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Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

The week the neocons jumped the shark

As of last week, I have concluded that the so-called “neo” conservatives have “jumped the shark,” if I may invoke a cliché from popular culture.

And it’s not just any shark. It’s a great white.

If you doubt that, consider a couple of pieces that ran recently on the op-ed pages of the New York Times.

One came from columnist Tom Friedman, who is generally located on the liberal internationalist side of the same coin as the neocons. In a recent column he said he would “toss out” for discussion the question “Should we be arming ISIS?”

Uhh, no. They have a habit of cutting journalists’ heads off – though I suspect that might be superfluous in the case of Friedman.

Then there was the piece by former UN ambassador John Bolton headlined “To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran.” It contained the usual cliches about weapons of mass destruction and the need to stop terrorism along with this proposition: “Such action should be combined with vigorous American support for Iran’s opposition, aimed at regime change in Tehran.”

In the past Bolton has identified the “opposition” as called Mojahedin-e-Khalq. This is a shadowy cult that makes the Scientologists look transparent by comparison. In the past MEK members have killed Americans in terror attacks. More recently they are seen as the likely suspects in the car-bombing of nuclear scientists in Tehran.

Until 2012, MEK was listed by the State Department as a terrorist group. That designation was lifted because of the lobbying by, of all people, John Bolton.

And just to show the bipartisan nature of this sort of thing, MEK is also a pet cause of our Democratic senior U.S. Senator, Bob Menendez.

Menendez leaped a tiburon or two himself earlier this year when he accused a president of his own party of mouthing “talking points straight out of Tehran” on those nuclear negotiations with the Iranians.

Those talks have been going on for 12 years and will probably drag on for quite a bit longer. Yet of late the neocons have decided to spread panic about them and also about the dire threat from those nasty Houthis in Yemen.

Few Americans even know where Yemen is or who the Houthis are. In fact, they are a tough mountain tribe of the Shia faith who have a history of defeating their Sunni enemies in battle. Among those enemies are Al Qaeda. Yeah, that Al Qaeda – the guys who blew up the World Trade Center and started this whole thing.

(Go to http://www.nj.com/opinion/index.ssf/2015/03/

more_on_menendezs_favorite_ex_terrorist_group_-_an.html to the many of my fellow traditional conservatives who get derided as “isolationists” for pointing out that we should take an America-first attitude and stop messing around in the Mideast.)

You may have noticed a pattern here. In the name of the War on Terror we are being asked to take the side of a wide range of terrorists.

That fits with the origin of that cliché. Wikipedia traces it to an episode of the series “Happy Days” in which the Fonzie character jumps over a shark-filled pool on water skis. It signals “a particular scene, episode, or aspect of a show in which the writers use some type of gimmick in an attempt to keep viewers’ interest, which is taken as a sign of desperation and is seen by viewers to be the point at which the show had strayed irreparably from its original premise.

Paul Mulshine, NJ.com

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Iran Interlink Weekly Digest

Iran Interlink Weekly Digest – 91

++ An hour before the announcement from Lausanne on the result of the nuclear negotiations, Ramin Fakhari, an Iranian analyst, published an article analysing the situation. He concluded that irrelevant of the outcome – whether there is agreement or not and who names who to be the winner or loser – ensuring that there is one less nuclear bomb in the world, and reducing the savage effects of sanctions on the ordinary citizens of Iran is a victory for all the people of the world. The real winners are the people and the losers are Israel, the Saudis and the MEK.

++ Maryam Rajavi and the NCRI websites published statements in support of bombing Yemen, accusing the victims of these bombs of being “agents of the Iranian regime”. The critical Farsi Commentariat have denounced Rajavi for taking this cruel position at a time that the UN says this action is in violation of international law and has expressed deep concern for the lives of ordinary citizens there. Critics say that this is not the first time Rajavi has taken such an anti-human stance, and remind us of the MEK’s collusion with Saddam Hussein to kill their own people and their begging the Neocons to bomb their mothers’ and sisters’ homes in Iran. This is normal, they say, for Rajavi and the MEK.

++ This week the MEK has again asked to be armed in Iraq. Many critics ridiculed this, reminding the MEK that they are in the process of being expelled by the UN. Ehsan Bidi, who is in Tirana, goes into more detail about what is really in Massoud Rajavi’s mind. Bidi suggests that Rajavi is desperate to stop people being transferred to third countries – Albania, the US, Europe; he produces evidence of the ways the MEK is trying to prevent the UN from taking people to America. When Rajavi says “Iran wants to kill us, that’s why we need arms”, what he really wants, Bidi says, is a way to legitimize killing the residents of Camp Liberty. Rajavi even has people who will do this killing – bands related to the Saddamists and ISIS. Bidi then reflects on MEK history in this respect; whenever Rajavi announces that “Khamenei wants to kill us”, some weeks later a disaster strikes and several MEK are killed. This only happens to disaffected members not the commanders. There is clear danger that this will happen again soon. Bidi appeals to everyone to inform the authorities in their own countries and help prevent a tragedy from happening again.

++ The MEK published a video on its satellite and websites in reaction to an open letter by 80 ex members and critics addressed to the President of France asking him – as her host – to put pressure on Maryam Rajavi to release the people in Camp Liberty. The letter also emphasised the MEK’s threats to kill critics all over Europe, saying that the French should take action to stop this, not the potential victims. Ghorban Ali Hossein Nejad has examined the MEK’s video message and come to an interesting conclusion. He points out that Rajavi has not only backed down from his threats to kill his critics, but has now apologised for this. Hossein Nejad explains that this is clearly the result of France’s security services having a word with the leaders and telling them that incitement to murder is illegal in Europe. Rajavi has had to take his words back because clearly Europe is not Iraq.

In English:

++ In the week leading up to the historic Lausanne announcement, Paul Mulshine has written two articles in NJ.com about the MEK and America. The first ‘More on Senator Menendez’s favorite (ex?) terrorist group and the insanity of neocon policy in the Mideast’ criticizes efforts to push America into a war with Iran. He mentions Menendez and Bolton as paid advocates of the MEK position, saying “As part of that propaganda, we’re supposed to think it’s just peachy to support the MEK in its efforts to topple the Iranian government. Or in other words, we’re supposed to support a terrorist effort in the midst of a War on terrorism.” His second article, ‘The week the neocons jumped the shark’ attacks Bolton and the neocon agenda as a distraction saying “Then there was the piece by former UN ambassador John Bolton headlined “To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran.” It contained the usual cliches about weapons of mass destruction and the need to stop terrorism along with this proposition: “Such action should be combined with vigorous American support for Iran’s opposition, aimed at regime change in Tehran. In the past Bolton has identified the “opposition” as called Mojahedin-e-Khalq. This is a shadowy cult that makes the Scientologists look transparent by comparison. In the past MEK members have killed Americans in terror attacks. More recently they are seen as the likely suspects in the car-bombing of nuclear scientists in Tehran.”

++ In a bad week for the MEK, Jim Newell for Salon, also writes about another MEK paid advocate, this time on the Democrat side. In his article “Howard Dean’s Iran secret: “Famously dovish” Dem is paid shill for Iranian regime change group”, Newell says “Dean, along with the likes of John Bolton, Rudy Giuliani, Ed Rendell and other notables, has given paid speeches at MEK rallies. In the first term of the Obama administration, MEK’s allies launched a expensive P.R. effort to get the State Department to de-list MEK as a Foreign Terrorist Organization. (Anyone who lived in the D.C. metropolitan area between 2010 and 2012 will be familiar with a seemingly endless cycle of television ads calling for this.) The effort was successful: in September 2012, just before the election, the State Department de-listed MEK. It was a heavy, cynical lobbying effort that offered a real education in the how subjectively the government applies the term “terrorism” to suit its interests.” Newell comments sarcastically “Dean takes the same approach as Benjamin Netanyahu: suggesting that there is a “better deal” out there in which Iran eliminates every last trace of its nuclear infrastructure, reforms itself into the world’s number one protector of human rights, and abandons all of its regional interests. Perhaps, if John Kerry had the courage to twist a few more arms, he could even get Ayatollah Khameini and his regime to self-abdicate and put in place an American puppet government. How about… the MEK?”

April 3, 2015

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Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

More on Senator Menendez’s favorite (ex?) terrorist group and the insanity of neocon policy in the Mideast

Even at this late date a lot of people claim not to know the difference between us true conservatives and the so-called “neo” conservatives.

Hint: “Neo” means new. And if you have new beliefs, then by definition you’re not a conservative. We stick to the tried and true. Plato’s fine but that Aristotle guy was getting a little ahead of himself.

Another hint: If you’re a true conservative, then people will call you an “isolationist.”

They mean it as an insult. But the way they define the term it’s really a compliment. To the neocons, an isolationist is anyone who doesn’t believe the Beltway crowd should micro-manage every event everywhere on Earth.

In that regard, you might have seen that piece I did recently showing our senior senator’s ties to a shadowy Iranian cult called Mojahedin e Khalq.

The more I look into these characters, the more I realize how nutty the so-called “War on Terror” being carried out by the so-called “neo” conservatives has become.

And now we’ve reached the point where we’re supposed to take the side of the terrorists in the War on terror.

As I noted in a prior post, the neocons and their hired mouthpieces have been trying to sell the American public in the proposition that we should support Saudi Arabia in its efforts to impose the extremist Wahabbi form of Islam on the people of neighboring Yemen.

This is absurd on its face, as is the idea that the U.S. should support the Islamic Republic’s side in the current dust-up in the Mideast.

Yet that’s what we’re being told. Our wonderful allies the Saudis – you know, the folks who brought us the 9/11 attacks – are tacitly backing ISIS in an effort to score points against Iran.

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.

If you wish to begin your deprogramming I suggest starting with this piece by Daniel Larison of the American Conservative on Republican Bolton’s connection with Democrat Bob Menendez’s favorite Iranian cult. Here’s a passage that reminds us that the Saudis have done a good job of buying support from both parties:

Bolton is hardly the only former official, retired officer, or ex-politician to do this, but for the last several years he has been a vocal cheerleader of the Mujahideen-e Khalq cult (and “former” terrorist group) and its political organization. He has been consistently misrepresenting a totalitarian cult as a “democratic” Iranian opposition group. When Bolton or someone else with this record talks about “vigorous American support for Iran’s opposition,” we can be fairly sure that he means that the U.S. should be backing the MEK in its quest for seizing power in Iran. This confirms Bolton’s extremely poor judgment and underscores how truly crazy his overall argument for war with Iran is. It also reminds us how oblivious Iran hawks such as Bolton are to the political realities inside Iran. Once again we have a hawkish demand for U.S. support for an exile group that has absolutely no support in its own country in order to achieve regime change.

The effort to push the U.S. into war with Iran is, as Larison notes, truly crazy – especially when you consider Iran is our only useful ally in the fight against ISIS. Our other supposed “allies,” the Saudis, the Turks and the Israelis, are in full appeasement mode as regards ISIS – even though they could crush it in a week.

This is absolutely nuts, and only one in a thousand Americans knows how nuts it is. That’s because they don’t get to talk to the experts I get to talk to, ex-CIA guys, ex-grunts and others who actually understand the Mideast. Among them is ex-CIA man Larry Johnson with this piece about the misguided effort to convince Americans to take the Saudi side:

The American public are being saturated with propaganda intended to convince them that Iran is the greatest evil in the world today and must be stopped at all costs. While I harbor no illusions that Iran is a harmless, impotent nation, it also is not the Shia Muslim reincarnation of Nazi Germany or Stalin’s Soviet Union. Here’s a simple test – if you had a daughter and she had to work in Saudi Arabia or Iran, where would she have more freedom? Simple answer – Iran. Which nation allows Jewish synagogues to still function? Iran.

We need a new consensus in the United States regarding our policy in the Middle East. As I noted in an earlier piece, we have been the bitch of the Saudis for the last 35 years. Ever since the Shah was dumped and the Ayatollah took the reins of power in Iran, we have been cozying up to carry the Saudis’ chamber pot.

But times have changed and the old policy has collapsed and the United States bears sole responsibility for setting in motion the emergence of Iran’s growing influence in the region. A lot of smart people in the United States still do not understand that our decision to dump Saddam and replace him with Shia Iraqis that had close ties to Iran flung wide open the door for Tehran to enter Iraq and build out intelligence networks. This is on us.

As part of that propaganda, we’re supposed to think it’s just peachy to support the MEK in its efforts to topple the Iranian government. Or in other words, we’re supposed to support a terrorist effort in the midst of a War on terrorism.

That sure seems to describe MEK if this 2012 report by Richard Engel and Robert Windrem is any indication:

Deadly attacks on Iranian nuclear scientists are being carried out by an Iranian dissident group that is financed, trained and armed by Israel’s secret service, U.S. officials tell NBC News, confirming charges leveled by Iran’s leaders. The group, the People’s Mujahedin of Iran, has long been designated as a terrorist group by the United States, accused of killing American servicemen and contractors in the 1970s and supporting the takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran before breaking with the Iranian mullahs in 1980.

The attacks, which have killed five Iranian nuclear scientists since 2007 and may have destroyed a missile research and development site, have been carried out in dramatic fashion, with motorcycle-borne assailants often attaching small magnetic bombs to the exterior of the victims’ cars.

U.S. officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the Obama administration is aware of the assassination campaign but has no direct involvement.

The report contains the usual denials, but few Mideast insiders believe these attacks could be anything other than an MEK operation. That of course would mean our side is supporting terrorism, since putting magnetic bombs on cars is quite obviously an act of terrorism.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that, by the way. Anyone who understands terrorism understands that one man’s terrorist really is another man’s freedom fighter. At least that was the case in every war zone I’ve ever visited.

In Nicaragua, for example, the Marxist Sandinista government persisted in calling the Contra rebels “terrorists.” Ronald Reagan called them freedom fighters. Reagan was vindicated when the government made the mistake of holding an election and the Contra side won.

But “terrorism” remains in the eye of the beholder. That’s why we should have called this post-9/11 enterprise the “War on Al Qaeda” rather than the “War on Terrorism.”

Which brings up the current dust-up in Yemen.

The people the neocons are opposing, the Houthis, are a tough Shia mountain tribe openly hostile to the Sunni Saudis and – how did you guess – Al Qaeda, which is also Sunni.

You read that right. The neocons want to target the enemies of Al Qaeda.

Does that make any sense to you? It doesn’t make any to Pat Lang, the former Vietnam Green Beret and Mideast expert who spent several years in Yemen. In this post, Lang enjoys a hearty laugh at the notion that the Houthis are “Iran’s puppet.”

There are certain peoples who are instinctively good at fighting. The Pushtuns, Somalis, Sikhs and Yemeni Zaidi tribesmen are among them. Others are not so good at fighting or joyful at the prospect of combat; Saudi hirelings of the Al-Saud “country” of Saudi Arabia, Egyptian peasant conscripts, and Sunni Yemenis of the south. The Zaidi mountain tribesmen defeated the Egyptian Army fifty years ago. There is a large Egyptian military cemetery in San’a. The road down from the mountains to the port of Hodeida is still littered with destroyed Egyptian Army vehicles that were “killed” in guerrilla ambushes.

Lang goes on to debunk any idea that the Houthis are part of an Iranian axis. In fact they don’t even share the same form of Shia Muslim.

The Zaidi scholars profess no allegiance to the 12er Shia scholarship of the Iranian teachers. In theology the Zaidis follow the methodology in analysis of the mu’tazila , the “rationalist” school of theology exterminated in the rest of Islam (including Iran) 1200 years ago.

Do you ever hear such details from any of the neocons who assert there is some sort of monolithic Iranian axis at work here?

No. They’re idiots I use that term not as an insult but a useful description. Look at the etymology of the word “idiot.” “From Greek idiotes “layman, person lacking professional skill” (opposed to writer, soldier, skilled workman).”

There’s a lot of that going around. But thanks to the efforts of conservatives like Pat Buchanan and libertarians like Ron Paul, people are finally starting to realize they’ve been duped for all these years.

Here’s Pat holding forth on the current effort to get us bogged down in the Mideast:

Some mullahs may be fanatics, but Iran is not run by fools. Yet even if we have a mutual interest in avoiding a war, where is the common ground between us?

Let us begin with the Sunni terrorists of al-Qaida who brought down the twin towers, and the Islamic State that is beheading Christians, apostates, and nonbelievers, and intends to establish a Middle East caliphate where there are no Americans, no Christians, and no Shiites.

Americans and Iranians have a common goal of degrading and defeating them.

In the Syrian civil war, Iran and its Shiite allies in Hezbollah have prevented the fall of the Alawite regime of Bashar Assad.

For years, Iran has helped to keep the al-Nusra Front and ISIL out of Damascus.

Why do the neocons want to see Assad out of control in Damascus?

As it happens, I had a very humorous back-and-forth with Menendez on that very point.

I say “humorous” because Menendez was, as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, perhaps the loudest voice calling for the U.S. to depose Assad.

That led directly to the rise of ISIS. His excuse?

He argued that everyone else was making the same mistake:

Mulshine criticizes me for pushing the U.S. “to take an active role in supporting the rebels fighting to oust Syrian dictator Bashar Assad.” But that exact position is the administration’s policy, arguing that “Assad must go” and supporting the training and equipping of the Syrian opposition. President Barack Obama over Labor Day 2013 even came within minutes of approving air strikes against Assad for gassing Syrians and crossing his self-imposed red line.

It is also the position of Senators from liberal Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) to conservative Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) who voted with me in September 2013 to provide lethal and non-lethal assistance to vetted Syrian opposition groups

This is obvious nonsense. Menendez acts as if there weren’t voices pointing out that the effort to depose Assad would bring Muslim fundamentalists to the fore. But all he had to do back then was read my columns. I cited expert after expert who predicted exactly that.

Among them was former CIA agent Bob Baer, who asked this of one proponent of deposing Assad:

“Who does he propose supporting in Syria? Anyone with any common sense knows it’s the Muslim Brotherhood that would take over. There are no white hats in Syria.”

What, no “vetted moderate rebels?”

Anyone who could ever use such a term without laughing should shut up forever as regards the Mideast. That would shut up just about every neocon, including a certain senator who supports the MEK.

(Paul Mulshine, NJ.com,

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Iran Interlink Weekly Digest

Iran Interlink Weekly Digest – 90

++ The MEK and its affiliated fronts – the NCRI, Maryam Rajavi etc – have gone all out to praise Saudi Arabia for attacking Yemen. It is not the first time they have praised Saudi Arabia for just about anything at all [an indication of the needy relationship Rajavi has with the country]. Fars News reproduced the MEK praise alongside praise from Israeli media such as the Jerusalem Times, showing they are carbon copies of each others’ position.

++ This week Maryam Rajavi has issued a New Year Message; she does this every year as though she is the Queen of Iran. This year, as for the past thirty years, she promises this will be the last one and this coming year ‘we’ will topple the Iranian regime. Mohammad Razaghi has collated each of these messages along with a picture of Rajavi posing with her Haftsin table. One of the seven ‘S’s is the word Sarneguni [overthrow]. Razaghi says this is the best joke he has heard all year – that she simply doesn’t give up. Others have pointed out that her message is directed at Israel and the Neocons rather than any other group of people. Her message is actually a plea: “why don’t you attack Iran?”

++ The National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) held its annual fake meeting last week. Various commentators say that ‘putting aside the usual lies and irrelevant issues, the whole discussion is reduced to demanding that the US re-arms the people in Camp Liberty’. This has provoked a reaction among internal critics of the MEK. They ask ‘why do you want to kill these poor pensioners by arming them in Iraq and making them into targets?’ Commentators also say that it is apparent that for Rajavi the NCRI presents more problems than it is worth. There are predictions the NCRI will be abolished before long.

++ Several people have written to President Holland asking him as the head of the MEK’s host country to put pressure on Maryam Rajavi to allow the hostages in Camp Liberty to leave and to allow international agencies to take them out of Iraq.

In English:

++ The extreme right Israeli Settlers news outlet Beritbart, in an article titled ‘A Complete Timeline of Obama’s Anti-Israel Hatred’, reveals that the MEK lined up with Israel behind the back of the American Administration to assassinate Iranian nuclear scientists.

++ Iran Interlink reports that fifteen young Iranians have now arrived in America following their escape from the pernicious hold of the Rajavi cult… The fifteen individuals have been accepted as refugees by the United States and were flown to Los Angeles on 21 March. This group is part of a quota of 80 from the 3,000+ MEK members which the US agreed to accept from the temporary transit camp Liberty (aka Hurriyeh) in Iraq. The government of Iraq and the United Nations are coordinating efforts to have all the residents transferred to third countries as soon as possible. Only the cult leader Massoud Rajavi is obstructing and resisting this inevitable process.

 March 27, 2015

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Iran Interlink Weekly Digest

Iran Interlink Weekly Digest – 89

++ This week Iranians joyfully celebrated Chahar Shanbe Suri with their families, with friends and in their communities. Nothing of much note happened apart from the usual needless, unfortunate firework injuries. Not a sign of the uprising that Maryam Rajavi’s ordered last week. Mohammad Karami exposed the MEK’s delusions on his weblog with an article titled ‘False Pictures, False News and False Identity’. He explains that the MEK have taken a single photograph from BBC Farsi showing that a police car was set ablaze outside a stadium in Ahwaz during a local clash. The MEK misleadingly claimed this is what happened “in Iran”. The MEK website also distorted an AP news article by adding bits to it themselves. Karami provided screenshots of the original AP article alongside the MEK version which clearly shows what they have added. Karami reminds us that they did the same thing last week with AP coverage of Maryam Rajavi’s Berlin Women’s Day show, in which the MEK edited out AP reporting that the audience was mostly made up of Polish and Czech students. He reminds us also of the ‘nuclear safe door’ debacle, pointing out that the MEK couldn’t even find a graphic obscure enough to avoid instant exposure. Karami reviews several years of photoshopped pictures of audiences, demonstrations and other events and concludes that the MEK has long ago become nothing more than image makers.

++ This week seven people moved out of Hotel Mohajer in Baghdad to resume normal life. The hotel is where ex members reside when they escape from Camp Liberty. This is good news because for many months conditions in Baghdad meant that there were not appropriate nor sufficient resources and facilities to allow them to move out. Now the situation in Iraq has eased the hotel has gone back to being a transit hotel.

++ Parviz Khazai, the MEK’s nefarious NCRI representative in Norway, has written a sixteen page report by order of Rajavi with title ‘Up to date report to the people of Iran’. Ebrahim Khodabandeh has unpicked it in an article, not, as he says because of the issues it contains but because this shows what the MEK’s problems are, where they are stuck and what they are trying to sort out with this report.

Khazai’s report has three subtitles: 1. About the Iranian regime. 2. About outside Iran and 3. About the people of Iran. Ironically, says Khodabandeh, Khazai explains that the MEK’s success are that it prevented Iran from taking over Iraq – during the eight year war [by siding with Iraq], during the 1991 Gulf war [by crushing the Kurdish uprising] and after the 2003 invasion [by siding with the Saddamists and insurgents] – and that it prevented Iran from building a bomb [as the source of nuclear exposures]. Although these are not things to be proud of says Khodabandeh, that is not the point; we didn’t think it was the MEK’s job to do these things. This is not opposition activity, in fact it is something quite different, and these are not questions of the Iranian people.

Khodabandeh says he is in contact with various people including current and former MEK members and they confirm that everybody’s questions are: 1. Where is Massoud Rajavi, the leader? 2. Why is it you are part and parcel of the Neocon/Zionist alliance and have nothing to do with Iran but everything to do with Israel? And 3. Where is all the money coming from to pay for all this? These are the questions of your own people let alone everyone else. Therefore this is not a report aimed at the people of Iran, nor is it aimed at the MEK’s own people. This report is for Israel because Rajavi is afraid of being dumped. It is an advertisement and justification of what the MEK has done for Israel in the hope of continued support.

In English:

++ TEHRAN (Tasnim) – ‘Mojahedin Khalq Has Strong Ties with ISIL: Former Member’

A former member of the anti-Iran terrorist Mojahedin-e Khalq Organization (MKO) revealed the group’s close relations with the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) terrorist group. Ghorban Ali Hosseinnejad said the leaders of MKO (also known as MEK) maintain strong ties with the ISIL Takfiri group in Iraq and Syria. “The MKO leaders had pinned hope in ISIL to seize control of the Iraqi capital of Baghdad after the northern city of Mosul fell to ISIL forces last summer”, Hosseinnejad was quoted by Iraqi Al-Masalah website as saying.

++ Michael Knights, Foreign Affairs, (The Council On Foreign Relations) ‘After Tikrit What to Do With Iraq’s Shia Popular Mobilization Units’

“Eastern Iraq has also been a literal and figurative battlefield between Iranian-backed Iraqi militants and the Iraqi state. Ravaged by the Iran-Iraq War, the borderlands soon after the cease-fire became sites of tit-for-tat border raids. Baghdad sent in the Mujahadeen-e-Khalq (MeK), Shiite opponents of the Iranian theocracy classified as a terrorist organization by the United States. Tehran sent in the Badr Corps, an Iraqi Shiite force recruited by Iran. In the 1990s, Iran also periodically sent its air force into Iraq to hit the MeK. It even fired salvos of Scud-like missiles into Diyala as late as 2001.”

++ Justin Raymondo, Antiwar.com ‘Bin Laden and Bibi, Together At Last, Israel’s alliance with al-Qaeda’: “Israel has never hesitated to ally with the worst elements on earth in order to advance what its leaders regard as the Jewish state’s interests. From South Africa’s apartheid regime to the death squads of Central and South America, to the Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK) – an Iranian exile group of Marxist terrorists – Israel has always given a helping hand to whoever merits it according to their amoral calculus. And as Israeli and American interests began to radically diverge – a process that has been ongoing since the demise of the Soviet Union – it makes perfect sense that they should align with our worst enemies.”

++ Nejat Bloggers: ‘Mr Rahmani – former MKO member – joined his family after 27 years’

“Mr. Mahmoud Rahmani who was a POW of Iran-Iraq war in 1987, was deceived into joining the Cult of Mujahedin-e Khalq. Mr. Rahmani who was forced to stay with the group for 27 years, transferred to Albania from Temporary Transit Location, Iraq. In Tirana far from the Cult boundaries and strict manipulation practices, Mr. Rahmani managed to release himself from the cult. Now, he is with his family after about a quarter of a century. When he left his family, his son was a 3 year old child. Now he is a 30 year old married young man. Within the mind manipulating cult of MKO, having contact with the family members both within and outside the Cult Camps is forbidden.”

++ Fars News: ‘Senior Iraqi MP: ISIL Continuing Mojahedin Khalq’s Terrorist Ideology’.

“Iraqi MP Hunain Al-Qado said the importance of reminding MKO’s crimes stems from the fact that some people try to keep these crimes under wraps.

He said the terrorist groups all pursue a shared objective, and added, “There is no difference between the ISIL’s terrorist acts in Iraq and Syria and Mojahedin-e Khalq’s terrorist acts.” “These groups use the same methods and have similar purposes which is creating fear and terrorizing civilians. So, what is going on now in Iraq is the continuation of MKO’s ideology.”

Emphasizing the need for cooperation among the regional countries that have been targeted by terrorist groups, al-Qado said, “On account of the arrogant powers’ struggles against Iran as well as their efforts in sowing the seeds of chaos in the Axis of Resistance, which is made up of Syria, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon and most probably Yemen in the future, it is vital to set up strategies in order to encourage integrated efforts in these countries and other countries which are a victim of terrorism.””

++ Iran Interlink, March 20 2015:… On the occasion of Norooz, Iran Interlink is posting this article titled ‘Uncertain Future for MKO’ which was first published by Knight Ridder in March 2005. Our thoughts and hopes are with the victims of Massoud and Maryam Rajavi, and their families, who are still held in incommunicado captivity in Camp Liberty …

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Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Breaking the Resistance with US Sponsored Terrorism and Proxy Wars

With the situation in the Middle East seemingly spinning out of control, many political observers are left wondering what it all means. The war in Syria has been at the forefront of the news since 2011, and rightly so, as Syria has become the epicenter of a larger regional conflict, particularly with the ascendance of ISIS in the last year.

Undoubtedly, the mainstream acceptance of the ISIS threat has changed the strategic calculus vis-à-vis Syria, as the US prepares to launch yetanother open-ended war, ostensibly to defeat it. And, while many in the West are willing to buy the ISIS narrative and pretext for war, they do so with little understanding or recognition of the larger geopolitical contours of this conflict. Essentially, almost everyone ignores the fact that ISIS and Syria-Iraq is only one theater of conflict in the broader regional war being waged by the US-NATO-GCC-Israel axis. Also of vital importance is an understanding of the proxy war against Iran (and all Shia in the region), being fomented by the very same terror and finance networks that have spread the ISIS disease in Syria.

In attempting to unravel the complex web of relations between the terror groups operating throughout the region, important commonalities begin to emerge. Not only are many of these groups directly or tangentially related to each other, their shadowy connections to western intelligence bring into stark relief an intricate mosaic of terror that is part of a broader strategy of sectarianism designed to destroy the “Axis of Resistance” which unites Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah. In so doing, these terror groups and their patrons hope to internationalize the war in Syria, and its destructive consequences.

Terrorism as a Weapon in Syria and Iraq

In order to understand how these seemingly disparate groups fit into the regional destabilization, one must first recognize how they are connected both in terms of ideology and shared relationships. On the one hand you have the well known terror outfits operating in the Syria-Iraq theater of this conflict. These would include the ubiquitous ISIS, along with its Al Qaeda-affiliated ally Jabhat Al-Nusra.

However, often left out of the western narrative is the fact that the so called “moderate rebels,” such as the Al Farouq Brigade and other similar groups affiliated with the “Free Syrian Army,” are also linked through various associations with a number of jihadi organizations in Syria and beyond. These alleged “moderates” have been documented as having committed a number of egregious war crimes including mutilation of their victims, and cross-border indiscriminate shelling. And these are the same “moderates” that the Obama Administration spent the last three years touting as allies, as groups worthy of US weapons, to say nothing of the recent revelations of cooperation with US air power. But of course US cooperation with these extremist elements is only the tip of the iceberg.

A recent UN report further corroborated the allegations that Israeli military and/or Mossad is cooperating with, and likely helping to organize, the Jabhat al-Nusra organization in and around the Golan Heights. Such claims of course dovetail with the reports from Israeli media that militant extremists fighting the Syrian government have been treated in Israeli medical facilities. Naturally, these clandestine activities carried out by Israel should be combined with the overt attacks on Syria carried out by Tel Aviv, including recent airstrikes, which despite the inaction of the UN and international community, undeniably constitute a war crime.

Beyond the US and Israel however, other key regional actors have taken part in the destabilization and war on Syria. Turkey has provided safe haven for terrorists streaming into Syria to wage war against the legally recognized government of President Assad. In cooperation with the CIA and other agencies, Turkey has worked diligently to foment civil war in Syria in hopes of toppling the Assad government, thereby allowing Ankara to elevate itself to a regional hegemon, or so the thinking of Erdogan and Davutoglu goes. Likewise, Jordan has provided training facilities for terrorists under the guidance and tutelage of “instructors” from the US, UK, and France.

But why rehash all these well-documented aspects of the destabilization and war on Syria? Simple. In order to fully grasp the regional dimension and global implications of this conflict, one must place the Syria war in its broader geopolitical context, and understand it as one part of a broader war on the “Axis of Resistance.” For, while Hezbollah and certain Iranian elements have been involved in the fighting and logistical support in Syria, another insidious threat has emerged – a renewed terror war against Iran in its Sistan and Baluchestan province in the east.

Rekindling the Proxy War against Iran

As the world’s attention has been understandably fixed upon the horrors of Syria, Iraq, and Libya, a new theater in the regional conflict has come to the forefront – Iran; specifically, Iran’s eastern Sistan and Baluchestan province, long a hotbed of separatism and anti-Shia terror, where a variety of terror groups have operated with the covert, and often overt, backing of western and Israeli intelligence agencies.

Just in the last year, there have been numerous attacks on Iranian military and non-military targets in the Sistan and Baluchestan region, attacks carried out by a variety of groups. Perhaps the most well known instance occurred in March 2014 when five Iranian border guards were kidnapped – one was later executed – by Jaish al-Adl which, according to the Terrorism Research and Analysis Consortium is:

an extremist Salafi group that has since its foundation claimed responsibility for a series of operations against Iran’s domestic security forces and Revolutionary Guards operating in Sistan and Balochistan province, including the detonation of mines [link added] against Revolutionary Guards vehicles and convoys, kidnapping of Iranian border guards and attacks against military bases… Jaish al-Adl is also opposed to the Iranian Government’s active support of the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, which they regard as an attack on Sunni muslims…Jaish ul-Adl executes cross border operations between the border of Iran and Pakistan and is based in the Baluchistan province in Pakistan.

It is important to note the centrality of Iran’s support for Syria and the Syrian Arab Army (and of course Hezbollah) in the ideological framework of a group like Jaish al-Adl. Essentially, this terror group sees their war against the Iranian government as an adjunct of the war against Assad and Syria – a new front in a larger war. Of course, the sectarian aspect should not be diminished as this group, like its many terrorist cousins, makes no distinction between political and religious/sectarian divisions. A war on Iran is a war on Shia, and both are just, both are legitimate.

Similarly, the last 18 months have seen the establishment of yet another terror group known as Ansar al-Furqan – a fusion of the Balochi Harakat Ansar and Pashto Hizb al-Furqan, both of which had been operating along Iran’s eastern border with Pakistan. According to the Terrorism Research and Analysis Consortium:

They characterize themselves as Mujahideen aginst [sic] the Shia government in Iran and are linked to Katibat al Asad Al ‘Ilamiya; Al-Farooq activists; al Nursra Front (JN), Nosrat Deen Allah, Jaysh Muhammad, Jaysh al ‘Adal; and though it was denied for some time, appears to have at least personal relationships with Jundallah…The stated mission of Ansar al Furqan is ” to topple the Iranian regime…”

Like its terrorist cousin Jaish al-Adl, Ansar al-Furqan has claimed responsibility for a number of attacks against the Iranian Government, including a May 2014 IED attack on a freight train belonging to government forces. While such attacks may not make a major splash in terms of international attention, they undoubtedly send a message heard loud and clear in Tehran: these terrorists and their sponsors will stop at nothing to destroy the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Two inescapable facts immediately come to the fore when examining these groups. On the one hand, they are Sunni extremists whose ultimate goal is the destruction of the Iranian state and all vestiges of Shia dominance, political, military or otherwise. On the other hand, these groups see their war against Iran as part and parcel of the terror wars on Syria and Iraq.

And then of course there’s Jundallah, the notorious terror organization lead for decades by the Rigi family. Anyone with even cursory knowledge of the group is undoubtedly aware of its long-standing ties to both US and Israeli intelligence. As Foreign Policy magazine reported in 2012, Israeli Mossad and US CIA operatives essentially competed with one another for control of the Jundallah network for years. This information of course directly links these agencies with the covert war against Iran going back years, to say nothing of the now well-known role of Israeli intelligence in everything from assassinations of Iranian scientists to the use of cyberweapons such as Stuxnet and Flame. These and other attacks by Israel and the US against Iranian interests constitute a major part of the dirty war against Iran – a war in which terror groups figure prominently.

It should be noted that a number of other terror outfits have been used through the decades in the ongoing “low-intensity” war against Iran, including the infamous Mujahideen-e-Khalq, a terrorist group hailed as heroes by the US neocon establishment. Thanks to Wikileaks, it also now documented fact that Israel has long since attempted to use Kurdish groups such as PJAK (Iraqi Kurdish terror group) to wage continued terror war against Iran for the purposes of destabilization of the government. Additionally, there was a decades-long campaign of Arab separatism in Iran’s western Khuzestan region spearheaded by British intelligence. As Dr. Kaveh Farrokh and Mahan Abedin wrote in 2005, “there is a mass of evidence that connects the British secret state to Arab separatism in Iran.”

These and other groups, too numerous to name here, represent a part of the voluminous history of subversion against Iran. But why now? What is the ultimate strategy behind these seemingly disparate geopolitical machinations?

Encircling the Resistance in Order to Break It

To see the obvious strategic gambit by the US-NATO-GCC-Israel axis, one need only look at a map of the major conflicts mentioned above. Syria has been infiltrated by countless terrorist groups that have waged a brutal war against the Syrian government and people. They have used Turkey in the North, Jordan in the South, and to a lesser degree Lebanon and, indirectly, Israel in the West. Working in tandem with the ISIS forces originating in Iraq, Syria has been squeezed from all sides in hopes that military defeat and/or the internal collapse of the Syrian government would be enough to destroy the country.

Naturally, this strategy has necessarily drawn Hezbollah into the war as it is allied with Syria and, for more practical reasons, cannot allow a defeated and broken Syria to come to fruition as Hezbollah would then be cut off from their allies in Iran. And so, Hezbollah and Syria have been forced to fight on no less than two fronts, fighting for the survival of the Resistance in the Levant.

Simultaneously, the regional power Iran has made itself into a central player in the war in Syria, recognizing correctly that the war could prove disastrous to its own security and regional ambitions. However, Tehran cannot simply put all its energy into supporting and defending Syria and Hezbollah as it faces its own terror threat in the East. The groups seeking to topple the Iranian government may not be able to compete militarily with the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, but they can certainly create enough destabilization through terrorism to make it more difficult for Tehran to effectively aid in the fight in Syria.

The US-NATO-GCC-Israel alliance has not needed to put its own boots on the ground to achieve its strategic objectives. Instead, it is relying on irregular warfare, proxy terror wars, and small-scale destabilizations to achieve by stealth what it cannot achieve with military might alone.

But it remains paramount for all those interested in peace to make these connections, to understand the broad outlines of this vast covert war taking place. To see a war in Syria in isolation is to misunderstand its very nature. To see ISIS alone as the problem is to completely misread the essence of the conflict. This is a battle for regional hegemony, and in order to attain it, the Empire is employing every tool in the imperial toolkit, with terrorism being one of the most effective.

Eric Draitser is an independent geopolitical analyst based in New York City, he is the founder of StopImperialism.org and OP-ed columnist for RT, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

Eric Draitser,

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Terrorist groups and the MEK

The MKO campaign in the Congress boosted ISIS

Those who follow the news of the Mujahedin Khalq Organization (the MKO) would hardly ever forget the group’s early reactions regarding the progress of the forces of the Islamic State extremists in Iraqi territory. They remember the MKO’s delighted comments on the victory of what they called “Iraqi revolutionary forces and tribes”!
The phrase “Iraqi revolutionary forces and tribes” was clearly condemned by the group’s critics.  That is why a few weeks later the group leader, Maryam Rajavi, tried to whitewash the pro violence and anti-human face of her cult by pretending the the group’s disapproval of the IS.
Meanwhile, the MKO supporters in the US Congress who are also opponents to both Iraqi and Iranian regime called IS invasion to Iraqi soil as “Part of popular uprising”.  However, they started taking position against ISIS after the world witnessed the group’s atrocious acts against civilians.  Both the MKO and its supporters had to wear masks to distance themselves from IS terrorists.  
Furthermore, the truth was revealed about the real intentions of the MKO and its advocates. Ali Gharib and Eli Clifton’s observations show how MKO’S manipulation over certain members of the congress helped the ISIS to seize parts of Iraqi territory.
According to the investigations made by Gharib and Clifton of the Intercept, Senator Robert Menedez –who is on top of the list of recipients of the MKO’s funds—played a key role to block the sale of Apache Helicopters to Iraq. The authors of the article conclude that his opposition to aid Iraqi government against the threat of ISIS was motivated by the MKO’s well-funded lobbying campaign in the Congress.
Ali and Eli’s account of the MKO’s influence over Menendez is clear in their account of a SENATE Foreign Relations Committee hearing where MKO agents in yellow rain jackets were looking in the eyes of their paid speaker. [1]
“During the hearing, the powerful then-Foreign Relations Chairman Bob Menendez, a Democrat from New Jersey, spoke out for the Mojahedin. About an hour and a half into the proceedings, Menendez issued an explicit threat to Undersecretary of State Wendy Sherman over attacks against the group’s members in Iraq’’ they write. [2]
Accusing the Iraqi and Iranian governments for the attacks against MKO camps, Menendez provided his reasoning as to why selling the weapons and helicopters to Iraq would endanger the MKO.
 “The threat sounded like a hypothetical, but it wasn’t: as Menendez spoke, he was blocking a major weapons deal with Iraq — a sale that would eventually be worth more than $6 billion in Apache helicopters and associated equipment and support, marking, perhaps, the first major Capitol Hill achievement for the Mojahedin since being removed from the U.S. list of designated terrorist organizations the year before,” according to Ali and Eli. [3]
 Menendez just lifted his objections of the Apaches on January 25, after ISIS succeeded to take control of large parts of Iraqi soil and committed a lot of distressing violent acts.
“Although it would be unfair to conclude that Menendez was motivated only by his sympathy for the MeK, sources quoted by Ali and Eli suggest pretty strongly that the issue played a role,” suggested Jim Lobe of the lobelog. “As Iraq’s ambassador to the United States Lukman Faily told Ali in relation to his efforts to release the hold on the Apaches, “The issue of the MEK came up in most of my meetings with the House and Senate, especially the Foreign [Relations Committee].” [4]
“According to the article, Menendez accepted more than $25,000 from donors with ties to the MEK, making him the largest recipient from 2012, when the MeK was delisted that September, to the present. That’s not much compared to the well over $300,000 Menendez received from pro-Israel groups during the 2012 election cycle, but it was more than twice what was provided to the next biggest recipients, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA).” [5]
Thus, the MKO and its Western sponsors see one common enemy, the Islamic Republic of Iran.  And this determines their entire policies and approaches. It’s a pity that saving the lives of Iraqi civilians and the security of the whole region depends on the fanatical ideas of a cult-like terrorist group, the Mujahedin khalq Organization.
Mazda Parsi
Sources:
[1] Gharib, Ali & Clifton, Eli, Long March of the Yellow Jackets: How a One-Time Terrorist Group Prevailed on Capitol Hill, The Intercept, February 27, 2015
[2] ibid
[3] ibid
[4] Lobe, Jim, Sen. Menendez Top Recipient of MEK-Related Campaign Funding, Lobelog , February 26, 2015
[5] ibid
 

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Iran Interlink Weekly Digest

Iran Interlink Weekly Digest – 88

++ The death was announced yesterday of Hareth al Zaari, a backer of the MEK. Al Zaari escaped from Iraq in 2003 after the fall of Saddam Hussein to Jordan where he established the Association of Muslim scholars. This association was part of a cohort, which included Saddam’s daughter, fighting against the Iraqi government and trying to stop the progress of the country. Iraq had issued an arrest warrant against him. Al Zaari died in Turkey from cancer and his body will be taken to Jordan for burial. Although he was a fugitive he was very influential for the MEK; Massoud Rajavi was highly dependent on his patronage.

++ Widespread ridicule followed Maryam Rajavi’s annual invitation to the Iranian people to ‘rise up and overthrow their government’ on the occasion of the joyous Iranian celebration of Chahar Shanbe Suri, an ancient purification rite. The MEK treat it as though the Iranian people are doing it to support them. One Farsi comment was that “the next step will be for Maryam Rajavi to ask all the people of the world to take their socks off before going to bed at night and then the next morning claim that she made it happen saying ‘look, all the world supports me because they took their socks off!”

++ The Quarterly issue of Cheshmandaz Iran, whose editor is Meysami a well-known critic of Iran where he is resident, has published a two part article by Mohammad Karimi, also a known revolutionary at time of Shah who had been involved with the MEK at that time. In this final part titled ‘Mojahedin-e Avare’ (The Homeless Mojahedin), he goes into detail about the start of the MEK when he was with them and is a short but thorough history. In the same publication Maysami writes, “People ask me where do I think Massoud Rajavi is. My only answer is that after what he has done he is staying somewhere that he doesn’t have to answer to anyone for anything. I don’t know where but I know why.”

++ In reaction to Maryam Rajavi’s Berlin show to mark International Women’s Day, Mirbaghersaderi in Switzerland writes about this from the angle of Maryam Rajavi’s outstanding hypocrisy, her unique potential and ability in lying. The writer says she is far superior to anyone else in this skill.

++ Many people continue writing to their friends and family in Tirana. Hassanpiransar congratulates his friend Alireza Mirbagheri for moving out of Iraq but encourages him and his friends to take the next step and free themselves. He tells them not to be afraid. Hassanpiransar says “the MEK pay you $500 per month and this keeps their rope around your neck. The difference between that and the UN money is only $300 and I promise you, you will not collapse if you take that instead. The damage done by that extra $300 is much worse than struggling to make your own way. The MEK’s money is poison for you.”

In English:

++ This week, following Maryam Rajavi’s show in Berlin to mark International Women’s Day, several former MEK members have written open letters to political representatives of their countries of residence to protest and to inform.

Iran Zanan (Iranian Women’s Association) wrote to Otto Bernhardet in Germany after he met with Rajavi to ask him ‘Do you know who Maryam Rajavi is?’ The letter listed the human rights abuses specifically affecting women in the cult, including murders, forced hysterectomies, grooming for sex and ongoing incommunicado incarceration.

Mohammad Razaghi wrote to Manuel Valls, the Prime Minister of France warning of the danger posed by MEK members living in Auvers sur Oise who have been trained in the manufacture and use of explosives and chemical weapons; this training was provided by Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard says Razaghi who is an eye witness to many of the MEK’s criminal and terrorist activities. Such MEK members living in France use false identities to evade detection by security services, he says.

++ Using the framework of Maryam Rajavi’s claim to defend the rights of women, Mazda Parsi in Nejat Bloggers says she should be challenged to identify the economic, political and social achievements of the women in her own camps both in France and Iraq. Parsi points out that “no woman in the MKO earns money or runs her own business. Women in the MKO are completely separated from men. Even women are not allowed to associate with their same sex comrades as friends. Friendship is forbidden. Celibacy is obligatory and a lot of other facts that prove that female members of the MKO enjoy no social achievements. They are not given the slightest opportunity to learn social skills. Most of them have no idea how to use a cellphone. About the political achievements of the MKO female members, it is enough to mention that the group has no significant role in the political scene of Iran.” Parsi says former members of the MEK are highly motivated to help rescue their former comrades who Rajavi is holding hostage.

++ PressTV reported that Rudi Giuliani made his lucrative annual pilgrimage to Europe to advocate for the MEK in a speech in Berlin. As expected, Giuliani’s speech, delivered to a captive audience of Polish and Czech students taking time out from an MKO funded all-expenses paid tourist trip, followed the usual trend of ineffectual nobodies being paid to make unwarranted and unwanted criticisms of President Obama’s efforts in the nuclear negotiations as part of a greater attempt by Zionists and Neocons to stymie the process. He described Obama as “extremely reckless”. Giuliani also wants the residents of Camp Liberty to be given refugee status. Press TV did not report how Giuliani proposed this should be granted – the residents continue to be held in incommunicado captivity by the MEK leaders Massoud and Maryam Rajavi – we can assume he didn’t elaborate.

++ Another MEK-paid advocate was unable to attend the Berlin show because of problems at home. The New York Times reported that the US “Justice Department is preparing to file corruption charges against Senator Robert Menendez… after a two-year investigation into allegations that he accepted gifts and lavish vacations in exchange for political favors for a longtime friend and political benefactor. The article focuses on Menendez’ friendship with Salomon Melgen, a wealthy Florida eye surgeon and the corrupt practices which ensued. It was left to Paul Mulshine in nj.com to focus on the senator’s use of his powerful position as Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for “courageous efforts to keep the cowardly and evil Obama administration from caving in to the crazed Iranian mullahs who want to rain nuclear destruction on the U.S. and Israel”.

“The senator’s recent behavior should be seen in light of his affinity for another Mideastern group he champions, Mojahedin-e Khalq. You’ve probably never heard of it. But Bob Baer has… “These guys killed Americans,” said Baer, a former CIA agent who spent much of the 1980′ and ’90s in the Mideast. “They tried to kill one of my colleagues, but they ended up shooting his driver.” MEK, as it’s known, is an Iranian dissident group of Marxist-Leninist origins that operates from a base in Iraq called Camp Liberty. Menendez has become its prime spokesman in Congress – and also the prime recipient of donations from MEK sympathizers, according to an article on the Intercept site.”

++ Marcin Banasik writing for Dzienni Poliski24 newspaper exposes the MEK’s activities in Poland. The MEK created a Facebook page to lure students into participating in an all-expenses paid trip to Berlin for Rajavi’s show. But, said the paper, the students weren’t informed that the trip was paid for by a terrorist organization and that they were expected to support the MEK as part of the conditions attached to the trip.

“When we called the number given on the web, we were told that the organizers are associations supporting the struggle for democracy. The person responsible for compiling the departure list would not, however, give us a Polish contact for the tour. Facebook is the only information we had and it says that “the subject is the same as every year in Paris”.

The point is that in 2008 the People’s Mojahedin held a rally at Charles de Gaulle airport. That was attended by around 3.5 thousand Polish students and was met with criticism from Iran. The Iranian ambassador in Warsaw said that this event, in which a terrorist organization could deceive students, was a humiliation for Polish society.

Until yesterday the authorities of Kracow University did not know about the Berlin trip. In the same way as the Paris Conference, Professor Anna Krasnowolska from the Department of Iranian Studies at Jagiellonian University learned about the Berlin Conference in March from us. Professor Krasnowolska said “I advised my students not to participate in this. The way in which it is organized shows that the concept of democracy is foreign to the People’s Mojahedin”.

When articles began to circulate on the Internet showing the true face of the Conference in Paris, some students began to sell their tickets for the trip to Berlin. “I preferred to withdraw from participation in the meeting altogether. I even heard that the Americans refuse to issue visas to those who were at a similar conference”, the student from Krakow told us.”

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Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Bob Menendez and the Mideast madmen: senator tries to spin his way out of scandal

There’s a guy I know from Hudson County who is anything but a fan of our senior U.S. senator. So I expected to get an earful when I called him the other day to discuss what appear to be looming federal charges against Bob

U.S. Senator Bob Menendez has been trying to position himself as a high-minded defender of Israel but his connections to a shady Iranian cult hint at other motives. (Alexandra Pais | For NJ Advance Media)

Menendez.

I got an earful, all right. But now the guy was claiming the Democratic senator had been set up because of his courageous efforts to keep the cowardly and evil Obama administration from caving in to the crazed Iranian mullahs who want to rain nuclear destruction on the U.S. and Israel.

Does that prose sound too purple? Here’s what Menendez really said in a speech last week to the annual convention of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in Washington:

“There can be little doubt that under a flawed deal that fails to roll back Iran’s nuclear program, every extra cent, every extra rial would go directly toward Iran’s nefarious adventures that threaten Israel, the region, and are diametrically opposed to the national interests of the United States, our friends, and allies.”

According to my Hudson friend, who was in the audience, the speech brought down the house. It also perfectly positioned the senator to claim political persecution when reports of the impending charges broke later in the week.

It’s a clever line of deflection. But it’s hogwash. Menendez has been peddling that line for several years now, most of them spent in the powerful position of chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. If Attorney General Eric Holder had been out to get him, he would have done so back then.

Now that he’s a mere member, Menendez has been particularly outspoken. But this is not the behavior of a high-minded defender of freedom. It’s the behavior of a prey animal searching desperately for help against the hunter.

The senator’s recent behavior should be seen in light of his affinity for another Mideastern group he champions, Mojahedin-e Khalq. You’ve probably never heard of it. But Bob Baer has.

“These guys killed Americans,” said Baer, a former CIA agent who spent much of the 1980′ and ’90s in the Mideast. “They tried to kill one of my colleagues, but they ended up shooting his driver.” (This article shows how Baer suspects the group is tied to assassinations inside Iran.)

MEK, as it’s known, is an Iranian dissident group of Marxist-Leninist origins that operates from a base in Iraq called Camp Liberty. Menendez has become its prime spokesman in Congress – and also the prime recipient of donations from MEK sympathizers, according to an article on the Intercept site.

group was put on the terrorist watch list in 1997 but taken off the list in 2012 after an extensive lobbying campaign headed up by a certain Bob Torricelli.

Yes, that Bob Torricelli, the former Democratic U.S. Senator from New Jersey who gave up his seat in 2002 after revelations concerning some wealthy friends of his own.

Salomon Melgen: The senator has done a clever job of deflecting attention from the scandal surrounding his junkets with the wealthy eye doctor, but it’s pure nonsense to believe the senator’s fellow Democrats are going after the senator for his stance on Iran.

Torricelli and Menendez have a lot in common, including an ability to get up and give a very sincere-sounding speech on behalf of whoever’s picking up the tab. In July of last year, Menendez sent a message to an MEK gathering in Paris saying “the safety and security of MEK members at Camp Liberty is a critical factor in my future support for any assistance to Iraq.”

Baer describes the group as “a cult,” and descriptions of its members’ behavior bear that out. They show up by the dozens at foreign-relations hearings in the Capitol, all wearing matching yellow raincoats. Staffers have to fill front-row seats early so witnesses don’t have to testify before a sea of yellow plastic.

“It’s not a good idea to take money from a Mideastern cult,” said Baer. “It’s like taking money from the Gambino family.”

How the group fits into Mideast politics is too complicated to explain in this short space. Even Baer, who knows them as well as anyone, says that “they believe in some sort of mysticism I never understood.”

I offer this example merely to illustrate why we should not be sending to Washington senators who tend to have such bad judgment on picking friends. It is a sad fact that the last three senators New Jersey sent to D.C. who weren’t independently wealthy all ended up embroiled in scandals. Before Torricelli and Menendez there was Harrison “Pete” Williams who got caught up in Abscam.

At least the shady Mideasterner that senator got involved with was fictional.

You can’t say the same for Menendez’s Mideastern friends.

By Paul Mulshine , nj.com,

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Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

That secret Iranian ‘nuclear facility’ you just found? not so much.

Iran’s most notorious dissident group loves luring gullible U.S. officials and journalists into seeing a bomb factory beneath every building in Tehran. Dig a little deeper, sheeple.

On Tuesday, Feb. 24, the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), the political front for the “cult-like dissident group” known as the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (MEK), revealed the location of what it claimed was an underground centrifuge facility in the suburbs of Tehran. The announcement was, evidently, intended to derail ongoing negotiations toward a diplomatic settlement over Tehran’s nuclear programs. The State Department spokeswoman stated, “Well, we don’t have any information at this time to support the conclusion of the report.”

That’s not quite the same thing as saying it’s a load of bullfeathers, but we’ll get there in due course. The story may be false, but it demonstrates both the culture of leaks in Washington and the way open-source information can challenge that culture.

This is not the first time that NCRI has organized a press conference with startling revelations about Iran’s nuclear program. The one everyone remembers was in 2002, when the group made the first public reference to the underground enrichment facility at Natanz. Reporting by folks like Mark Hibbs, however, suggests the United States and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) already knew about the existence of the site. An intelligence agency simply may have laundered the information through NCRI. The group has more often gotten the story all wrong. For example, NCRI calls the new site Lavizan-3. For some reason, they don’t talk about Lavizan-2, which was a site they “revealed” in 2008, shortly after the United States released a National Intelligence Estimate stating that Iran had “halted” or paused its covert nuclear weapons program, in what was totally-not-a-coincidence.

But when I read NCRI’s latest dossier, I thought of a totally different case — one involving North Korea. During the late 1990s, there was growing opposition to the U.S.-DPRK Agreed Framework, under which Pyongyang agreed to freeze plutonium production in exchange for heavy fuel oil and a new light-water reactor to be constructed in North Korea. In August 1998, a U.S. “official” told the New York Times’s David Sanger that satellite images showed North Korea constructing an underground nuclear reactor and reprocessing plant near Kumchang-ri. The Old Gray Lady ran the story under this restrained headline: NORTH KOREA SITE AN A-BOMB PLANT, U.S. AGENCIES SAY.

That wasn’t, strictly speaking, true. The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) thought Kumchang-ri might house a secret nuclear reactor. The rest were more skeptical. Jack Pritchard was an intelligence analyst at time. “Everybody threw up their hands and said we don’t know what it is, but we don’t have a better explanation,’’ he would later tell Dan Sneider of the San Jose Mercury News. The DIA couldn’t win consensus for its view within the government, so someone decided to appeal though the press. The U.S. intelligence community might not have collectively agreed that Kumchang-ri was an underground nuclear reactor, but that no longer mattered after the New York Times said otherwise. The Clinton administration was forced to negotiate access for a team of inspectors to the site, at considerable expense to U.S. taxpayers.

When the inspectors arrived, they could not determine the purpose of the site, but concluded that Kumchang-ri, laid out as a grid of tunnels, was “unsuitable” for a nuclear reactor and “not well designed” for a reprocessing facility. It was just a big, enigmatic hole in the ground. Still, the damage was done: The Clinton administration asked former Secretary of Defense William Perry to undertake a review of U.S. policy toward North Korea, motivated in part by Kumchang-ri and other allegations of North Korean cheating. Although there was a last-minute effort to re-engage with North Korea under something called the “Perry Process,” the Clinton administration ran out of time. George W. Bush’s administration undertook its own policy review once in office, but then shelved its “bold approach” after the U.S. intelligence community concluded that North Korea was pursuing a sizeable covert uranium enrichment program.

Much like the case of Kumchang-ri, there is every reason to think the latest allegations by NCRI represent a politically motivated effort to derail the engagement of Iran over its nuclear program.

Almost immediately, there were reasons to doubt NCRI’s claim. A review of commercial satellite images reveals no evidence of large-scale excavation or tunneling during the 2004-2008 period identified by NCRI. The site seems to lack a suitable transformer substation for electricity to power centrifuges or evidence of ventilation systems so workers underneath can breathe. (It turns out workers tend to insist on breathing.) And if Iran had excavated a massive 2,000-square-meter underground facility, where’d all the dirt go? It just doesn’t add up.

Moreover, the press release contained a number of details that were obviously fabricated. NCRI claimed that the facility had “3 by 3 m radiation proof doors that are 40 centimeters thick and weigh about 8 tons … to prevent radiation leak.” There is no reason for such doors at a uranium-enrichment facility, which is not subject to massive radiation leaks. Almost immediately, others were able to determine that the picture of the door released by NCRI was actually lifted from an Iranian commercial website. That detail is just balderdash, despite NCRI’s lame defense that the firm supplies doors to the Iranian nuclear industry.

The site that NCRI identified is, in fact, a facility operated by a firm called Matiran. NCRI described Matiran as a firm that produces identification documents, like passports, for the Iranian government. Helpfully, that’s how Matiran describes itself, as well. You may not have heard of it before — I had not — but its representatives attend international conferences and its employees post their CVs on social networking sites. The construction of the new facility roughly corresponds with Matiran’s successful bid to produce the new Iranian national identification card.

¬¬Hey, what do I know, but it seems unlikely that Iran has decided to double-up producing ID cards and enriching uranium at the same site.

But guess what? I found someone who’s been there. This illustration shows a “GPS trace” created by a European who visited the site in February 2013. (There is a cool project called “Open Street Map” which is like Google Maps meets Wikipedia.) The user traveled from a hotel in Tehran to the Matiran facility in question and uploaded the GPS trace of his route to Open Street Map. (He has since taken it down.) Despite claims by NCRI that the site is located within a “restricted military zone,” he took a car right into the site. Since the journey is time-stamped, we can tell he didn’t spend a bunch of time at checkpoints.

My colleague Paul-Anton Krüger, who writes for the German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung, and I contacted this person. His story checks out. Iran makes identification cards at the site. It also has a steady stream of foreign visitors. None of his colleagues saw anything out of the ordinary.

In addition to foreign firms working with Matiran, at least two international delegations have also visited the facility. Iran organized an October 2011 site visit by a delegation of National Civil Registration Organizations as part of a conference held in Tehran. Iran organized a second site visit, in April 2013, as part of a similar meeting. So there you have it: NCRI “found” a secret site producing identification cards that has been visited repeatedly by foreigners.

Somehow, not a single newspaper tried to contact any of these people. Carol Morello at the Washington Post wrote that NCRI’s claims “could not be independently verified.” Yeah, not unless you have a computer and an Internet connection.

This is not to suggest that the problem of covert enrichment sites in Iran is not a real concern. It is by far the biggest challenge facing any deal. Iran still maintains the remnants of its pre-2003 nuclear weapons program. (The enigmatic Dr. Mohsen Fakhrizadeh has to have an office somewhere.) Moreover, Iran has been repeatedly caught attempting to build covert enrichment facilities. The details suggest Iran had no intention of declaring enrichment plants at Natanz or Fordow. And Iran still denies that a nearby site, referred to as Lavizan-Shian, housed a covert weapons program, despite the fact that Tehran bulldozed the site after the IAEA expressed interest, turning it into a park. At one point, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad openly discussed constructing as many as 10 new enrichment facilities at various locations.

So, yeah: Any new agreement with Iran is going to depend on some measure of confidence in the West’s ability to detect covert sites.

But this ain’t one of ‘em. The Iranian government could, of course, invite one more delegation to a site visit, perhaps to serve them a working lunch of crow.

This was like old times for Krüger and me. He helped me debunk another suspected centrifuge plant back in 2011, when “officials” leaked information to the Associated Press suggesting that the IAEA suspected that Syria had an enrichment facility on the outskirts of Hasakah — one that was identical to plans for a centrifuge facility found in Libya, right down to the toilets.

Within a few days, however, I was able to determine that the site was actually a textile factory constructed by East Germany in the early 1980s. Both old satellite images and the Syrian company’s website helped establish its purpose. Krüger then actually tracked down the chief East German engineer and scored an interview. The facility was not a copy of a Libyan centrifuge facility. The Libyan facility, on the other hand, might have been disguised as an East German-built textile factory, many examples of which can be found in the Middle East. One wonders if it was designed by German business partners of Pakistan’s Dr. A. Q. Khan. My colleague Tamara Patton built a pretty cool 3-D model of the site, if you are interested.

The important thing is that open-source tools, plus a little investigative shoe leather, allowed us to quickly determine that the allegation was false. I was able to go through historical satellite photographs to determine the date of construction and find the firm’s website. I have never met Krüger in person, but we were able to collaborate over email. We killed off this particular rumor — and without Washington having to pay the local authorities millions of dollars’ worth of “aid” to get a look inside. You’re welcome, taxpayers!

Any agreement with Iran is destined to contend with a series of leaks like this. But let’s remember: The MEK and the United States have fundamentally different interests. The MEK highlights Iran’s nuclear programs — real, imagined, and downright fabricated — as a way to build support for regime change in Tehran. Hemming in the Iranian nuclear program through diplomacy removes one of the MEK’s most effective talking points in favor of bombing Iran. They won’t go down without a fight.

We can expect to hear more about Iran’s misdeeds ahead of any agreement, and as long as there is an agreement in place. It is probably too much to ask many journalists to fact-check their stories in advance. Even with the best of intentions, journalists operate under tight deadlines and the fear of being scooped by less cautious colleagues. (Ed. note: The author is not referring to the fine journalists at Foreign Policy.) But those of us in civil society can hold the MEK, comically bellicose pundits, and credulous journalists accountable in way that would have been impossible in 1998 when Kumchang-ri broke. (We can, however, ask them to run corrections with the same prominence as error-ridden alarmist stories.)

It really is a different world than in August 1998, when Google didn’t even exist. (Well, at least for another few weeks.) There are many reasons to hope that a nuclear deal with Tehran will prove more durable than the one with Pyongyang, one of which is the flood of open-source information. There is, today, an enormous amount of information that can help the public sort fact from fiction. It is really is just a matter of having skilled nongovernmental groups working in the public interest. There isn’t, at the moment, much funding available for this sort of work and only a few institutions really do it for nuclear issues, including the Institute for Science and International Security as well as my home institution, the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies. But the important point, the one illustrated by the Hasakah Spinning Factory and now Matiran, is that, given a chance, we can sort fact from fiction, and at a modest cost.

By Jeffrey Lewis, Foreign Policy

Jeffrey Lewis is director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies.

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