed as an alternative to Iran’s current regime. This shows that the MEK’s campaign to galvanize support in the West has been relatively successful.

A more careful examination of the MEK provides evidence of the group’s problematic nature.

First, the MEK has no viable chance of seizing power in Iran. If the current government is not Iranians’ first choice for a government, the MEK is not even their last—and for good reason. The MEK supported Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War. The people’s discontent with the Iranian government at that time did not translate into their supporting an external enemy that was firing Scuds into Tehran, using chemical weapons and killing hundreds of thousands of Iranians, including many civilians. Today, the MEK is viewed negatively by most Iranians, who would prefer to maintain the status quo than rush to the arms of what they consider a corrupt, criminal cult.

Second, what Iranians understand, but the American MEK supporters choose to ignore, is the MEK’s track record of human-rights abuses. The MEK controls every aspect of its members’ lives and tortures them. Some of these human-rights abuses include: mass, compulsory divorces, beatings and torture, costing some members their lives, and solitary confinements so extreme that some members preferred to take their lives than be subjected to them.

Third, to understand the origins of anti-Americanism in pre-revolutionary Iran, look no further. The MEK was responsible for the assassination and failed attempts to kidnap and assassinate Americans in Iran in the 1970s. It was also the MEK that pressured the Islamic revolutionaries to take a stronger stance against the United States. The MEK further supported the 1979 U.S. embassy hostage crisis in Tehran.

Fourth, on the surface, the MEK has evolved since the ‘70s into a democratic alternative to the Islamic Republic and a potential ally for the West and Israel. However, the organization is merely manipulating the West, hoping it will rush to it for fear of the greater enemy: the Islamic Republic. To do so, the MEK has teamed up with Israel, while it is as anti-Israeli as the Iranian regime, criticizing the Shah’s support for Jerusalem as much as the Islamic revolutionaries. This is not a real ideological shift, but rather a smart, tactical move by the MEK.

Fifth, the MEK may appear as a modern organization on the surface, but it is, in fact, a crypto-Shiite Communist group. In effect, it is the product of the Leninist-style party and the eleventh-century Ismaili order, the Assassins: a religious, Communist cult based around the myth of an invisible leader, Massoud Rajavi, who has not been seen for years (and who is said to be dead or hiding).

Sixth, the MEK claims that it would dismantle Iran’s nuclear program, which has led some in the United States to believe its empowerment to be a viable solution to the Iranian nuclear crisis. Even if the MEK had a real chance of coming to power in Iran, which it does not, it would most likely not dismantle the nuclear program. In fact, it would have even more incentive to pursue nuclear weapons and would be less likely to engage with the international community. The MEK is a far less accountable organization than the Islamic Republic is, as, unlike the latter, it is a cult-like organization, rather than an established government that has certain checks and balances. As such, sanctions and deterrence would be less effective on the MEK than on the current government.

The voices supporting the MEK are ignoring the lessons of some of the most catastrophic U.S. foreign-policy mistakes in the past few decades, urging Washington to repeat history. Overhyping the threat of an adversary and blindly supporting groups opposing it led to the creation of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Supporting the MEK is neither in accordance with American values, nor beneficial to U.S. interests. Instead, the United States should pursue the diplomatic track, which is what most Americans favor. Diplomacy will not only promote U.S. interests in the Middle East, but also help empower Iranians to improve their lives by normalizing the Iranian political climate.

Ariane Tabatabai, The National Interest

Ariane Tabatabai is a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. Follow her on Twitter @ArianeTabatabai.

August 25, 2014 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

MEK Muck-up

It may seem a bit late, but ex-San Diego mayor Bob Filner, who quit office following revelations of sexual harassment last summer, has just received a warning from California’s Fair Political Practices Commission. In a letter dated July 23, commission senior counsel Neal Bucknell calls out Filner for accepting what it calls an “unlawful gift” of travel from an Iranian-American group that provided an all-expenses-paid trip to Europe beginning on June 21 of last year.

“As Mayor of the City of San Diego, you accepted a gift from the Organization of Iranian-American Communities in the approximate amount of $9,839 in the form of a paid trip to Paris, France,” Bucknell notes. “In a letter to the FPPC dated January 20, 2014, you acknowledged that this was an over-the-limit gift, claiming that you ‘immediately wrote a personal check to [the Organization of Iranian-American Communities] for the total cost of the trip…’ However, it appears from your bank records that you did not make your payment until August 2013.” If the ex-mayor ever finds himself again in a position to be offered a similar deal, Bucknell warns he should be mindful that “the information in this case will be retained and may be used against you should an enforcement action become necessary due to newly discovered information and/or failure to comply with the Act in the future. Failure to comply with the provisions of the Act in the future may result in monetary penalties of up to $5,000 per violation.”

As first reported here back in November 2007, Filner, then a congressman, had long been accepting Parisian freebies from backers of the People’s Mujahedin of Iran, also known as the Mujahedin-e Khalq Organization, or MEK for short. That June, Filner and GOP congressman Tom Tancredo of Colorado co-authored an op-ed piece in the editorial pages of the conservative Washington Times demanding that the Bush Administration stop labeling the group as a terrorist organization. Though Filner never returned calls seeking an explanation of his fervid MEK support, wealthy Iranian expatriates were often fingered as cash underwriters of the effort, which included the lobbying services of Republican ex-House majority leader Dick Armey. The Obama administration’s then–secretary of state Hillary Clinton finally took the group off the government’s terrorist list in September 2012.

By Matt Potter, Sandiego Reader

August 21, 2014 0 comments

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