Articles

US Envoy Becomes Next to Refuse Attending House Hearing Due to MKO Leader’s Attendance

Former US Ambassador to Syria Robert Ford joined former State Department counter-terror official Daniel Benjamin as a second witness that refused to testify at a House hearing because of the presence of the leader of the anti-Iran Mojahedin-e Khalq Organization (MKO also known as MEK, PMOI and NCRI) in the meeting.

“I didn’t want to be on a panel with the MEK. I was shocked they invited the MEK. What the MEK has to do with the ISIL, I don’t have a clue,” Ford told FP.

“I told the committee to put me on a panel without the MEK or I wouldn’t appear,” the former envoy stressed.

The April 29 hearing, in front of a House subcommittee on terrorism and nonproliferation, will focus on the threat from the ISIL, which has overrun much of Syria and Iraq. Among the invited speakers is Maryam Rajavi, president of the Paris-based National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), which is the umbrella organization for groups that include Mojahedeen-e-Khalq (MKO), the foreign policy reported.

Earlier, former State Department counterterror official Daniel Benjamin balked at sharing the spotlight with terrorist group’s leader.

Daniel Benjamin, formerly the State Department’s counterterror coordinator, also was slated to testify at the House hearing. But on Monday, Benjamin declared that “I will not appear at a hearing” about the ISIL with the MKO’s leader, because “I know of no substantive expertise that the MKO has developed on the ISIL.” News of Benjamin’s cancellation was first mentioned on Twitter by ALM Congress Pulse.

In an email to Foreign Policy, Benjamin noted that the MKO’s “exclusive focus” of concern has for decades been Iran. “So one has to wonder what the purpose of Rajavi’s presence on this panel is,” said Benjamin, who is now director of an international studies program at Dartmouth University.

“Being delisted as a Foreign Terrorist Organization — a decision I took part in — doesn’t mean that this group … has suddenly … become trustworthy or worthy of engagement,” he said.

Meanwhile, in a follow-up interview with Foreign Policy, Benjamin — who had a role in the State Department’s decision to delist the MEK — criticized the House panel for agreeing to let Rajavi testify by video. He said that is not a perk that is offered to US witnesses.

“Why won’t she travel here to testify?” Benjamin asked.

"MEK offered me tens of thousands of dollars to speak on its behalf, but i turned down the request," he underlined.

“This is still a group that has American blood from killings in the 1970s on its hands and killed many other innocents as well. That has never been apologized for,” the former senior American official stressed.

The Obama administration believed the MKO was providing misinformation in an effort to derail recent nuclear talks with Iran. During negotiations the MKO insisted Tehran was building underground nuclear facilities, an assertion dismissed by the State Department.

The MKO, founded in the 1960s, blended elements of Islamism and Stalinism and participated in the overthrow of the US-backed Shah of Iran in 1979. Ahead of the revolution, the MKO conducted attacks and assassinations against both Iranian and western targets.

The group started assassination of the citizens and officials after the revolution in a bid to take control of the newly-established Islamic Republic. It killed several of Iran’s new leaders in the early years after the revolution, including the then President, Mohammad Ali Rajayee, Prime Minister, Mohammad Javad Bahonar and the Judiciary Chief, Mohammad Hossein Beheshti who were killed in bomb attacks by the MKO members in 1981.

The group fled to Iraq in 1986, where it was protected by Saddam Hussein and where it helped the Iraqi dictator suppress Shiite and Kurd uprisings in the country.

The terrorist group joined Saddam’s army during the Iraqi imposed war on Iran (1980-1988) and helped Saddam and killed thousands of Iranian civilians and soldiers during the US-backed Iraqi imposed war on Iran.

Since the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, the group, which now adheres to a pro-free-market philosophy, has been strongly backed by neo-conservatives in the United States, who argued for the MKO to be taken off the US terror list.

The US formally removed the MKO from its list of terror organizations in early September, one week after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sent the US Congress a classified communication about the move. The decision made by Clinton enabled the group to have its assets under the US jurisdiction unfrozen and do business with the American entities, the State Department said in a statement at the time.

In September 2012, the last groups of the MKO terrorists left Camp Ashraf, their main training center in Iraq’s Diyala province. They have been transferred to Camp Liberty. Hundreds of the MKO terrorists have now been sent to Europe.

Earlier this month, the managing editor of Veterans Today from Atlanta said the number of Iranian terror victims is “in effect almost six 9/11’s,” but these attacks never got enough coverage in international media.

Jim W. Dean said even now, very few people know the scale of the Iranians who were killed in terrorist acts. “I would imagine your maimed casualties would also be high, and those statistics should be publicized as well.”

He went on to say that despite this great number of terror victims, “Iran did not crank up a huge War on Terror that slaughtered countless thousands of innocents, as happened with the Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld gangsters and their army of helpers.”

The US political analyst underscored that the story of Iranian victims of terror, “with all of its gory details,” still has to be brought to the international audience. “The Western media blackout shows they fear their audiences wanting to know more about why this was being covered up and eventually figuring out that these were offensive Western Intel operations during peacetime.”

"You have been maligned in Western media as a longtime supporter of international terrorism, but we know that hiding the history of Iran having been the top victim of terrorism was part of the false propaganda," he continued.

“Suppressing publicity of your being the major victim of terrorism at the time played a key role in falsely casting Iran as a major terror threat to everyone else,” Dean continued. “This is what people remember as it was an organized campaign in the Jewish controlled media for years and years.”

Regarding the presence of Iranian terrorist groups such as MKO in the US and their role in anti-Iran policies, Jim Dean said, “They have no negative profile here whatsoever. They are presented as oppressed freedom fighters and that is all the public ever hears.”

He pointed out that American people would be shocked, if Iranian terror victim groups and families were constantly touring the American college campuses and the church networks on speaking tours. “But the Zionist Lobby, the NeoCons and Christian Zionists would fight any attempt to do this, but that would be good as it would show they fear exposure.”

The US veteran went on to say that Iran should not act alone in exposing the state sponsors of terrorism, “as the victims of terror are now manufactured on an industrial scale, most of it state-sponsored terrorism, and the guilty parties naturally dread having this exposed.” “This is why I feel Iran is in a unique position to be the tip of the spear for efforts to uncover the long sordid history of state-sponsored terrorism and to publicize it on a continual basis to challenge the various nations involved to hold their leaders and operational organs responsible.”

“Their goal to destabilize target countries to protect their own nations will not be believable once the truth is out that these were purely offensive operations straight out of the Cold War operations manual, where anything could be done to hurt ‘the other side’ and be done with immunity, despite there being no state of war existing.”

He also made a reference to the Zionists’ killing of Iranian nuclear scientists and said, “Unfortunately, we see old tactics being reused, the ones with a track record of being successful and low risk.” “The killing of a few scientists would not have much effect on a major program. Personnel losses get replaced. And with 20/20 hindsight, we see from the 18 months of nuclear talks with Iran that neither Israel nor Britain ever disclosed any hard evidence of an Iranian nuclear weapons program.”

He finally said that he saw Iran nuclear deal as “an offering of good will from Obama,” and that “he wants to turn the corner on the sordid past of US diplomacy and start a new era.” “The average American is not aware of how our CIA and British intelligence basically hijacked your country and terrorized it under the Shah for a long time. No reparations for that flagrantly offensive act have ever been discussed here.”

May 6, 2015 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

The Backlash Against the MEK’s Fans in Congress

The enthusiasm of some hawks in Congress for the Mujaideen-e Khalq (MEK) has started to create a bit of a backlash. The Terrorism, Nonproliferation, and Trade Subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee invited the cult’s leader, Maryam Rajavi, to testify remotely as part of a panel on ISIS. That prompted one former State Department official to withdraw from the meeting entirely. Robert Ford, the former ambassador to Syria, has also said he won’t take part in a panel that includes Rajavi:

“I didn’t want to be on a panel with the MEK. I was shocked they invited the MEK. What the MEK has to do with the Islamic State, I don’t have a clue,” Ford told FP. “I told the committee to put me on a panel without the MEK or I wouldn’t appear.”

The refusal of these former officials to play along with some hawks’ disturbing admiration for the MEK is appropriate, but it is unfortunate that it should be necessary. The attention and praise lavished on the MEK in recent years by former officials, retired military officers, and politicians has been an embarrassing spectacle. Now the strange infatuation that many hawks have with the “former” terrorist group is spilling over into the regular business of Congress. As if to underscore how misguided inviting Rajavi was, a copy of the cult leader’s testimony shows that she intends to use her time to argue for regime change in Iran. Ali Gharib comments:

But more to the point, the MEK has always had only one goal: the overthrow of the Iranian regime. For decades, it has tried to shoehorn regional and geopolitical dynamics into its aim, irrespective of any salient connections.

This obviously has nothing to do with combating or understanding ISIS, and allowing her to speak at such a meeting just lends a totalitarian cult a platform from which it can promote its own warped agenda. Inviting Rajavi demonstrates exceptionally poor judgment, and her testimony will make a farce of the proceedings tomorrow. It would be one thing to invite a representative of this awful group if it had anything useful to contribute to the subject being discussed, but of course it doesn’t. The invitation to Rajavi is simply a way for hawks on this subcommittee to flaunt hostility to Iran and to indulge the fantasy that the MEK speaks for the Iranian opposition.

By Daniel Larison

May 5, 2015 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Why Is Congress Listening to an Ex-Terrorist Iranian Cult Leader?

In what one member of Congress called a “historic hearing” yesterday, Maryam Rajavi, leader of the controversial Iranian dissident group Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, or MEK, testified via satellite before a congressional subcommittee on the threats posed by ISIS and Iran, which she sees as one and the same. The MEK is considered a dangerous cult by many, and until three years ago was labeled a terrorist organization by the U.S. government. But after years of concerted lobbying, it enjoys a surprising amount of support on Capitol Hill. And yesterday the MEK displayed its growing influence in U.S. foreign policy debates.

It’s been a long and winding road for the MEK. Ideologically, the MEK originally sought to fuse revolutionary Marxism with Islam, but it has largely abandoned that rhetoric today for something more palatable to Western supporters. The group was formed in the 1960s by leftist Iranian students opposed to the Shah’s regime. During the 1970s it carried out attacks that killed several Americans working on defense projects in Iraq, and supported the takeover of the U.S. Embassy in 1979. After the Iranian Revolution, the group fell out with the new Islamic state and went underground, carrying out a series of high-profile attacks against the Iranian government while its leaders fled to Paris. During the 1980s and 1990s, the MEK fought as a private militia on behalf of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

But things changed after the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, when the MEK renounced violence (after being disarmed by the American military) and cast itself as supporters of the democratic opposition in Iran. Not everyone bought the group’s transformation into defenders of liberty, secularism, and women’s equality. Critics say the group began to transform into a cult centered around its leaders, the married couple Massoud and Maryam Rajavi, after the Iran-Iraq War, when thousands of its fighters were killed.

In 2003, New York Times reporter Elizabeth Rubin visited the group’s Iraqi compound at Camp Ashraf and described it as resembling a “fictional world of female worker bees … dressed exactly alike, in khaki uniforms and mud-colored head scarves, driving back and forth in white pickup trucks, staring ahead in a daze as if they were working at a factory in Maoist China.” Followers at Ashraf were reportedly cut off from the outside media, required to attend regular self-criticism sessions, and barred from personal friendships and emotional relationships.

But the group played its cards well as Western concerns grew over Iran’s nuclear program, reportedly passing information from its supporters within the Islamic Republic on nuclear facilities to the U.S. and, according to some reports, cooperating with Mossad to assassinate Iranian scientists. It also began a multiyear, multimillion-dollar lobbying campaign to remove itself from the terrorist list, including paying American figures like Rudy Giuliani and Howard Dean to give speeches on its behalf. It worked, and in 2012, Hillary Clinton took the MEK off the list.

Since then, the group’s influence has been growing. Its supporters regularly crowd hearings on Capitol Hill dealing with Iran and its increasing influence in Iraq. The Iraqi government has long viewed the MEK with hostility and has carried out several brutal attacks on its compound. U.S. officials also believe Iranian troops participated in a 2013 attack that killed at least 50 MEK members in 2013. One of its staunchest supporters on Capitol Hill, Sen. Robert Menendez of New Jersey, held up a planned arms sale to former Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s government in part over concerns about the treatment of the MEK.

Ted Poe, R-Texas, chairman of the House Subcommittee on Terrorism, Nonproliferation and Trade, which held Wednesday’s hearing, is another prominent MEK backer. Shaylyn Hynes, a spokeswoman for Poe, told me by email that Rajavi has a “long history of speaking against what she calls ‘Islamic fundamentalism,’” and “can speak to how ISIS’ ideology is both similar to and different from the mullahs leading Iran.” Asked if there were any concerns given the MEK’s history, Hynes replied, “the administration does not consider them a terrorist group and neither do we.”

Rajavi was certainly feeling the love from Congress on Wednesday, testifying before an overflow crowd at the hearing, which was titled “ISIS: Defining the Enemy.” Rep. Brad Sherman, D-California, compared her appearance to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s address to Congress that day, noting that Japan had also once been an enemy of the United States. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, is not a member of the subcommittee but dropped in to refer to Rajavi as a “great leader.”

Still, not everyone was as welcoming. Former State Department counterterrorism director Daniel Benjamin, who had been scheduled to testify, dropped out of the hearing rather than appear with Rajavi. Another, former ambassador to Syria and prominent administration critic Robert Ford, told Foreign Policy he was “shocked” to learn she was on the panel and demanded that the subcommittee “put me on a panel without the MEK or I wouldn’t appear.” He wound up speaking earlier in the day.

Suspect groups playing on American naiveté by telling gullible politicians exactly what they want to hear. Anybody remember that great band Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi Expatriates? They sure were reliable sources, weren’t they… More…

In her appearance, via satellite from Paris, Rajavi made a case familiar to anyone who listened to Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress in March: that ISIS and Iran are two sides of the same coin, despite the fact that Iranian-backed militias are fighting the group in Iraq. “The Mullahs regime is not part of any solution to the current crisis. Instead, it is the heart of the problem,” she said, referring to the Iranian government as the “Godfather of ISIS.” She referred to the current fight between ISIS and Iran as merely an “internal power struggle” within Islamic fundamentalism and warned that “fundamentalism of the Shiite kind is more dangerous than the Sunni one” because Shiites already have a state, Iran, which is projecting its power in Yemen, Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere.

While the support for Rajavi was a bipartisan affair, her message seemed to resonate in particular with critics of the Obama administration’s Iran policy. Hynes denied to me that the timing of the hearing had anything to do with the ongoing debate over nuclear diplomacy and Iran sanctions, saying “There is no relation. Ms. Rajavi is an expert on radical Islamist extremism and is being called to testify in that capacity.” Still, Rep. Lee Zeldin, R-New York,, who praised Rajavi and the MEK as the legitimate democratic opposition of Iran, said during the hearing that when he listens to the administration’s rhetoric on the Iranian regime, “I honestly do not know if my president is on the same team as I am.”

By Joshua Keating, Slate.com

May 4, 2015 0 comments

Iran Interlink Weekly Digest

Iran Interlink Weekly Digest – 94

++ The appearance of Maryam Rajavi by videolink (because she is refused a visa to enter the USA) in Congress last week attracted a flurry of responses from critics and ex members in Iran Interlink’s Farsi site. These largely ignored American politics and instead demanded to know what was being done to help the 2000+ hostages being held captive in Camp Liberty by the Rajavis. Open letters from families and ex members were addressed to Ban Ki Moon and UN Rapporteur Ahmad Shahid asking ‘where is the international community, why do you not have power over a cult?’ Several petitions sprung up with the same demands.

++ The daughter of former MEK member Ghorban Ali Hossein Nejad had visited Baghdad with her husband in another attempt to get a meeting with her estranged sister inside Camp Liberty. Along with several other families, she met with UN officials to plead for help in securing the safety and freedom of their loved ones from the camp. The MEK reacted by publishing a photograph of her but with the faces of UN officials blacked out and a caption underneath saying this was evidence of her working with the Iranian Intelligence ministry and Pasdaran.

++ The situation in Albania has worsened for around five hundred ex MEK members who were transferred there over the past two years. They report that Rajavi has sent two top level fixers – Mehdi Abrishamchi and Zohreh Merikhi – to intervene to stop the rapid dissolution of the MEK. Growing numbers are escaping the hold of the MEK and the cult is very worried about them exposing the internal crimes and abuses to the world. To stop people talking the MEK has employed intimidation tactics, saying that because the group is backed by the might of America and Israel it only takes a phone call for anybody’s refugee status to be denied and all aid cut off. Their message is that only the MEK can endorse a person’s refugee status and allow them to go to another country, claiming falsely that they endorsed the transfer of those accepted by the US. The MEK also says it will pay people if they declare themselves to the UN as ‘Mojahedin’ not as individuals and insist that they want to stay in Albania. This is interpreted as further evidence that the MEK is seeking to establish a closed cult base in that country with the intention of bringing Massoud Rajavi there. Outspoken critics of the MEK in Albania are now openly threatened in public meetings. People like Ehsan Bidi are told in front of the others that they will be killed and nobody will know how or by whom.

++ Former Iranian President Abol Hassan Bani Sadr has published the first of a series of damning articles in his newspaper ‘Enghelab Eslami’. Bani Sadr has begun to explain the real reasons why he left Massoud Rajavi and his Mojahedin Khalq after they arrived in Paris in 1981. It was not only, he says, because the MEK were traitors. In more detail he exposes what the MEK were doing in collaboration with Saddam Hussein without the knowledge of most of the MEK members. Further articles will be published revealing this hidden history.

In English:

++ The headlines tell the story this week as several articles reported on Maryam Rajavi’s testimony to Congress. ‘Cult Leader Will Tell Congress: Fight ISIS by Regime Change in Iran’ says Ali Gharib in The Nation. An analysis which was confirmed after the event with the headline ‘Controversial MEK Leader, Asked to Talk Islamic State, Instead Talks Iran’ by David Francis in Foreign Policy blog The Cable. Anger at the inclusion of Rajavi was expressed in Al Monitor’s article ‘Congressional invite to MEK (Mojahedin Khalq) sparks furious backlash’ with the succinct and accurate reaction from America’s former ambassador to Syria Robert Ford who said “What the fuck do the MEK know about the Islamic State?” He only agreed to testify in a separate panel because he said American soldiers deserved the benefit of his expertise. Ex-counterterrorism coordinator Daniel Benjamin refused to testify because of Rajavi citing as his reason that he “did not believe the MEK had anything to contribute to a discussion of [IS], and that this would be a distraction from an important issue,” he told Al-Monitor. “I said the story of the day would be the rehabilitation of the MEK, and I did not want to be associated with that in any way.”

Most articles pointed out the financial links between the MEK and members of Congress who support the cult.

In an article titled ‘Congress cannot rely on Rajavi’s testimony – Camp Liberty residents must be taken to safety now’, Anne and Massoud Khodabandeh predicted that Rajavi would not be able to criticise the Islamic State because she is on the same side as them. They urged members of Congress to question Rajavi about her hostages in Camp Liberty.

“Instead of condemning the Islamic State, Maryam Rajavi will speak about how the Iranian government wants to kill the people in Camp Liberty and is plotting every day to find ways to massacre them all. This is an old script. It has been the MEK script for thirty years. Does Ted Poe think the MEK has suddenly flipped sides and will line up with Iran against the Islamic State?

Whatever threats are faced by the residents of Camp Liberty, one thing is certain. The reason they cannot leave is because the MEK leaders refuse to allow them to leave. Members of Congress should robustly question Maryam Rajavi about that. They need to ask why the UN is unable to progress its work with these vulnerable people. Why, if they are in such direct danger, she doesn’t allow the Iraqi authorities to remove them to separate accommodation. The Iraqis have offered to place the MEK in various secure hotels and apartments in order to make life safer and more comfortable for them. The MEK have refused. Congress needs to ask Maryam Rajavi why the residents of Camp Liberty are not able to make contact with their relatives. Hundreds of families have travelled to Iraq since 2003 attempting to make contact with their loved ones. The MEK have accused them all of being ‘agents of the Iranian regime sent to kill them’. Is this plausible? Most of the family members are old people; the parents and siblings and in some cases the children of people trapped in Camp Liberty. Are they really desirous of massacring their loved ones?”

May 1, 2015

May 4, 2015 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Seeking to understand Islamic State, Congress hears from foe of Iran

A controversial foe of the Iranian government sought to tie the rise of the Islamic State terrorist group to the regime in Iran before Congress on Wednesday — a link that President Obama and many foreign policy experts have rejected but one that has gained traction on Capitol Hill as Obama continues nuclear talks with Iran.

A House foreign affairs subcommittee’s decision to invite Maryam Rajavi, a longtime leader of Mujaheddin-e Khalq, had generated objections before the hearing. The exile group, also known as MEK, was listed as a terrorist organization by the State Department as recently as 2012 and had been known to ally itself with Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein against Tehran.

But since the group formally renounced violence, the most aggressive U.S. foes of the Iranian regime have embraced MEK as an ally. With Wednesday’s hearing on the Islamic State, that alliance has been extended to discussions of the Sunni extremist group now attracting the attention of lawmakers as it wreaks havoc in the Middle East.

“The mullahs’ regime is not part of the solution to the current crisis,” Rajavi said, referring to the Iranian government. “It is indeed the heart of the problem.”The regime in Tehran is the “godfather” of the Islamic State, she said, adding that “the ultimate solution to this problem is regime change by the Iranian people and resistance.”

At a Senate hearing last month, Secretary of State John F. Kerry said it was a grave mistake to link the Shiite regime in Iran with the Sunni-led Islamic State. In fact, he said, the group has given the United States reason to make common cause with Iran.

“They want us to destroy ISIS; they want to destroy ISIS,” Kerry said, using an alternative name for the group. “ISIS is a threat to [Iran]; it’s a threat to the region.”

Rajavi testified as president-elect of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, MEK’s political affiliate. She appeared before the subcommittee on terrorism, nonproliferation and trade via video link from Paris.

Her appearance prompted another scheduled witness, former State Department counterterrorism official Daniel Benjamin, to withdraw.

“Congress can invite anyone it wants to testify, but I don’t understand why a group with a history like this should be accorded this treatment,” Benjamin, now a Dartmouth College scholar, said in an e-mail, citing MEK’s role in Iran’s 1979 revolution, and international terror attacks to which the group has been linked.

He asserted that MEK is chiefly interested in overthrowing the Iranian regime. “The notion that it has any particular insights into ISIS is absurd,” he said.

Shaylyn Hynes, a spokeswoman for the subcommittee’s chairman, Rep. Ted Poe (R-Tex.), said Rajavi was invited to testify on the basis of her “personal knowledge of the prejudices inherent in radical Islamist ideology” as well as her knowledge of the plight of MEK members living as refugees at a Baghdad camp.

Greg Miller contributed to this report.

May 3, 2015 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

MEK Uses Congressional Spotlight to Push Regime Change in Iran

WASHINGTON — MEK leader Maryam Rajavi told lawmakers on April 29 that the path to defeating the Islamic State (IS) runs through regime change in Tehran.

Testifying by teleconference from the exiled group’s headquarters in Paris, Rajavi urged the United States to stand up to Iran throughout the region. Her appearance has sparked controversy because the MEK was listed as a terrorist group until 2012, but several lawmakers defended her right to testify and held up her organization as a viable democratic alternative to the mullahs.

"Since [1979], the regime in Tehran has acted as the driving force for, and the epicenter of, this ominous phenomenon regionally and worldwide," Rajavi testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s panel on Terrorism, Nonproliferation and Trade. "The ultimate solution to this problem is regime change by the Iranian people and resistance."

The hearing drew a crowd of MEK supporters, including a who’s who of lawmakers who have long supported — and taken money from — the MEK and its Iranian-American affiliates. They include Reps. Judy Chu, D-Calif., and Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, who aren’t on the committee but stopped by to praise Rajavi.

"This is a very historic hearing," said Jackson Lee, who along with panel Chairman Ted Poe, R-Texas, actively pressed the State Department to take the MEK off its terrorism list. "This is one of the few times that the voice of the opposition [to] the government of Iran has been part of an official discussion. And that’s very important for the American people."

Other lawmakers, including ranking member William Keating, D-Mass., ignored Rajavi and directed their questions only at the other witnesses. Rep. Danny Davis, D-Ill., who also isn’t a committee member, was the only one to challenge her to explain why the United States should put its trust in a group that was kicked out of Iran in the early 1980s and fought alongside Saddam Hussein against Tehran.

"Over the past 30 years, the United States has been drawn into some serious diplomatic and military dead-ends in the Mideast by mistakenly backing individuals and organizations claiming popular support, which turned out to be exaggerated and somewhat manufactured," Davis told Rajavi. "Would you please tell us about the role of the [MEK] … and its place in the current Iranian political life?"

Rajavi said it was impossible to gauge support for the MEK because the mullahs would never allow free and fair elections. But she said the regime’s "fear" of the group and its efforts at "demonizing" was a strong indication of the MEK’s "strength."

Freshman Rep. Lee Zeldin, R-N.Y., left little doubt that he believed in her.

"I honestly do not know if my president is on the same exact team that I am," he told Rajavi. "Because there are individuals like you, who are willing to rise up and take control of your country’s future."

Rep. Brad Sherman, D-Calif., said the MEK’s terrorism designation belonged in the past and compared Rajavi’s appearance to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s address to Congress earlier in the day. He said the media had "attacked" the MEK’s inclusion in the hearing because she was advocating for a certain policy — namely, regime change — but argued that most if not all other witnesses do the same.

"I’ve never heard a witness that wasn’t providing information to further their public policy interests," Sherman said.

Other witnesses, however, took a much different view, arguing that Rajavi’s testimony detracted from the fight against IS. Former State Department counterterrorism coordinator Daniel Benjamin pulled out of the panel after finding out that Rajavi was testifying, and former Ambassador to Syria Robert Ford demanded to be seated on a separate panel.

"I wanted to have an in-depth discussion of the Islamic State in great detail, because, precisely, we have American servicemen and women in harm’s way," Ford told reporters after leaving the hearing before Rajavi’s appearance. "It’s really important to get the strategy right. And that requires a detailed discussion."

By: Julian Pecquet, Congressional Correspondent for Al-Monitor

May 3, 2015 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Buying your way to respectability

Maybe you’ve heard the saying “money talks, bullshit walks”? Well on Capitol Hill, money and bullshit are often the same thing, and they both get to talk as long as they want or until the cash runs out, whichever comes first. Take the People’s Mujahedin, or Mujahedin-i Khalq (MEK), an Iranian exile group that I’ve written about in the past. MEK used to reside on the State Department’s list of terrorist groups until 2012, when a massive PR campaign led by the most prominent collection of lobbyists that money could buy, bolstered by some strategic donations to the right politicians, convinced Hillary Clinton to remove them from the list. To be fair, the EU had already delisted MEK as a terror group in 2009, and Canada delisted them right after the US did, and obviously there’s no corruption in either Europe or Canada, so I’m sure this was all on the up and up. All MEK did to get listed as a terror group in the first place was little stuff like assassinating a half-dozen or so Americans and blowing up a few US-owned buildings in Iran in the 1970s, before the revolution. Totally innocent stuff, you know.

MEK, known for its opposition to Iran’s current clerical government, was actually founded in the 1960s as a Marxist group opposed to the Shah and his decadent, Western, corrupt, yadda yadda, you know the drill. After the Iranian Revolution, which MEK fully supported, its leader, Massoud Rajavi, found himself getting the short end of the stick in the new Iranian order, so he fled the country before Ayatollah Khomeini could throw him in prison. He set up in Iraq and struck up a friendship with an amiable fellow named Saddam Hussein, and also started dropping MEK’s previous anti-Western and Marxist rhetoric in an effort to get on America’s good side. Also, where MEK had criticized the Shah for having cordial relations with Israel, after the Revolution it started working with the Israelis to carry out covert attacks inside Iran, particularly assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists. In 2002, the National Council of Resistance of Iran, which claims to be Iran’s “government-in-exile” but is really MEK’s cuddlier political front group, claimed to have revealed information about the existence of Iran’s Natanz uranium enrichment facility to the US, which is true inasmuch as you’re willing to ignore the fact that the US already knew about Natanz before NCRI/MEK said anything.

Since he took firm control of the group after the 1979 revolution, MEK has essentially existed as Massoud Rajavi’s personal entourage/fan club. It’s got a creepy cult of personality vibe about it even when you get past the fact that it has demonstrably engaged in numerous real-deal terror attacks over the course of its existence (it supposedly “renounced violence” in 2001, but it kept right on assassinating Iranian nuclear scientists, so…). It’s even mirrored that not-at-all creepy US cult, Scientology, in that, not unlike David Miscavige’s missing-since-2007 wife, Shelly, nobody has seen or heard from Massoud Rajavi in over a decade, since the Iraq War, when the US actually targeted MEK camps (they were, after all, still on the terror list) and upended things for Massoud’s bro Saddam. MEK insists that Massoud is alive and well and in hiding, but control over the organization appears to have gone to his wife, Maryam Rajavi.

All of this is prelude to the news that Maryam Rajavi will testify tomorrow by videoconference to the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s Subcommittee on Terrorism, Nonproliferation, and Trade about…the fight against ISIS. Maryam Rajavi has no experience as a counterterrorism expert, nor does MEK have any experience fighting (or any reason to fight, let’s be honest) against ISIS. Subcommittee chair Ted Poe (R-TX) claims that he invited her to testify “about the threats the Islamic State (IS) poses to MEK members who remain at Camp Liberty in Baghdad,” but, and this may come as a shock so sit down before you read it, she plans on explaining how the US should fight ISIS by overthrowing the clerical government in Iran. That makes no logical sense, but MEK has never been about “making sense.”

Rajavi’s invitation to testify has caused a bit of a kerfuffle around tomorrow’s hearing, as both former US Ambassador to Syria Robert Ford and former State Department Coordinator for Counterterrorism Daniel Benjamin have flatly refused to appear alongside Rajavi (Ford has said he would be willing to testify on a different panel, which the subcommittee apparently has decided to do, but Benjamin seems to have pulled out of the hearing altogether). Benjamin cited MEK’s past terrorist activity, including its participation in the 1979 US embassy hostage crisis, as the reason for his unwillingness to testify alongside Rajavi, while Ford was a little blunter:

“The committee handled this abysmally,” Ford told Al-Monitor in a phone call late Monday. “What the fuck do the MEK know about the Islamic State?”

Poe has been defending his decision to include Rajavi in the hearing (at the cost, mind you, of getting testimony from an actual counter-terrorism expert) because she can testify about how threatened the MEK members in Baghdad are by ISIS (which, if they’re in Baghdad, is “hardly at all”). The problem with that is a) she’s planning on testifying about regime change in Tehran instead and b) why doesn’t Poe invite someone from, say, Iraq’s Yazidi community, which is actually directly threatened by ISIS, to testify before his subcommittee? Maybe (SPOILER ALERT: here’s where the money comes in) it has something to do with the fact that nobody from the Yazidi community has managed to put a cool $38K in cash and prizes in Ted Poe’s pockets the way MEK has:

Poe received $17,900 in campaign contributions from supporters of the MEK between 2009 and 2014, according to an analysis I conducted of campaign finance data. Surprisingly, nearly half—or $8,600—of the total flowed into his campaign while the group was still on the State Department’s terrorism list between 2009 and its delisting in 2012.

In 2013 and 2014, the group also paid for $19,671 in travel expenses (including business-class plane fare) for Poe’s travel to MEK events in France.

So, hey, if you’ve ever wanted to testify before Congress but there’s no discernible reason why they should invite you to do so, plus maybe you’ve got some unsavory things in your past that could complicate matters, don’t worry! Just fork over a few tens of thousands to your favorite congressperson and you could soon find yourself offering your “expertise” (or irrelevant ranting, but whatever, you bought your time fair and square) to our nation’s top legislators! Good luck!

ATTWIW.com

May 3, 2015 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq Organization's Propaganda System

Threat of IS for Liberty residents?

"She knows more about what’s taking place at Camp Liberty than any person, anywhere," Congressman Ted Poe said about Maryam Rajavi the leader of the Mujahedin khalq Organization (the MKO) who is supposed to testify before a hearing in the US Congress next week. "And that’s why she’s testifying." [1]

Yes, Congressman Poe is right. Maryam Rajavi is the most informed person about what is really going in the MKO camps in Iraq or France but she is not the most reliable person at all. She is not reliable because of the long history of fraud and Goebbels -like propaganda of her group.

Maryam Rajavi, the self-claimed president of National Council of Resistance of Iran (the propaganda arm of the MKO), will testify via video conference on April 29 at a House Foreign Affairs terrorism panel on "ISIS: Defining the Enemy”. Surprisingly, the organizers of the event are supposed to define the threat of ISIS terrorists via testimonies of Maryam Rajavi while she has never taken any position against ISIS. [2]

Ann and Massoud Khodabandeh, are the couple who happened to be the disassociated members of the MKO and also the experts on the organization explain why Congress should not rely on Rajavi’s testimony to discuss the threat of the Islamic State:

“She won’t. She can’t. Because the MEK are friends of the Islamic State (IS), they support the Islamic State. Maryam Rajavi has spoken in Farsi in favour of the Islamic State. The Islamic State do not pose any danger to the MEK in Camp Liberty. In fact, before the Iraqi army and militias drove IS back from its encroachment, it was clear to all those who know the MEK that the leaders were hoping that when IS reached Baghdad, the MEK would be liberated from Camp Liberty and join the terrorist forces.” [3]

It is well known that any disassociated member who tells the truth about the organization and denounces the MKO and exposes the abuse by its leader will be branded by the group as the agent of the Iranian intelligence service. Hence, the US officials should be cautious about letting the MKO’S leader to attend a Congressional hearing.

According to Al Monitor, Daniel Benjamin, formerly the State Department’s counter terror coordinator, also was slated to testify at the House hearing. But on Monday, Benjamin declared that “I will not appear at a hearing” about the Islamic State with the MEK’s defacto leader, because “I know of no substantive expertise that the MEK has developed on ISIS.” News of Benjamin’s cancellation was first mentioned on Twitter by ALM Congress Pulse. [4]

Benjamin told committee staff that he "did not believe the MEK had anything to contribute to a discussion of [IS], and that this would be a distraction from an important issue," he told Al-Monitor. "I said the story of the day would be the rehabilitation of the MEK, and I did not want to be associated with that in any way." [5]

Foreign Policy also quoted from Benjamin that the MEK’s “exclusive focus” of concern has for decades been Iran. “So one has to wonder what the purpose of Rajavi’s presence on this panel is,” Benjamin told FP. [6]

“Being delisted as a Foreign Terrorist Organization — a decision I took part in — doesn’t mean that this group … has suddenly … become trustworthy or worthy of engagement,” he said. [7]

Besides Daniel Benjamin, Robert Ford former US ambassador to Syria who was also invited to testify at the hearing declined to attend the event. According to Al Monitor, Ford said he would not testify at the same time as Maryam Rajavi". The committee handled this abysmally," Ford told Al-Monitor in a phone call late Monday. "What the fuck do the MEK know about the Islamic State?" [8]

A very comparable reaction was made by Ahmed Shahid UN Special Reporter on Human Rights last year. Shahid who had been invited to address in a similar event in Canadian Parliament withdrew from the program because Maryam Rajavi was supposed to deliver speech too. [9]

However, Congressman Ted Poe who is on top of the MKO pay roll, still defends his invitation despite Benjamin’s considerations on the MKO’s violent history. Definitely, Congressman Poe might not be so naïve to get misled by the propaganda of a cult of personality but he might be paid enough to cover the truth. The untrustworthy background of the MKO to deal with the International Community is so well reported and documented that you may find a case of the group’s deceitful approach on Ted Poe’s own website on House of Representatives.

Ardavon Niami’s article which had been originally published on NIAC website on December 12 2011, was available on Poe’s page the following day. The article was focused on the destiny of residents of Camp Ashraf before its closure in 2013. Niami reports that the relocation process of Ashraf residents was obstructed by their leaders.” U.S. officials testified before the House Foreign Affairs Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee last week that efforts to peacefully resolve the standoff are being rebuffed by MEK leadership”, He wrote. “U.S. Special Adviser on Camp Ashraf Daniel Fried said MEK leadership has impeded a refugee resettlement process and interfered with the UN’s ability to conduct interviews with individuals at the encampment.” [10]

Ted Poe’s web page says, “Fried told Congress that the Administration’s efforts have been met intransigence by Camp Ashraf leadership to agree to any relocation plan other than en masse relocation outside Iraq.” [11]

Although, the relocation of Ashraf residents was finally accomplished in 2013 –after over a decade of international efforts—about 100 of its high ranking members of the group who stayed in the Camp under the order of the leadership faced a deadly attack in September 2013, following which 53 members were killed!

Furthermore, the relocation process from Iraq Camp Liberty to Europe is very slow due to obstacles made by the MKO leaders. Based on testimonies of former members and various documented and investigated reports, the most crucial threat to residents of the MKO’s camps, is caused by the group’s leaders who do not have any consideration for the members. They only care for their own interests.

By Mazda Parsi

References:

[1] Pecquet, Julian, MEK leader to testify before Congress, Al Monitor, April 23, 2015

[2] ibid

[3]Khodabandeh, Ann & massoud, Congress cannot rely on Rajavi’s testimony, The Iran Interlink, April26, 2015

[4 ] Pecquet, Julian, Congressional invite to MEK sparks furious backlash, Al Monitor, April 28, 2015

[5]ibid

[6] Francis, David, Renowned U.S. Arabist Is Second Witness to Refuse to Appear With MEK Leader, Foreign Policy , April28, 2015

[7]ibid

[8] Pecquet, Julian, Congressional invite to MEK sparks furious backlash, Al Monitor, April 28, 2015

[9] Gharib, Ali , Controversial Iranian Exile Shakes Up Canadian Parliament’s Human Rights Program, The Nation, May 14, 2014

[10] Niami , Ardavon, U.S. Officials Warn that MEK is Obstructing Humanitarian Solution in Ashraf, NIAC, December 12, 2011

[11] ibid

April 30, 2015 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Poe’s Financial Ties To MEK May Explain Maryam’s House Testimony

Wednesday’s scheduled congressional hearing on “ISIS: Defining the Enemy” is rapidly shrinking in size. Two key witnesses are refusing to attend due to the invitation to testify that Ted Poe (R-TX), the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Terrorism, extended to Maryam Rajavi, leader of the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (MEK).

Former U.S. Ambassador to Syria Robert Ford and former State Department counterterrorism director Daniel Benjamin have both said that they won’t appear for the hearing after learning that Rajavi would also be a witness on the same panel. She is scheduled to participate via videoconference from Paris, the headquarters the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), a MEK front.

MEK, which the State Department removed from terrorism list in 2012 following a lengthy and expensive lobbying campaign, is believed to have been responsible for the killing of six Americans in Iran between 1973 and 1976.

The group, which went into exile after losing a violent power struggle in the early years of the Islamic Republic, aligned itself with Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war and, despite claims to being Iran’s viable democratic government in exile, is widely believed to have little or no grassroots support in Iran. The group has long faced criticism from Iran specialists and rights groups such as Human Rights Watch that it has devolved into a cult based on devotion to Maryam and her long-missing husband, Massoud Rajavi. According to numerous accounts, the group exerts a high degree of control over its followers, going so far as to mandate divorces and celibacy for their soldiers.

But, as Ali Gharib and I documented in February, MEK’s influence in Washington, particularly with Iran hawks, has coincided with a flow of money from the group to American politicians, in particular, to embattled Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) who is currently under indictment on unrelated federal corruption charges.

So why did Poe and the Republican majority on the terrorism subcommittee decide to invite Rajavi (a copy of whose testimony was obtained by Ali who previewed it Tuesday on The Nation’s website) Campaign finances may offer at least part of the answer.

In 2013 and 2014, the group also paid for $19,671 in travel expenses (including business-class plane fare) for Poe’s travel to MEK events in France.

In contrast, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), returned a $2,600 campaign contribution from a MEK supporter in Virginia in 2013. “During routine due diligence by campaign staff, it was discovered that a few donors had associations the campaign was uncomfortable with,” a spokesman for Graham’s campaign told Politico. “In an abundance of caution, the contributions were refunded.”

Poe seems less concerned about the association. His insistence on inviting Rajavi adds to the irony of his chairmanship of the terrorism subcommittee (shades of Sen. James Inhofe’s chairmanship of the Senate Environment Committee).

With Ford and Benjamin out, Rajavi will be joined on Wednesday by only one other witness: Walid Phares, a pro-Israel Lebanese-American Maronite Christian with a long association with hard-line neo-conservatives and a terrorism “expert” for Fox News. During Lebanon’s civil war that raged from 1975 through the 1980’s, Phares served as an ideologue for the Lebanese Forces, an umbrella group of various Christian militias. Some of these militias carried out the Sabra and Shatila massacres in September, 1982, in which at many as 3,000 Palestinians—mostly women, children and the elderly—were killed following Israel’s conquest of Beirut. Among other positions, he served as co-chairman of the Middle East working group of Mitt Romney’s foreign policy advisory team.

by Eli Clifton,

April 30, 2015 0 comments

Maryam Rajavi

Cult Leader Will Tell Congress: Fight ISIS by Regime Change in Iran

Last week, the House Foreign Affairs’ Subcommittee on Terrorism, Nonproliferation, and Trade announced that a controversial Iranian exile opposition figure would be testifying via video uplink at a hearing on the Islamic State, known as ISIS. What does the witness, Maryam Rajavi, a co-leader of the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK), have to say about the subject at hand?

Rajavi’s written testimony, a copy of which was obtained by The Nation, focuses on an unexpected way of bringing ISIS to heel: by fostering regime change in Iran. “The ultimate solution to this problem” of Islamic extremism, such as ISIS, Rajavi says in the written statement, “is regime change by the Iranian people and Resistance”—a reference to the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), the MEK’s political wing.

It sounds counter-intuitive—Iran’s aid to the Iraqi government and various Iraqi militias, after all, is widely credited with stopping ISIS’s advances there—but not when you know about the MEK’s tortuous past. Over the years, the MEK has been nothing if not opportunistic; animated by the twisted logic that the enemy of its enemy is its friend, the group seizes whatever political angle is fashionable at the moment to bring them relevance (Congress is happy to oblige). But more to the point, the MEK has always had only one goal: the overthrow of the Iranian regime. For decades, it has tried to shoehorn regional and geopolitical dynamics into its aim, irrespective of any salient connections.

The plan to bring down ISIS by toppling Iran’s government, then, is little more than the latest chapter of group’s 50-year history of monomaniacally trying to install itself atop the Iranian government. Indeed, Rajavi is testifying at Congress with the title of “president-elect” of the NCRI, which hopes to run a transitional government immediately upon the fall of the Islamic Republic.

Founded as an Islamo-Marxist revolutionary group in the 1960s, the MEK spent its early years pursuing its Quixotic aims by opposing the Shah’s government with a vengeance: through student organizing, outright terrorism—including against American targets when the United States was allied with the Shah, helping to earn its 1997 American designation as a terror group—and fighting at the vanguard of the Islamic Revolution. By the 1980s, after the leader of the revolution, Ruhollah Khomeini, kicked the group out of Iran, critics were regularly deriding the MEK as a cult of personality—not least because of its continuing “wacky” behavior, as a former congressional aide put it to me for a feature I wrote this winter with Eli Clifton.

So how do Rajavi and MEK plan to end the threat from ISIS by upending the Iranian regime? That’s not so clear. But it definitely involves ignoring, despite the current clashes, the distinction between Sunni and Shia extremism—including, for example, propagandistic exaggerations like saying that “Shiite militias act more viciously than their Sunni equivalents, such as ISIS”—and pointing out several times that Iran went Islamist before anyone else. That’s about it.

It’s worth noting, however, that the MEK does have some experience in Iraq: after going into exile, its leaders gathered their fighters in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, to take his side in the Iran-Iraq war—earning the enmity of many Iranians. After the war ended, the MEK, led by Maryam Rajavi and her husband Massoud (who hasn’t been seen in public for a dozen years), stuck around and enjoyed Hussein’s largesse, acting, periodically, as mercenaries to crush incipient uprising against the Iraqi strongman—earning, in turn, the enmity of many Iraqis.

After Hussein’s fall in 2003, the American invaders stripped the MEK of its multitude of arms. (Curiously, for a group that claims to have renounced violence in 2001, Rajavi cites in her Congressional testimony the “disarming” of the MEK as a “misguided polic[y]” that helped give rise to Muslim extremism—but not the invasion that toppled their benefactor itself.) The MEK then languished in its camps, coming under periodic attack by a murky combination of the Iraqi army and, reportedly, government-aligned Shia militias. Dozens of MEK adherents were slaughtered.

The period also marked the growth of an ardent pro-MEK lobby in the United States. As Eli Clifton and I detailed in our Intercept piece this winter, a multimillion-dollar campaign kicked into gear to remove the MEK from the US State Department’s terrorist list. Once that hurdle was cleared, the MEK—despite its cult-like practices—began to accumulate more mainstream power in Congress, where super-hawkishness against Iran is guaranteed to attract powerful bedfellows, including large amounts of pro-Israel donor money and more modest cash from MEK supporters themselves.

Meanwhile, the massacres of the MEK’s ex-fighters at its Iraqi desert bases fueled the group’s hatred of the Iraqi government led by Nouri al-Maliki, which had failed to protect them. Just as the MEK had grown close to Hussein because he was an arch-enemy of the Iranian regime, the group likewise reviled Maliki’s government, and vice-versa, for its closeness to the Iranians—the Islamic Republic had hosted and fostered Maliki’s movement in exile before the 2003 war, and supported his Shia government after its rise to power in Iraq.

When ISIS began to rip apart what was still then Maliki’s Iraq, the MEK’s prevailing logic seemed to again fall back on the enemy of its enemy. Perhaps chastened by their own labeling by the US as a terrorist organization, the group seldom uses the word “terrorism” in conjunction with ISIS. Instead, MEK propaganda refers to ISIS as “extremists,” in some instances. At other times, the language is more ambiguous: Last June, when ISIS took the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, one MEK website gave a triumphalist account of the conquest, referring to ISIS as “revolutionary forces.”

Historical revisionism of the ISIS assault started almost immediately. “These forces have taken over the Badoush prison and they had hundreds of prisoners that had been proclaimed to be terrorists and they freed them,” read a Persian-language post on the website Mojahedin.org. HRW, however, collected survivor testimonies from the prison takeover that told a different story: “After seizing Badoush Prison near Mosul, the gunmen from Islamic State, also known as ISIS, separated the Sunni from the Shia inmates,” an HRW release said, “then forced the Shia men to kneel along the edge of a nearby ravine and shot them with assault rifles and automatic weapons.”

Herein lies the MEK contradiction behind its early positions. On the one hand, ISIS, like the MEK, is militantly opposed to Iranian influence in the region. But Rajavi needs to gin up support in Washington. So she poses herself in opposition to ISIS, claiming the best strategy for fighting the marauding Sunni terrorists is to… overthrow the first regime in the region to commit blood, money and heavy weaponry to the fight against ISIS.

As ISIS became the world’s most famous terrorist group, the MEK eased its whitewash and adopted the stances Rajavi will bring to Congress on Thursday: namely, that ISIS is an extremist group—whose model and inspiration is Iran, however nonsensical that point is. That Congress would invite these ex-terrorists—Rajavi’s past prevents her from getting a visa, the reason for her video testimony—speaks ill of their commitment to shaping serious policy on either ISIS or Iran. Rajavi’s participation proved such an embarrassment that a distinguished diplomat, Ambassador Robert Ford, and another witness withdrew from the hearing rather than speak alongside her on the dais—just as the top UN official for human rights in Iran withdrew from a program last year in Canadian parliament where Rajavi was set to appear.

The MEK’s story is a tragic one of sustained failure, of being massacred and massacring, of being abused and abusing its own people, of terrorizing and being terrorized, and of a constantly morphing politics consistent only in its oddness and toxicity. That story needs to be heard, but as a cautionary tale, not as expert advice. Instead, Congress is asking one of the groups most hated in Iraq and Iran what to do about those countries’ woes. What could go wrong?

Ali Gharib, The Nation

April 30, 2015 0 comments

Newer Posts

Older Posts