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Massoud Khodabandeh responds to MEK ‘s defamations in the Gazeta TemA newspaper

Dear Sir/Madam

I have been informed by colleagues in Tirana that you have published a defamatory post

http://www.gazetatema.net

against me (Massoud Khodabandeh) and my wife (Anne Khodabandeh nee Singleton). This is not entirely unexpected since the MEK always attack their critics rather than answering their criticisms. I am, however, surprised that you did not take the trouble to contact either me or Anne for any clarification of the libelous comments made in this piece. I guess the fight against fake news has not reached your outlet yet.

Interestingly, the libellous allegations in this post are based on ‘reports’ purported to come from the United States Ministry of Defense (Pentagon) and The Library of the US Congress. They do not. They are fake. Did you not think for a moment to check these sources – perhaps with the military attaché in the American Embassy in Tirana? For your information, reports in the Library of the US Congress are available to the public. No such report exists there.

In any case, a simple check on our background would show that we are British citizens living in the same house for sixteen years in the UK. The claim, therefore, that the American authorities have been after me from 2013 should have alerted any decent journalist. The idea that we are British citizens who have not been investigated and imprisoned as spies for a foreign country – one for which the UK has a large degree of enmity – which is the central allegation of your article, is bizarre at best and indeed stretches the imagination of any normal person.

My background is widely known. I left the MEK while they still enjoyed the brutal support of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. When I left I was a high-ranking member of the Central Committee, member of the political wing (NCRI) and was head of the security of the leadership of the organisation. Since 2003 and the fall of Saddam I have been working as a consultant with the department in the Government of Iraq responsible expulsion of the MEK from that country how to facilitate this event as safely and securely as possible. A mission, I am glad to say we succeeded in.

Anne was also a member of this organisation and underwent military training in the terrorist camp of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. She spent many years in the MEK’s so-called public relations department. We met and married after leaving the MEK. Anne currently works as a consultant under the UK government Prevent Duty helping to prevent young people from being recruited into violent extremism, terrorist entities and foreign struggles which will rob them of their futures and sometimes their lives. She has just visited your country on a mandate given to her by European Members of Parliament to report back on the situation of the Mojahedin Khalq Organisation (aka MKO, MEK, NCRI, Rajavi cult, Saddam’s Private Army) in Albania.

However, again I remind you of basic journalistic principles. You failed to inform your readers that Farid Toutonchi – the author – is an active member of the Mojahedin Khalq terrorist organisation. We managed to have him expelled from Iraq along with the other members of the group. The Americans then dumped them on your country. No doubt his status in your country – like that of the other MEK – will become clear when he appears in court to answer for this libellous article.

You also failed to mention that the appearance of this ridiculous piece coincided with interviews with Albanian media by three ex-MEK members who finally managed to escape twenty-five years of slavery with this group.

You have also failed to inform your readers that there is no evidence whatsoever of any of the libellous allegations against myself and my wife in any official or reliable source (i.e., not the MEK’s own websites). Instead, you have mentioned our website Iran-Interlink.org (a site preceding the existence of your site by far) but did not mention that this organisation has and is helping the victims and the families of the victims of Mojahedin Khalq. Through Iran-Interlink, we are now helping enslaved MEK members gain their freedom. Is this considered espionage in Albania? The contact details for this site are also easily available.

Dear Sir/Madam,

The Mojahedin Khalq have been deported from Iraq to your country to be deradicalized. Your government had even been paid for this task. This did not happen. Instead we see well known American war-mongers are now reviving this terrorist organisation against Iran as they have done with many others against Turkey, Iraq and Syria.

Anne has visited Albania to warn of MEK activities there. Of particular concern is the recruitment of young Albanians to serve the group. With first-hand knowledge of this she is able to alert civil groups how this takes place and how to prevent this from happening.

With this in mind, the best way to determine what the MEK is actually doing in Albania is to arrange a live media debate between Anne and MEK leader Maryam Rajavi – or one of her followers – so that the truth can be brought into the public arena. Anne will explain her task to establish legal status for Rajavi’s followers in your country and warn against recruitment. Maryam Rajavi might then explain to the Albanian people why she is calling for war and terrorism from their country. The citizens of Albania are already deeply suspicious of the strange behaviour and secretive activities of this group. An explanation by Rajavi in the media would go a long way to clarify for them who the group is and what they are doing in the country. Although I suspect that all this would do is to further convince Albanian civil society that they do not want such a controversial, provocative and secretive group living alongside their families, their children and their youth.

With our help, over a thousand MEK members have escaped this group in the past decade. If there is still any doubt about the integrity of myself and my wife, I suggest you invite these formers to speak about their experiences.

I have briefed my lawyer on this issue and am sending a copy of this letter to the Albanian Embassy in London seeking clarification on the situation of Albanian justice regarding such matters.

Yours sincerely,

Massoud Khodabandeh

Gazeta Impakt,

November 13, 2017 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq Organization

What caused the decline of the cult of Rajavi?

The crucial question for many people is that why people join cults. In fact, people do not join cults. Most of the time incidentally they find themselves in a cult that is successful in gaining their trust and loyalty. A large number of people who were recruited by the Mujahedin Khalq Organization (The MKO/ MEK / the Cult of Rajavi /PMOI) found themselves trapped in the bars of the group many years after their recruitment.

Mujahedin-e Khalq last days

The process to gain the trust and loyalty of members was gradual in the MKO. The leaders of the group Massoud and Maryam Rajavi ran very meticulous methods of brainwashing to indoctrinate their cult-like ideas. The more the group members endured cult-like practices, the more they lost their trust to the outside world.

To replace their loss of faith to the outsiders, members of the MKO had no option except to follow blindly their leaders. The outsiders included a range from the Islamic Republic to ordinary Iranians and even their friends and family. The so-called “Ideological Revolution “was a significant manipulation technique that the MKO leaders launched to deny the individuality of each member: members were forced to divorce their spouses and single members were made swear for a mandatory celibacy; they had to submit themselves whole-heartedly to the leaders and the group’s cause.

But, forced celibacy was not enough. Thus the group authorities increased self-criticism sessions in order to get to know members’ most inner thoughts. Peer pressure became a very useful tool in these sessions. Separation of children from parents, sleep deprivation, forced labor all aided the MKO leaders to keep members inside the group.

A turning point inflamed the start of a rise in defection from the group. What was the cause?

In 2003, after the American invasion to Iraq and the fall of the MKO’s main financial and military sponsor, the group was disarmed by the US army.

Once they were disarmed in the Iraqi dessert, Camp Ashraf, members of the group wandered why they were there – under the name of the National Liberation Army without any arms.

The leaders of the MKO started negotiations with American military officials; they signed agreements with them. The MKO that was previously the sworn enemy of America as an anti – Imperialism entity was now receiving US army officers warmly! This hypocritical approach was another coup to members’ trust. They began to seriously doubt the group`s cause and its sincerity.

Thus, the leaders of the cult were not as successful as they were before, any more. Members didn’t believe in an armed struggle without arms. They could not realize the truth anymore. Confused by the contradictory acts of their authorities, they were desperate and dis-trusted.

The second peak of defection process took place after the group’s relocation in Albania. Distanced from Iranian border, the hope for the alleged near overthrow of the Islamic Republic was killed.

Doubts about the group’s leaders and their ideology was enhanced when members found themselves in a rather free world in Tirana. They could see the normal life of ordinary normal citizens whenever they could manage to get out of the group’s camp –although under sever supervision and control of their superior ranks. Hence, they got informed of the aspects of violations of human rights that the leaders of the Cult of Rajavi committed against them. This instigated the second and hopefully last stage in the decline of the cult of Rajavi.

By Mazda Parsi

November 8, 2017 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Trump and Iran Nuclear Deal: ‘On the Road to Nowhere’

As the October 15th deadline for Pres. Trump to certify Iranian compliance with the P5+1 nuclear deal, the administration through various media leaks made clear it will refuse to do so. His grounds for refusal are the flimsiest imaginable: Iran has engaged in objectionable behavior which the President wishes violated the deal, but doesn’t. That’s an exceedingly thin reed on which to hang an entire policy.

Trump and Iran Nuclear Deal: ‘On the Road to Nowhere’

Trump and the GOP are locked into a rejectionist, even nihilist approach toward Iran. This should be familiar to many Americans, because It’s very similar to the one being used against North Korea. Threats, bellicosity, all substitute for a real policy. Furthermore, they elevate countries and foreign policy issues far above their real importance, even to the brink of nuclear war. Does anyone believe that whatever issues we may have with North Korea, it’s worth the death of tens of millions of Asians and Americans to prove a point?

In Iran’s case, the war hawks object to Iran’s missile tests and its support for fellow-Shia in Syria and Lebanon. They also side with their oil rich Sunni allies in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, who declare Iran to be a mortal threat. In truth, none of these Iranian actions violate the nuclear deal which, as its title suggests, only deals with nuclear issues.

If the Trump administration accepted the P5+1 agreement, and then sought to negotiate a separate one dealing with some of all of these issues, this would he a far more constructive approach. But the GOP knows that many of these issues involve far more players than just Iran, including Syria, Russia, Sunni Islamists like al-Qaeda and ISIS, and their proteges, among them Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. In other words, you can’t isolate Iran’s role without taking into account the roles of all the other parties intervening in Syria.

Iran’s missile tests, which so enflame Israel and the GOP, do not violate the JPOA. That doesn’t stop the anti-Iran media and GOP from declaring that they do. Of course, it would be possible to open a new round of negotiations to restrain them. But only in the context of an open process in which all parties are treated with respect. Something sorely lacking in current U.S. foreign policy. The current thinking seems to be that the U.S. will simply declare Iran must stop missile testing, Iran will acquiesce, and demand nothing from us in return. Nor should it have the right to do so.

But that’s simply not the way international negotiations work (as Trump, of all people, should understand). If one party wants the other to give away something, then you must give something in return. There simply is no sense of reciprocity in U.S. policy. Which is why it is doomed to failure. Iran will not be brow-beaten into submission. You might even reduce Iranians to eating grass as North Koreans once did during a famine, and they still wouldn’t buckle. So unless the U.S. is prepared to pursue a policy of outright sadism leading to the death of tens of thousands through starvation and plague, we are doomed to fail.

That’s what the worst elements of the neocon policy élite want to see. Former administration officials like Tom Ridge and Washington think tanks allied with the Israel Lobby have published screeds calling for violent overthrow of the Iranian regime. Their op-eds are bought and paid for by former terror groups like the MeK charged with assassinating U.S. diplomats. Ridge alone has earned tens of thousands of dollars for giving 15-minute speeches addressed to MeK gatherings around the globe. Scores of other past officials including Howard Dean, Rudy Giuliani, Ed Rendell, John Bolton, have also joined the gravy train.

When Sam Husseini questioned Ridge at an MeK press conference about this, it was not received kindly:

I asked Ridge about any financial arrangement between him or the other speakers and the MEK. He reacted with anger, questioning my motives and my affiliations. Rendell said in much calmer tone that no one was getting paid for today’s event but that people there had been paid for other speeches at other events. One of the speakers indicated that Ridge had personally paid for today’s event. Ridge in his remarks derided the notion that money would ever influence men of the stature of those speaking at the event. I asked if he was arguing that there was no problem of money influencing politics. Rendell cut that off.

the MeK participated in the assassination of five Iranian nuclear scientists

Many analysts believe that MeK’s mysterious largesse originated in the treasury of the Saudi regime, a sworn enemy of the Iran’s Shia regime. NBC, quoting Obama administration sources, claimed the Mossad was an important funder as well. Meir Dagan, Israel’s former Mossad chief, publicly boasted of Israeli acts of terrorism sponsored inside Iran. Clearly, these sorts of operations need Iranian insiders and MeK is a likely culprit. The same NBC report asserted that the MeK participated in the assassination of five Iranian nuclear scientists. I reported here, based on a high-level Israeli former military officer, that the Mossad and MeK jointly coördinated the attacks. Other journalists have reported that the Saudis gave Israel $1-billion for various operations to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program including the assassinations and the Stuxnet malware attack.

It would be totally in character for the MeK to accept funding from Iran’s enemies, as it was once sheltered in Iraq by Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war.

Returning to the U.S. president, the problem with the Trump approach is that he has no strategy, no ultimate vision for future relations between the U.S. and Iran. As the old Talking Heads song went: “We’re on the road to nowhere.” His policy is designed for media sound bytes and tweets. It’s pure posturing. This is something that could end up getting many millions killed. And for what? To mollify the ego of a madman? That would be our madman, not their’s.

It’s pitifully ironic that amidst all the gnashing of teeth about Iran’s supposed effort to attain nuclear weapons the GOP dominated Congress shows no sense of outrage for Israel’s 200 weapon stockpile and its refusal to join the Non- Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Unlike Israel, Iranian leaders have never contemplated or advocated using nuclear weapons against their enemies during wartime. Unlike Israel, Iran is a member of NPT and has permitted numerous inspections of its facilities by the IAEA, which has affirmed the country’s adherence to the JPOA. Israel on the other hand has never permitted legitimate inspections of its Dimona nuclear reactor, which produces its nuclear weapons.

This week, the Nobel committee awarded its Peace prize to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. Iran, though it does not have nuclear weapons, has made clear that it will never use them or deploy them. Israeli leaders have urged their use during past wars. If Iran knew that its enemies heeded the call of this NGO for a nuclear ban, it would have no need for such weapons, even were it to be pursuing their production. The fault and burden here is on Israel which has them, not Iran which doesn’t.

One hopes that this award will increase pressure on Israel to abandon the folly of its own nuclear arsenal. In Israel’s case, nuclear weapons have enabled it to pursue a reckless, rejectionist policy toward its neighbors. WMD enables it to avoid dealing with a festering, decades-old political problem. Trump’s reckless decertification of the nuclear deal could lead Iran to follow the same path.

By Richard Silverstein,Tikun Olam

November 5, 2017 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq Organization's Propaganda System

MEK has abandoned celebration of everything except two

Homeira Mohammad Nejad from the Women’s Association wrote an analytical article in which she explains that nowadays the MEK has abandoned celebration of everything except two events – 30th June (marking the self-immolations of 2004) and 20thOctober (the anniversary of Maryam Rajavi’s internal ‘election’ as president-elect of Iran). Everything else has been abandoned.

There are two reasons. One is that people are already leaving in droves, so the group can’t afford to revive or to promote the idea of armed struggle for fear of alienating more. The group is now moving further toward lobbying rather than raising any hopes for active participation in regime change.

The other reason is they are seriously afraid of the backlash of the Albanian people who don’t like them at all. The MEK has chosen these two events and done away with its logos and slogans and only promotes pictures of Maryam Rajavi in the hope people will forget who they really are and regard them as benign. This behaviour is obviously not of their choice. The MEK is instructed by its benefactors, such as the Saudis, what to do so that they will be paid.

November 4, 2017 0 comments

Ali Reza Jafarzade

The Iran Nuclear “Threat”: Trump’s Recycled Fake News

“The Fox program [of May 8, 2005] on Iran is simply the latest example of how the U.S. media has traded political favoritism to the White House, and its fierce demonization of Iran, for objective news.”—Kaveh L. Afrasiabi [1]

After more than a decade of dire warnings by Washington’s neocon war hawks of the Iranian nuclear “threat,” most of the civilized world rejoiced when the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action was signed by Iran and the P5+1 in 2015. Hopes for gradually thawing relations between the Islamic Republic and U.S. were short-lived, however, with the ascendancy to the White House of Donald Trump, who unceasingly railed against the so-called Iran nuclear deal during his campaign. Now once again, Iran is being accused by the U.S. media of covertly pursuing nuclear arms. [2]

In an exclusive article, Fox News has announced that the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), a political front organization for the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MeK, MKO), has once again managed to obtain “intelligence” relating to a covert nuclear weapons program hidden skillfully from the peering eyes of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s inspectors. According to Fox News, the NCRI report, titled “Iran’s Nuclear Core: Uninspected Military Sites” and conveniently released days before the expected “decertification” of Iran by U.S. president Trump, claims agents of the MeK operating inside Iran have not only confirmed the existence of a covert nuclear weapons program in the Islamic Republic, but also have discovered an additional secret military base dedicated to building nuclear bombs.

While this may seem believable to poorly-informed Americans, the information bears a striking resemblance to the secret weapons facilities allegedly discovered by MeK agents inside Iran in 2002. In fact, the same person quoted in the Fox article, Alireza Jafarzadeh, wrote in 2005, “Based on information received from inside the country, the Iranian regime has started an extensive strategic plan in order to build tunnels and secret centers across the country, in order to hide its nuclear and missiles projects.” [3] Aside from being a Fox News commentator and “terrorism expert,” and he should be, given his background dating back to 1985 with the terrorist MeK cult, [4] Jafarzadeh is also president of Strategic Policy Consulting, which claims to “provide a wide range of consultancy on issues related to terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, Iranian internal and external affairs, as well as Iran’s role in Iraq.” [5]

Jafarzadeh gained notoriety in August 2002 when he held a press conference to present “evidence” of a nuclear weapons program in Iran. In his 2006 book titled “The Iran Threat,” which reads like a pulp-fiction spy thriller, he admitted that he has worked as a lobbyist for the MeK and even managed to convince 219 members of the U.S. House of Representatives to sign a statement in support of the NCRI. Jaferzadeh was particularly proud that George W. Bush gave the credit for discovering Iran’s “concealed nuclear program” to the NCRI, which Bush called “a dissident group.” [6]

The similarity of the current (2017) Fox News article and the 2005 press release is striking. For example, both speak of large underground tunnels: the present Fox News report speaks of “scores of large underground tunnels,” [7] while the 2005 press release reports on “large scale secret tunnels for weapons system [sic].” [8] Likewise, the same claims alleging that the military complex at Parchin, southeast of Tehran, houses a number of secret facilities supposedly used in the ongoing development and manufacture of nuclear weapons. In total, four locations are named: Natanz, Arak, Lavizan-Shian, and Parchin, which the NCRI claims “with high degrees of certainty” to be in some way involved with nuclear weapons research and development.

Jafarzadeh and Fox News have a long history of cooperation going back to 2003 when the self-proclaimed expert accused Iran of smuggling heavy weapons into Iraq “using trucks who [sic] were carrying vegetables and fruits, buses or utility vehicles, and they have been hidden in villages and agricultural fields to be used by them.” [9] More to the point, Jafarzadeh was already pushing regime change at that time, calling the Islamic Republic “the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism,” advising the U.S. “to step up pressure” on Tehran, and insisting Iranians by the thousands were demonstrating “for regime change” and an “end to theocracy in Iran.” [10]

In an interesting 2005 Fox News interview pitting Joe Cirincione, director for Non-Proliferation at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, against Jafarzadeh, the latter claimed to have new evidence from unnamed sources proving Iran’s peaceful civilian nuclear activities were a cover for a covert nuclear weapons effort. Citing information that Iran was developing a neutron initiator using polonium-210 and beryllium-9, Jafarzadeh claimed “Iran is actually working to develop a nuclear trigger, which is a necessary part of building the bomb.” To his credit, Cirincione, referring to the NCRI, emphasized, “The last couple of exposures that they made haven’t really born out.” Furthermore, Cirincione estimated that Iran was at least five years away from making an atomic fission bomb and pointed out that “after two years of inspections we haven’t found anything actually weapons related work.” [11]

Far from being new technology, modulated polonium-beryllium initiation to trigger neutron chain reactions was researched in the 1940s in the early stages of the U.S. atomic bomb program. [12] Also worth mentioning is the fact that India’s first atomic bomb tested on May 18, 1974 used a polonium-beryllium initiator almost identical to the one used in “Gadget,” the first U.S. nuclear device to be yield-tested on July 16, 1945 near Alamogordo, New Mexico. Away from Washington’s watchful eye, Indian scientists took two years to master manufacturing methods and handling techniques for the large amounts of polonium required to produce this type of neutron initiator. [13]

For Iran to attempt to amass the polonium and beryllium needed for a trigger would create an immediately discernable warning sign of proliferation. To date, no such credible sign has been detected. Furthermore, polonium-210 must be produced on an ongoing basis since it has a half -life of only four years, rendering any polonium-beryllium initiator ineffective within that period of time less than that. Even the “experts” associated with the NCRI in 2005 placed the lifespan of an alleged Iranian-designed initiator at 6 months maximum. [14] The point here is that any activity of this sort in Iran would certainly have been detected by IAEA inspectors long ago.

Unfortunately, Jafarzadeh and his ilk seem to have found a receptive audience in Washington, for Trump himself derogatorily referred to Iran thirteen times in his recent address to the United Nations General Assembly. Among his more amusing assertions, Trump stated, “Rather than use its resources to improve Iranian lives, its oil profits go to fund Hezbollah and other terrorists that kill innocent Muslims and attack their peaceful Arab and Israeli neighbors.” Noting the Saudi war on Yemen and the Israeli entity’s ongoing usurpation of Palestinian lands should suffice to discredit Trump’s remarks in reference to “peaceful Arab and Israeli neighbors,” [15] but what of the allegations of Iran’s support for “terrorists?”

Simultaneously funding an ongoing nuclear weapons program, if Iran indeed had one, as well as “terrorists,” as Trump has accused, would absorb a lot of money, and Iran is not awash in cash. With delays in integrating Iranian banks into the global banking system, Iran’s non-oil sector growth has been less than one percent, [16] leaving the country dependent on petroleum revenues subject to the volatile crude oil market and its persistently stagnant prices in the marginally profitable $50/bbl range. Yet somehow Iran has managed to reduce the poverty rate among its citizens from 13.1 percent in 2009 to 8.1 percent in 2013. [17] Obviously, this achievement of improving Iranian lives could not have been accomplished by diverting oil profits to nuclear weapons programs or funding extremist groups, as the Saudis have done and continue to do by pouring billions into spreading Wahhabism. [18]

Fox News has been quick to note that Maryam Rajavi, the leader of the NCRI, welcomed Trump’s bellicose remarks, which were in line with the Iranian people’s alleged desire for regime change. While this image of Iranians writhing under theocratic tyranny has much credence among U.S. pundits, the reality on the ground in Iran is quite the opposite. Within Iran, there is much popular support for the country’s nuclear program, and Iranians view their expanding homegrown nuclear technology with great pride. [19] Furthermore, surrounded by U.S. military bases in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, Turkmenistan and Kyrgyzstan, as well as U.S. military partnerships with Georgia and Azerbaijan, Iran rightly considers the U.S. to be its number one security threat. [20] Finally, it must be understood that with literally thousands of victims of its terror attacks inside Iran, the MeK has absolutely no credibility among the Iranian people as any sort of an opposition movement. [21]

Former political science professor at Tehran University, Kaveh L. Afrasiabi, warned, “A U.S. policy based on a caricature of Iran’s realities is obviously self-disserving.” [22] Nevertheless, the current caricature of a U.S. president residing in the White House seems determined to do just that based on recycled fake news about Iran supplied by Jafarzadeh and aired on Fox News.

Endnotes

[1] Kaveh L. Afrasiabi, Iran’s Nuclear Program: Debating Facts Versus Fiction (Charleston, SC: Booksurge LLC, 2006), 101.

[2] Hollie McKay, “Iran’s secret sites linked to nuclear weapons development revealed,” Fox News, October 10, 2017, accessed October 11, 2017, http://www.foxnews.com/world/2017/10/10/irans-secret-sites-linked-to-nuclear-weapons-development-revealed.html.

[3] “Statement by Alireza Jafarzadeh,” Joint Press Conference of Nuclear Control Institute & Iran Policy Committee, National Press Club, September 16, 2005, accessed October 11, 2017, http://spcwashington.com/?p=277.

[4] Alireza Jafarzadeh, The Iran Threat: President Ahmadinejad and the Coming Nuclear Crisis (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007), xvii.

[5] Strategic Policy Consulting, Inc. website, accessed October 12, 2017, http://spcwashington.com/?page_id=225.

[6] Alireza Jafarzadeh, ibid., xi.

[7] Hollie McCay, ibid.

[8] Statement by Alireza Jafarzadeh, ibid.

[9] “Iran’s sponsor of terrorism in Iraq,” Fox News transcript on Strategic Policy Consulting, Inc. website, November 20, 2003, accessed October 12, 2017, http://www.spconsulting.us/fox-latest.pdf.

[10] “IAEA Resolution on Iran Atomic Program,” Fox News transcript on Strategic Policy Consulting, Inc. website, November 30, 2003, accessed October 12, 2017, http://www.spconsulting.us/fox11-30.pdf.

[11] “Is Iran Nuke Program More Advanced Than We Thought?” Fox News transcript on Strategic Policy Consulting, Inc. website, February 05, 2005, accessed October 12, 2017, http://spconsulting.us/FoxNewsLive5Feb05.htm.

[12] Richard R. Paternoster, “Nuclear Weapon Proliferation Indicators and Observables,” Los Alamos National Laboratory, December 1992, 14-15, accessed October 12, 2017, https://fas.org/sgp/othergov/doe/lanl/la-12430-ms.pdf.

[13] “Smiling Buddha: 1974: India’s Nuclear Weapons Program,” Nuclear Weapons Archive, November 8, 2001, accessed October 12, 2017, http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/India/IndiaS.miling.html

[14] Mohammad Mohaddessin, “Project to Build Neutron Initiator, the Trigger to Fission Chain Reaction for Nuclear Bomb,” Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, February 3, 2005, accessed October 12, 2017, http://www.iranwatch.org/library/ncri-press-conference-irans-project-build-neutron-initiator-2-3-05.

[15] Donald Trump, “Remarks by President Trump to the 72nd Session of the United Nations General Assembly,” The White House, September 19, 2017, accessed October 12, 2017, https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/09/19/remarks-president-trump-72nd-session-united-nations-general-assembly.

[16] “Iran’s Economic Outlook- April 2017,” The World Bank, accessed October 12, 2017, http://www.worldbank.org/en/country/iran/publication/economic-outlook-april-2017.

[17] “Iran overview,” The World Bank, accessed October 12, 2017, http://www.worldbank.org/en/country/iran/overview.

[18] Editorial Board, “Fighting, While Funding, Extremists,” The New York Times, June 19, 2017, accessed October 12, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/19/opinion/saudi-arabia-qatar-isis-terrorism.html.

[19] Kaveh L. Afrasiabi, ibid., 3.

[20] Seyed Hossein Mousavian, Iran and the United States: An Insider’s View on the Failed Past and the Road to Peace (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 272.

[21] Seyed Hossein Mousavian, ibid., 77-82.

[22] Kaveh L. Afrasiabi, ibid., 9.

By Yuram Abdullah Weiler, American Herald Tribune

Yuram Abdullah Weiler is a former engineer educated in mathematics turned writer and political critic who has written over 130 articles on Islam, social justice, economics, and politics focusing on the Middle East and U.S. policies.

November 1, 2017 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq 's Terrorism

The Rise of MEK/NCRI in Washington: Pay Off The Right People and You Are No Longer A Terrorist

If you want to change a group of terrorists who have killed American overseas into something that appears to be much more benign, all you have to do is pay off the right people in Washington. With enough money, you can even open a nice plush lobbying office on Pennsylvania Avenue in the District of Columbia, not too far from the White House and Capitol Hill.

One-time Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has been rightly blamed for the ill-conceived and badly bungled “regime change” in Libya in 2011 that eventually led to her mishandling of the resulting blowback in Benghazi, but one of her greatest failings just might have involved the piece of paper she signed when she removed the Mujaheddin e Khalq (MEK) group from the State Department list of “designated terrorist organizations” in September 2012.

How is it possible that the bad judgment demonstrated in the Libyan fiasco that created a failed state, a humanitarian disaster, a migrant crisis, armed terrorists and ultimately produced the murder of the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans compare with a signature on a piece of paper? It is because that signature put in place one of the elements that will most likely in the near future lead to a far more disastrous war for the United States than was Libya. MEK, now labeled the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), has become a principal voice of the war party that is now seeking to attack Iran, a role similar to that played by Ahmad Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress in his disseminating of lies in the lead up to the catastrophic invasion of Iraq in 2003.

The tale of the rehabilitation and rise of MEK/NCRI is a subset of the ongoing corruption of America’s political culture, best illustrated by the fact that even national security is now up for sale, enabling a terrorist group to transform itself into a “resistance movement” and eventually be labeled “freedom fighters.”

How did this happen as MEK was on the State Department roster of foreign terrorist organizations since the list was established in 1997? Its inclusion derived from its having killed six Americans in the 1970s, its participation in the U.S. Embassy hostage-taking and from its record of extreme violence both inside and outside Iran since that time. When I was a CIA trainee our course included a simulation of the horrific attack on U.S. Air Force Officers in Tehran in 1973 that killed two colonels.

MEK is widely regarded as a terrorist cult headed by a bizarre husband and wife team Massoud and Maryam Rajavi. Its members are required to be celibate and are subjected to extensive brainwashing, physical torture, severe beatings even unto death, and prolonged solitary confinement if they question the leadership. One scholar who has studied them describes their beliefs as a “weird combination of Marxism and Islamic fundamentalism.”

With the sharp turn of the Trump Administration against Iran, NCRI is now finding an audience , telling the American public that Iran is “cheating” on the nuclear deal. It also tells us that “Iran’s nuclear weapons program has far from halted” and has claimed to identify four major sites that “with a high degree of certainty” have been involved in various aspects of the allegedly ongoing nuclear weapons project. This has led Jillian Mele of Fox News to declare, falsely, that “It appears [Iran’s nuclear] weapons program is fully operational.”

The CIA has in the past recruited MEK/NCRI agents to enter into Iran and report on nuclear facilities, but Israel’s Mossad is the group’s principal employer. Agents, recruited and trained by Israel, have killed a number of Iranian nuclear scientists and officials. The group appears to have ample financial resources, places full page ads in major US newspapers, and is also known to pay hefty fees to major political figures who are willing to speak publicly on its behalf. The group claims to want regime change in Iran to restore democracy to the country, an odd assertion as it itself has no internal democracy and is loathed by nearly all Iranians.

Because MEK/NCRI is a resource being used by Tel Aviv in its clandestine war against Iran, it is perhaps inevitable that many friends of Israel in the United States actively campaigned to have the group removed from the terrorism list so that it could, ironically, have a free hand to continue to terrorize Iran. Indeed, neocons at their various think tanks and publications as well as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee all recommended delisting the group and continue to support it. Prominent American Jews to include Elie Wiesel and Alan Dershowitz have been advocates for the group in spite of its record of terrorism.

Multi-million dollar contracts with Washington lobbying firms experienced at “working” congress backed up by handsome speaking fees have induced many prominent Americans to join the chorus supporting NCRI. Prior to 2012, speaking fees for the group started at $15,000 and went up from there. Former Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell reported more than $150,000 in honoraria. Rudy Giuliani has been paid generously for years at $20,000 per appearance for brief, twenty-minute speeches. Bear in mind that MEK was a listed terrorist group at the time and accepting money from it to promote its interests should have constituted material support of terrorism.

The group’s well-connected friends have included prominent neocons like John Bolton and ex-CIA Directors James Woolsey, Michael Hayden and Porter Goss as well as former Generals Anthony Zinni, Peter Pace, Wesley Clark, and Hugh Shelton. Traditional conservatives close to the Trump Administration like Newt Gingrich, Fran Townsend and Elaine Chao are also fans of NCRI. Townsend in particular, as a national security specialist, has appeared on television to denounce Iran, calling its actions “acts of war” without indicating that she has received money from an opposition group.

The emergence of NCRI at this time is just another fool’s game with the usual Washington crowd queuing up for a bad cause because they are both lining their pockets and thinking they are helping Israel by punishing Iran. In any event it is a poor bargain for the rest of us, but that hardly seems to matter anymore.

By Philip Giraldi, American Herald Tribune

Philip M. Giraldi is a former CIA counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer who served nineteen years overseas in Turkey, Italy, Germany, and Spain. He was the CIA Chief of Base for the Barcelona Olympics in 1992 and was one of the first Americans to enter Afghanistan in December 2001. Phil is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a Washington-based advocacy group that seeks to encourage and promote a U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East that is consistent with American values and interests.

October 31, 2017 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Trump Trashes Iran Deal to Satisfy Netanyahu

U.S-Iran policy is closer to Israel than it has been in years.

President Donald Trump’s new Iran policy clearly represents a dangerous rejection of diplomacy in favor of confrontation. But it’s more than that: It’s a major shift toward a much closer alignment of U.S. policy with that of the Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Whether explicitly or not, Trump’s vow to work with Congress to renegotiate the Iran nuclear agreement, and his explicit threat to withdraw from the deal if no renegotiation takes place, appear to be satisfying the hardline demands Netanyahu has made of Washington’s policy toward Tehran.

Specifically, Netanyahu has continued to demand that Trump either withdraw from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) or make far-reaching changes that he knows are impossible to achieve. In his September 17 speech to the UN General Assembly, Netanyahu declared, “Israel’s policy toward the nuclear deal with Iran is very simple: Change it or cancel it.” And he made no secret of what that meant: If Trump doesn’t “cancel” the deal, he must get rid of its “sunset clause” and demand that Iran end its advanced centrifuges and long-range missile program, among other fundamentally unattainable objectives.

Trump’s statement last Friday managed to include both of the either/or choices that Netanyahu had given him. He warned that, if Congress and America’s European allies do not agree on a plan to revise the deal, “then the agreement will be terminated.” He added that the agreement “is under continuous review,” and our participation “can be canceled by me, as president at any time.”

One provision the administration wants Congress to put into amended legislation would allow sanctions to be imposed if Iran crosses certain “trigger points,” which would include not only nuclear issues but the Israeli demand that Iran stop its long-range missile program. Ballistic missiles were never included in the JCPOA negotiations for an obvious reason: Iran has the same right to develop ballistic missiles as any other independent state, and it firmly rejected pro forma demands by the Barack Obama administration to include the issue in negotiations.

Trump went a long way towards Netanyahu’s “cancel” option by refusing last week to certify that Iran was keeping up its end of the JPCOA. That move signaled his intention to scrap the central compromise on which the entire agreement rests.

Although the Middle East is very different today than during the George W. Bush administration, some parallels can be found in comparing Trump’s policy toward the JCPOA and Bush’s policy toward Iran during the early phase of its uranium enrichment program.

The key figures who had primary influence on both Trump’s and Bush’s Iran policies held views close to those of Israel’s right-wing Likud Party. The main conduit for the Likudist line in the Trump White House is Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, primary foreign policy advisor, and longtime friend and supporter of Netanyahu. Kushner’s parents are also long-time supporters of Israeli settlements on the occupied West Bank.

Another figure to whom the Trump White House has turned is John Bolton, undersecretary of state and a key policymaker on Iran in the Bush administration. Although Bolton was not appointed Trump’s secretary of state, as he’d hoped, he suddenly reemerged as a player on Iran policy thanks to his relationship with Kushner. Politico reports that Bolton met with Kushner a few days before the final policy statement was released and urged a complete withdrawal from the deal in favor of his own plan for containing Iran.

Bolton spoke with Trump by phone on Thursday about the paragraph in the deal that vowed it would be “terminated” if there was any renegotiation, according toPolitico. He was calling Trump from Las Vegas, where he’d been meeting with casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, the third major figure behind Trump’s shift towards Israeli issues. Adelson is a Likud supporter who has long been a close friend of Netanyahu’s and has used his Israeli tabloid newspaper Israel Hayomto support Netanyahu’s campaigns. He was Trump’s main campaign contributor in 2016, donating $100 million. Adelson’s real interest has been in supporting Israel’s interests in Washington—especially with regard to Iran.

In a public appearance in Israel in 2013, when Adelson was asked about his view on negotiating with Tehran, he suggested dropping a nuclear weapon on a desert in Iran and then saying to the Iranians, “See! The next one is in the middle of Tehran. So, we mean business. You want to be wiped out? Go ahead and take a tough position and continue with your nuclear development….”

The Likud Party policy preferences on Iran dominated the Bush administration in large part because of the influence of David Wurmser, a Likudist who was a Middle East advisor first to Bolton and later to Vice President Dick Cheney. Wurmser was a co-author, with Richard Perle and Douglas Feith, of A Clean Break, the 1996 paper that advised Netanyahu to carry out military strikes against Syria and Iran and to remove the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq. Wurmser convinced Cheney that the administration should seek a pretext for attacking Iran.

But it was Bolton who worked with Israeli officials to plan a campaign to convince the world that Iran was secretly working on nuclear weapons. His goal was to sell key European nations on a UN Security Council resolution accusing Iran of developing a nuclear program. Bolton explains in his memoirs that the assumption of his strategy was that either the Security Council would strip Iran of its right to have a nuclear program or the United States would take unilateral military action.

In the summer of 2004, a large collection of documents allegedly from a covert Iranian nuclear weapons research program was suddenly obtained by Germany’s foreign intelligence agency. Those documents became the sole alleged evidence that such a program existed. But this writer found more than one telltale sign of fraud in the papers, and a former senior German foreign office official told me on the record in March 2013 that the source who passed on the documents was a member of the Mujihadeen e-Khalq (MEK), the armed Iranian opposition group. The MEK has allegedly worked with Israel’s Mossad for some time.

Neither the Bush administration nor the Trump administration viewed the alleged danger of nuclear proliferation by Iran as the priority problem per se; it was rather an issue to be exploited to weaken the Islamic regime and ultimately achieve regime change. Hilary Mann Leverett, the NSC coordinator in the Persian Gulf from 2001-03, told this writer in a 2013 interview that Wurmser and other Cheney advisors were convinced that the student protests of 1999 indicated that Iranians were ready to overthrow the Islamic Republic. In his statement last week, Trump blamed Obama for having lifted nuclear sanctions on Iran “just before what would have been the total collapse of the Iranian regime.”

After Netanyahu became Israeli prime minister in early 2009, his administration worked assiduously for four years to maneuver the Obama administration into giving Iran an ultimatum over its enrichment program. Obama rejected such a proposal, but Bolton has repeated his call for the United States to bomb Iran year after year.

Now the Trump administration is playing out a new chapter in the drama of the Likudists and their patrons in Washington. Their objective is nothing less than using U.S. power to weaken Iran through military means if possible and economic sanctions if necessary. The remarkable thing is that Trump is cooperating even more eagerly than did Bush.

Gareth Porter is an independent journalist and winner of the 2012 Gellhorn Prize for journalism. He is the author of numerous books, including Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare.

By GARETH PORTER

October 28, 2017 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

An Attack on Iran or North Korea Wouldn’t Be Putting ‘America First’

Almost every day I am asked by someone what the likelihood is that we may soon be at war with Iran or North Korea, or conceivably both. As it’s unlikely either of those countries will attack the United States since it would be suicidal, the question of war really means: are we going to attack them?

There are those who say all the tub-thumping emanating from Washington is just bluster. For example, Justin Raimondo of Antiwar.com writes that President Donald Trump is just engaging in “rhetorical pyrotechnics and scor[ing] political points with certain [domestic] constituencies while maintaining the status quo: in short, he gets to engage in what is essentially a theatrical performance entirely unrelated to what is actually occurring on the ground. His enemies, mistaking rhetoric for reality, have risen to the bait.”

I hope Raimondo is right but I fear otherwise. Underlying his analysis is the all-too-factual reality that attacking either country would result in catastrophe. “Millions would die, on both sides of the demilitarized zone,” if we were to move first, he writes. “For this reason, the US – despite Trump’s tweets – is not going to launch an attack on North Korea.” Similar logic applies to Iran.

Unfortunately, if a prudent assessment of costs and benefits had guided American policy in recent years, none of our other wars of choice would have taken place either – yet they did. The fact that foreseeable consequences may appear “unthinkable” to rational minds does not mean they are not regarded as quite thinkable to those making the decisions.

The potential for war is not, as Trump’s enemies and even some of his lesser-informed supporters would have us think, the product of his populism or nationalism. Quite the contrary, in 2016, Trump excoriated the globalist establishment’s interventions under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria. Now he’s adopted those very same policies clothed in Trumpish “America First!” bombast. Why he has done that is unclear and in the end not particularly relevant to what happens next.

To be sure, I do not think that the generals and globalists who now guide Trump’s policies want war with either country, but they are willing to risk war to get what they want. On Korea, they insist on North Korea’s denuclearization, which would likely set the stage for regime change in Pyongyang – which Kim Jong-un well knows, and why he will never agree to it. “The ‘America First’ solution is clear: Kim’s threat to the U.S. is present only for as long as America remains engaged in Korean affairs,” writes Srdja Trifkovic. “Disengage, and it disappears.” But Washington will not countenance ever giving up the U.S. military foothold on the Korean peninsula. To keep it, they would rather put in jeopardy the almost 30,000 American personnel in South Korea and the lives of countless Koreans on both side of the 38th parallel.

Given that any U.S. attack on North Korea, or even Pyongyang’s coming to believe that such an attack may be imminent, would almost certainly trigger a devastating counterstrike against South Korea and perhaps Japan, any American military action would have to be overwhelming from the start. Recent speculative talk of Kim’s ability to wipe out up to 90% of the American population with an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack can have only one aim – to lay out a justification for a preemptive U.S. strike, perhaps a nuclear one. Perhaps Trump will wave that scenario under Chinese President Xi Jinping’s nose at their summit next month based on delusions in Washington that if the U.S. can appear sufficiently bellicose, the Chinese will be panicked into solving the problem for us, either by a coup to remove Kim and his entourage or even via an invasion of North Korea.

Trump’s belligerence towards Iran is similarly divorced from American national interests. To start with, the Administration’s claim that Iran is violating the “spirit” of the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) is a tacit admission that Tehran is in fact meeting its obligations. Decertification of the agreement has less to do with actual concern about an Iranian nuclear device than seeking to neuter Iran as a regional power. This is clear from Trump’s recently announced new strategy towards Iran, directed against the IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps), Iran’s missile program, and Iran’s state integrity and regional interests generally. Many of those pushing Trump in this direction make no secret of wanting military action achieve “regime change” in Tehran to install in place of the current theocratic government the so-called Mojahedin-e Khalq-e Iran (MEK) terrorists – subsidized by Saudi Arabia – much as we parachuted the ersatz Iraqi National Congress into Baghdad after overthrowing Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

Full-spectrum hostility to Iran has nothing to do with putting America first. Critics of U.S. foreign policy have long pointed out that we tend to act less in accord with the interests of our people than those of trans-national corporations (notably those connected to what is known anachronistically as the Military-Industrial Complex, more properly called the Deep State) and those of supposed “allies” that do nothing to safeguard our security but are all too happy to drag us into their quarrels to further their interests, not ours. Two of the most powerful foreign lobbies in Washington are those of Israel and Saudi Arabia, which are increasingly linked based on their shared hostility to Iran. It is significant that Trump’s first two destinations abroad as president were to Saudi Arabia and Israel.

Trump seems to have entirely bought the false line that Iran is the world’s foremost supporter of terrorism. Really? How many Shiite, Iranian-supported terrorist attacks have taken place in Europe or North America? No, the dubious honor of top sponsor of jihad terror belongs far and away to Saudi Arabia and its Wahhabist ideology that inspires Daesh, al-Qaeda, Boko Haram, al-Shabaab, and many other groups. In an inversion of reality, the U.S. administration blames global terrorism explicitly on Iran (including the IRGC), Syria, and by extension Russia, all of which are fighting against al-Qaeda and Daesh, as Trump himself acknowledged during the 2016 campaign to the chagrin of GOP “experts.”

Now Trump has decertified the Iran nuclear deal as expected but has not withdrawn the U.S. from it. The next move is up to Congress, whether to re-impose sanctions lifted under the agreement. If they do so, that would effectively mean the U.S. is withdrawing from the JCPOA, whether or not there is a formal repudiation by the U.S. – a step Trump could have taken but didn’t. Based on my conversations on Capitol Hill this week, immediately restoring sanctions is improbable. Keep in mind that Democrats, even those deeply hostile to Iran, will wish to preserve what may be Obama’s only significant foreign policy achievement from his time in office and will be loath to endorse the action of a president they despise. Many Republicans, much as they railed against Obamacare for seven years but then fumbled when they had an opportunity to repeal it, will find it easier to sound belligerent than to take a real action that might have consequences.

If Congress does not re-impose sanctions within the 60-day window, that effectively means that for now the U.S. will formally remain within the JCPOA despite the decertification, which even bellicose Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley has conceded. (Giving some hope for Raimondo’s thesis, this could be what Trump intended – a way to look strong and hairy-chested, and to appease the partisans of Israel and Saudi Arabia, while leaving responsibility for staying in the agreement with Congress.) It’s likely, though, that eventually we will see some sort of measure from Congress condemning Iran for the usual laundry list of “bad behavior” – mostly untrue, and mostly not related to nuclear weapons development – with a sanctions trigger at some point in the future, perhaps in one year. Meanwhile, the U.S. will demand that Tehran agree to “improving” the deal with respect to ceasing development of missile technology, stopping aid to Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis, desisting from bad-mouthing Israel, pulling the IGRC out of Syria and Iraq, and swallowing pretty much anything else anyone can think of that would be fundamentally unacceptable to Iran.

If U.S. does at some point pull out of the JCPOA, or re-impose sanctions (which amounts to the same thing), it would be to the horror of the other signatories, who are anxious to preserve it. It would then be up to Iran to decide if pulling out of the agreement to which all the other parties except the U.S. remained committed were in her national interest. In my opinion that would be a foolish move and Iran would gain nothing from it. First, Iran has repeatedly said she does not wish to develop nuclear weapons and that doing so would contrary to her principles. Second, even if the U.S. were to re-impose sanctions, their effectiveness would be limited by the non-participation of even America’s closest allies and trading partners, not to mention rejection by Russia and China. Third, Iran’s remaining in the agreement with the other parties would create an advantageous circumstance for Tehran on one side with London, Paris, Berlin, Brussels, Moscow, and Beijing, while Washington is isolated on the other. (Or maybe this is part of Trump’s clever plan to disengage us from the Middle East! We go so far out on the limb that no one’s with us.) Finally and most dangerously, if Iran did denounce the JCPOA because the U.S. had, the hawks would claim it signaled a premeditated “breakout” toward acquisition of nuclear weapons, leaving Trump with “no choice” but to preempt it militarily.

While Patrick Buchanan writes that we are already on the road to war with Iran, there are many more relevant variables than is the case with North Korea. Moreover, while the fate of the JCPOA remains in limbo, it would take several months, perhaps a year, for the U.S. to assemble the forces necessary in the region to launch an attack on Iran. At this point I’d assess the odds of war with Iran holding at about 15%, but they could increase substantially and quickly depending on what happens next.

By contrast, assets for an attack on North Korea are already mostly in place on a hair trigger, awaiting only the order to engage. About a month ago, former NATO commander Admiral James Stavridis estimated a 10% chance of a nuclear war between the U.S. and North Korea, and a 20% to 30% chance of a conventional one. I think that assessment was optimistic then and things are getting worse. With regard to any attempt at “limited” conventional strike targeting specific missile and nuclear facilities, plus a decapitation of the North Korea leadership, it’s not a realistic option – at that point Kim would have nothing to lose. I suggest that the odds of war have passed 30% and are increasing almost weekly but with strong possibility that any conflict could turn nuclear.

“Whatever happened to ‘America First’?”, asks Paul Mulshine. One can’t help but suspect that Trump doesn’t fully appreciate the box in which he now finds himself. If he does decide on war against North Korea or Iran, or God forbid both, with the anticipated horrible consequences, he will be blamed, not his newfound neoconservative fans. In that case, the Never-Trumpers won’t have to wait for impeachment, they can activate the 25th Amendment to remove him for what they will claim is proof of his mental illness.

James George JATRAS , Strategic-culture

October 23, 2017 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

What ever happened to ‘America First?’ The neocons duped the Donald on Iran deal

It can be difficult for the average citizen to understand the intricacies of an issue such as the nuclear-weapons treaty with Iran.

Few people understand terms like”breakout time”and how it relates to enhanced uranium versus plutonium.

But there is one simple barometer that works for this and all other issues concerning the Mideast: Whatever position John Bolton takes, just take the opposite.

The man with the Captain Kangaroo mustache has gotten everything wrong about the Mideast for as long as he has been on the national scene, which is too long.

Back in 1998, for example, he was already calling for”regime change”in Iraq. That worked so well that by 2007 he was predicting that Israel was on the verge of launching a devastating first strike against Iran. In an interview that year Bolton said this about the Iranians’ development of nuclear weapons:

“If the choice is them continuing or the use of force, I think you’re at a Hitler-marching- into-the-Rhineland point.”

Everything that went wrong in the Mideast for the U.S. was entirely predictable; I know because I quoted the hard-nosed realists who predicted it.

For Bolton and the rest of the so-called”neo”conservatives in Washington, it’s always 1936 and there’s always a Hitler on the horizon. But they never seem to pin the mustache on the right guy. (These guys are serial violators of Godwin’s Law.)

In 2003, Bolton, who was then in the Bush administration, confidently told us that removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq would be so easy we could then”turn right”and impose regime change on Iran.

You’d think he and the rest of that crowd would have the decency to shut up after realizing the Iraq War actually strengthened Iran. Instead they pushed for deposing Bashar Assad in Syria. That also strengthened Iran.

None of that stopped Bolton from offering his latest prediction. It came in a Monday Wall Street Journal column on President Trump’s decision to refuse to certify the Iran nuclear deal. The headline was”A Slow Death for the Iran Deal.”

In it, Bolton advises that Congress should pull out of the”this intrinsically misconceived agreement,”an action that would have the Congress restoring economic sanctions.

The actual physicists with whom I have discussed this deal say that it is infinitely preferable to the alternative put forth by Bolton, who is a lawyer by trade.

Frank von Hippel of Princeton University is one of the world’s leading experts on nuclear arms. When I phoned him, he said this deal is a huge improvement on what went before.

Back then the”breakout time”- the time between when the Iranians started to enrich uranium and the construction of a bomb – was a month or two.

Now,”They don’t have the capacity to break out in less than a year,”von Hippel said.

And as long as we have monitors in place, he said, we’ll know when any such breakout begins and have a year to react, said von Hippel.

Contrast this to Bolton’s views.

“Iran is already within days of having nuclear weapons, given that it can buy them from North Korea,”he writes.

No, it can’t. The treaty bars Iran from ever acquiring nuclear weapons. But if we abandon the treaty, we abandon the right to put monitors inside Iran to check up on their actions.

We could still reimpose those sanctions to stop Iran from developing nukes, right? Wrong, writes Bolton.

“The unanswerable reality is that economic sanctions have never stopped a relentless regime from getting the bomb,”he writes – right after he proposes that Congress drop out of the deal and thereby restore these sanctions.

None of this makes any sense from the perspective of America’s security, said von Hippel.

If Iran were to try to build a bomb,”The question is would we know it fast enough?”he said.

The treaty accomplishes that, von Hippel. But what Bolton and the rest of the neocons want done has nothing to do with nuclear weapons and everything to do with regime change in Iran.

The real question in this debate is why Trump would listen to such characters.

During the campaign, he outraged the establishment by rejecting the call for deposing dictators supported by the mainstream Republicans. And he’s found some success in Syria by rejecting the neocon insistence on deposing the dictator there.

Recently the Syrian regime has been making great progress in routing ISIS – with the backing of the Iranians.

Virtually everything Bolton and the neocons have suggested for the Mideast has increased Iranian influence.

To listen to them you’d think the Iranians will soon be crossing the Rhine.

But why would anyone listen to them?

I suspect the president will soon be asking himself that question.

ALSO: If there’s anyone out there who thinks Bolton is a conservative, please explain why he is on the same side as our embattled liberal Democratic Senator Bob Menendez, and our disgraced liberal Democratic ex-Senator Bob Torricelli, in supporting the Iranian terrorist cult called Mojahedin-e-Khalq.

Here’s what I wrote about the liberals support for that cult:

“Do you think Iran is a greater threat, with a tenth of the world’s Muslims, is a greater threat to the U.S. than the Saudis, who present the nine-tenths of Muslims who are Sunni?

“If so, you have been taken for a ride. Doing the driving are neocons like John Bolton, the Captain Kangaroo clone who has been pushing the neocon line harder than anyone else inside the Beltway.”

And then of course there is Menendez’s”Talking points out of Tehran”speech. Does the Donald really want to be on the same side as this guy?

BELOW: It took Tucker Carlson a while to come around to the conservative point of view, but watch here as he demolishes clueless neocons Ralph Peters and Max Boot, both of whom have gotten everything wrong about Mideast policy. I particularly like the part where he asked Boot why he doesn’t find something he’s good at, like house-painting or selling insurance.

By Paul Mulshine, Columnist, The Star-Ledger, NJ.com

October 23, 2017 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Buyer’s Remorse: Why Is Howard Dean Selling Out Single-Payer?

The doctor is now in private practice

Howard Dean was never one of us. Dean, a former governor, first became famous as a progressive hero in 2004, before serving as the Democratic National Committee Chair from 2005 to 2009. What has he done since then? Why, turned lobbyist. The last several years have been kind to Dean’s bottom line, but not his followers. The former Governor and DNC honcho opposes single-payer and called the Iranian Revolution Guard a terrorist organization. What can we make of such a decreased paragon?

We could discuss the failure of Dean the Progressive endlessly. I think two examples will suffice.

Let’s take a pair of Dean’s positions: one in foreign policy, one domestic. Then we can examine why Dean has ended up on the short end of the progressive stick.

DEAN AND IRAN

On October 13, Dean tweeted:

A rare agreement with Trump. The IRGC is in fact a terrorist group. https://t.co/H016MKGd05

— Howard Dean (@GovHowardDean) October 13, 2017

The replies to this thread are a joy to read.

Dean is cool with taking money from MEK which was considered a terrorist group, and he once said LibDems were the only sane UK party LMAO

— extremely scary kai (@lonelykai15) October 13, 2017

Many of the Twitter snapbacks mentioned that Dean had been in the pay of MEK. That’s short for Mojahedin-e Khalq, or the People’s Mujahedin of Iran, an organization which calls for the violent overthrow of the Islamic Republic. The organization is also known as PMOI or MKO.

Salon, in an article titled “Dem is paid shill for Iranian regime change group,” noted that Dean had been critical of Obama’s negotiations with Iran back in 2015: ” Dean, appearing on Morning Joe, urged the administration to back out of the negotiations still underway in Lausanne, Switzerland.”

How does the hand-me-down oracle of the Internet, Wikipedia, refer to Dean’s backers? Surely, they will share the former governor’s enthusiasm for MEK?

Or perhaps not.

It is designated as a terrorist organization by Iran and Iraq, and was considered a terrorist organization by the United Kingdom and the European Union until 2008 and 2009 respectively, and by Canada and the United States until 2012. Various scholarly works, media outlets, and the governments of the United States and France have described it as a cult. The organization has built a cult of personality around its leaders Massoud and Maryam Rajavi. … In 2002 the MEK revealed the existence of Iran’s nuclear program. They have since made various claims about the programme, not all of which have been accurate.

Human Rights Watch documented prison camps run by the MEK. This was in 2005:

Within the District, MEK is famous for its aggressive lobbying efforts. They spent with wild abandon to get their names stricken from the terrorist list. Nobody’s sure how much. Who received those funds? Among others, Howard Dean. Dean is a Democrat, and the MEK are equal-opportunity spenders.

The claim that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps is a wholly terrorist organization, that they are a unique threat, is so laughable that only Dean and the National Review could believe it. The IRGC are pretty much the same as any military-industrial state complex: they play political games and try to expand their own power. Iran funds various militant groups and militias, but they’re far from the dominant state funder of terrorism. That would be us, and our good friends, Saudi Arabia.

The Global Terrorism Database at the University of Maryland has recorded terrorist incidents since 1970 onwards. A significant majority of deaths—over 94% of them—are the work of the Islamic State’s Sunni jihadists and al-Qaeda.

Of course, factual documentation of Iran is hardly the point. Since the Seventies, the American national security apparatus has wanted to fight Iran. Labeling the IRGC a terrorist group is one step closer to war with Tehran, since the IRGC is almost as powerful as the clergy. Once you have labeled the government as a hive of terror, it is easy to paint the entire population as murderers-in-waiting, and if you have done that, there is little to prevent the rain of missiles. Now, did Dean buy into the Iranian menace because he was paid to, or because he actually believes Tehran is gunning for Vermont? Does it matter?

DEAN AND SINGLE-PAYER

The question of belief leads into the weirdest skit in the hip-hop concept album that is Howard Dean. In November, the former Governor will give a talk about how great Big Medicine is, at a private get-together for medical industry professionals. The Geisinger Healthcare Symposium is next month. Hillary will be there, giving the keynote, “From Crisis to Cure.” According to Geisinger’s site:

The invitation-only event will be held Nov. 8, 9 and 10 on the Danville, Pennsylvania, campus of Geisinger Medical Center and will bring together a panel of the nation’s leading healthcare experts on policy, patient experience, wellness and technology.

What will Dean be speaking about?

Positive Impact of the Private Sector in Healthcare: Howard Dean, M.D., former Vermont governor and former chairman of the Democratic National Committee who ran for the party’s presidential nomination in 2004

Private sector? Positive impact? But this is Dean, who made his national name arguing for single-payer! You scoffers can scoff all you want. I can only speak for myself. I, for one, regret that I will not be there to see Dr. Dean’s magnificent defense of the large-hearted medical industry. For example, on September 20, 2015, the Times reported that

In August, Impax sold Daraprim to Turing for $55 million, a deal announced the same day Turing said it had raised $90 million from Mr. Shkreli and other investors in its first round of financing. Daraprim cost only about $1 a tablet several years ago, but the drug’s price rose sharply after CorePharma acquired it.

The private sector has made leaps and strides in degeneracy, and we do not give it enough credit for its glorious vision of a world where only Martin Shkreli can listen to Wu-Tang. It’s truly beautiful and calming that the U.S. Health Care industry spends five hundred billion dollars a year on administration alone, and thank sweet Christ our man Dean is there to praise the industry that bankrupts millions of Americans. What a brave minister of the healing gospel.

As Lee Fang wrote for The Intercept back in 2016, Dean has been in the pay of the health care lobby for some time.

Dean, though he rarely discloses the title during his media appearances, now serves as senior advisor to the law firm Dentons, where he works with the firm’s Public Policy and Regulation practice, a euphemism for Dentons’ lobbying team. … The Dentons Public Policy and Regulation practice lobbies on behalf of a variety of corporate health care interests, including the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, a powerful trade group for drugmakers like Pfizer and Merck.

In 2009, as Fang notes, Dean praised single-payer. That changed as soon as he moved full-time into lobbying. Fang again:

After Dean began working in the lobbying industry, he gave a talk about how to navigate the post-Citizens United campaign finance world. “I’ve advised a lot of clients in the industries that I usually end up working with, which are mostly health care industries, not to give any money to either side, or if you do, give it to both sides because politicians really don’t know much about the issues,” Dean said. “But they remember the ads, and they remember who was on whose side and who wasn’t, and it makes a big difference.”

What can account for Dean’s move to the profitable center? Why, his nature.

HE DOESN’T EVEN GO HERE

Dean is the last gasp of the Clinton Presidency, the moment right before Twitter swallowed up politics. Dean is the kind of progressive the Democrats used to follow; he symbolizes the final instant in American politics where grownups under forty took left-centrism with a straight face.

Dean is McCain, but less lucky. McCain scored his party’s nomination. Dean didn’t get that far. However, he definitely had McCain’s gifts for spinning a gullible press. The media painted him as a radical, but that was only in comparison to the times. In 2003 and 2004, Bush and the GOP were riding so high, they invaded Iraq on a rumor. Dean had the sand to say that Iraq was a mistake, and that set him apart from every other boneless Donkey in Washington.

That’s all it took to be a hero in 2004. No wonder the Governor of Vermont became famous. After failing in Wisconsin and his famous scream (which wasn’t much of a scream at all), he sank below the waves. Kerry was eventually nominated, met his destiny, and disintegrated into multiple windsurfing homunculi, never to be heard from again.

Dean, not President but very much alive, rose along an alternative path. In 2005, he became the DNC chair and instituted a fifty-state strategy which was incredibly useful and, frankly, blindingly obvious—make a national party a national party. Then, after Obama was lifted to the Executive. Dean and his followers promptly forgot everything that had got them there. The Republicans stayed a national party. Trump’s the result.

In his job as the chair, Dean traded on his image as the rebel leader of 2004. But any close reading of Dean’s record puts the lie to that assessment. Even during his supposedly courageous campaign, Dean argued for the War in Afghanistan; he advocated for the balanced-budget as if he’d just given birth to it onstage. He used the words “tax credit” with a straight face. His proposals were timid. In those days, with most of the Democratic party curled up around the radiator of the Iraq War, that counted as brave. Let me repeat that 2003 was deep in the Bush years, when Olbermann was considered a sage and Lance Armstrong could be a hero. During Dean’s run, the world cloned the horse and Arnold became governor of California, neither which should have been allowed by physics or good taste. Howard Dean was the great hope of progressives, but that counts more against Dean than progressives. Dean is selling out because he didn’t have much to sell to begin with.

Unless you’re one of those few political mutates who can see through tangled ship-rigging of time, you make use of what you have when you have it. In the Nineties hangover of Bush America, Dean was far enough out of the power structure to shock us all; he was honey to the bones, lithium to cranium. He was the only visible water in a vast desert. The rains have come since then. Why has Dean declined so? Because he was never high to begin with. He’s always been far from right, but this hardly makes him left.

Jason Rhode, Poste Magazine,

October 22, 2017 0 comments

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