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MEK Still Isn’t OK

The group is set to be taken off the foreign terrorist organization list, but it remains an unwelcome bedfellow on the Iran issue.

This past Friday, the State Department announced that it will remove the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK)—a fringe Iranian dissident group that has been criticized for its cultish practices—from its list of terrorist groups. The State Department may have satisfied a court-imposed deadline and could help the group’s members escape their current stateless limbo, but the decision will enable the MEK to put more effort into pushing the United States toward war with Iran in its campaign to become the new government in Tehran.

The court’s deadline comes from a lawsuit brought by the MEK arguing that its designation as a foreign terrorist organization (FTO)—which it has held since 1997—is no longer appropriate because it claims to have abandoned violence in 2002; in 2003, when its members in Iraq were disarmed by the U.S. military, the group signed documents promising to use only peaceful means of protest to advocate for its goals. In June, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit gave Secretary of State Hillary Clinton until October 1 to decide whether the group still belonged on the list or the court would delist the group.

Whether the MEK still belongs on the FTO list presents a legal question. If it has abandoned violence—including the capability and intent to commit terrorism—then perhaps it’s earned removal. The group’s many critics point to rumors that the MEK has been collaborating with the American and Israeli militaries and intelligence services (for example, here). But the FTO statute counts only terrorism or terrorist activity that “threatens the security of United States nationals or the national security of the United States”; even if unsubstantiated rumors about MEK’s collaboration with the U.S. military are true, they would not qualify the MEK for FTO status under the statute. This highlights the problem: The law as written gives a pass to groups whose activities are viewed as useful to the United States, just as it could fail to apply to unsavory groups that do not pose a danger to the country.

Aside from highlighting problems with the way U.S. law classifies terrorist organizations, the MEK decision creates a few practical problems. First, though, let’s look at two potential benefits. The Iraqi government wants the MEK out of the country—in part because it is close to the Tehran regime and in part because Iraqi Kurds and Shias despise the MEK for helping Saddam Hussein suppress their uprisings after the 1991 Gulf War. Iraq has demonstrated an unwillingness to respect its responsibility under international law to protect people who are essentially refugees; Iraqi security forces killed some 49 members during clashes with the group after the United States turned responsibility of Camp Ashraf over to the Iraqi government in 2009. The MEK can’t just be sent home to Iran because it is a crime to be a member of the group there. They need to go somewhere else, but no country was willing to welcome MEK members so long as the group was on the U.S.’s FTO list, and the MEK wouldn’t cooperate in the resettlement process until the State Department held out the carrot of delisting. This decision brings some hope, however limited and tenuous, that they may be able to find new, permanent homes, bringing an end to their stateless limbo.

Should members be resettled, another possible humanitarian benefit of the decision could be that they might then be able to engage with the wider world, and some might even consider leaving the cult. This is particularly relevant to the 70 percent or so of the group’s membership who joined after the MEK allied itself with Saddam Hussein, lost its support in Iran, transformed into a highly insular organization, and took up deceptive recruitment practices.

Those are the potential benefits. Now we turn to the problems with the decision. In light of the unprecedented lobbying effort made to get the MEK delisted, in which prominent former officials received tens of thousands of dollars to speak on the group’s behalf, it looks highly politicized. The MEK will make it look like delisting was a symbol of U.S. approbation. With regards to our complicated relationship with Iran, Tehran will see the decision as—in the words of CIA veteran and Georgetown University professor Paul Pillar—“one more indication that the United States is interested only in hostility and pressure toward the Islamic Republic, rather than coming to terms with it.” Some fear that it will undermine American credibility as a force for democracy in Iran (to the extent that the U.S. has such credibility).

The most significant concern is how it will unleash the MEK to further ratchet up the probability of violent conflict with Iran. As I have written here and here, the MEK has had two major goals: an immediate one of getting off the FTO list and a long-term one of taking power in Tehran (it already has a “parliament in exile” and a “president-elect” in its National Council of Resistance of Iran). Now that it has accomplished its short-term goal of getting off the list, it can focus on its core objective.

If the MEK were really what it claims to be—“the largest peaceful, secular, pro-democratic Iranian dissident group” and it didn’t need our help—we wouldn’t need to worry much. But it’s not. The MEK has almost no support among the Iranian people, who vilify the group for signing up with Saddam Hussein, killing Iranians, and then becoming a cult—or see it as a joke. There are only two ways that the MEK could achieve its goal: money or arms. Both options would likely involve the United States, and it is hard to imagine the MEK getting into power by money alone.

The MEK has been pumping up fears of Iran for years. I don’t want to discount the risks of Iran building a nuclear weapon someday, but the MEK plays up the issue for its own uses. The MEK will continue to encourage fear of Iran on Capitol Hill, maintain its ongoing public-relations campaign that promotes wildly exaggerated fears of Iran among the American public, and likely offer its services as a proxy-force ally against Iran, as it has for years.

We should worry that removing the MEK from the FTO list will open the door to a repeat in Iran of what we experienced in Iraq thanks to the embrace of Ahmed Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress. It started with us funding the Iraqi émigré banker-turned-politician, and it ended with us invading Iraq and putting him in charge of the interim governing council. Even if it was just a relatively small bunch of neocons in the Bush administration and Congress who bought Chalabi’s rosy picture of having huge support in Iraq and a ready-made government, it wasn’t as if the rest of Congress or the media put a stop to their push for war. It was more like full speed ahead.

To limit the damage from its decision, the State Department needs to make it powerfully clear that the United States does not support the MEK. That will take a lot of work, because the MEK will flaunt the delisting.

More important, the U.S. government should not engage with the MEK going forward. Congress should ignore the group. Some officials will inevitably think that working with the MEK makes sense or is convenient. They will be wrong. The White House should consider making it policy for the government not to fund, employ, or otherwise collaborate with the group. The MEK is not our ally. Its interests are its own, not ours. The State Department’s decision may be legally sound, and it’s good to help MEK members find a new home, but when it comes to American policy, the group is not to be trusted. To quote Ambassador John Limbert, former embassy hostage and the first deputy assistant secretary of state for Iran, the MEK has “a very dubious history and a similarly dubious present.” Let’s have nothing to do with its dubious future.

By Jeremiah Goulka ,Prospect.org

September 26, 2012 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

The Hypocrisy and Looming Danger of De-Listing MEK

The Obama administration’s decision to remove the Iranian cult Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK) from the State Department’s list of officially designated terrorist groups was a long time coming. But The Hypocrisy and Looming Danger of De-Listing MEK no single act by the administration so crystalizes the hypocrisy and recklessness of US postures towards Iran.

The MEK has a long history of terrorist activity going back to the 1970s and has the goal of overthrowing the Iranian government. Because of this goal, there has been a big money push by many influential people in Washington to get the group de-listed, presumably to make it eligible for US funding to act against the Iranian regime.

Please ignore the fact that these political elites that received payments from the MEK in order to advocate on their behalf appear to be in violation of laws prohibiting material support for “terrorists.” Also ignore the fact that George W. Bush included Saddam Hussein’s support for terrorists like MEK in his propaganda justifying the invasion of Iraq in 2003. “Iraq shelters terrorist groups including the Mujahedin-e-Khalq Organization,” reads a document in the archives of the White House’s website, “which has used terrorist violence against Iran and in the 1970s was responsible for killing several US military personnel and US civilians.” As recently as 2007, a State Department report warned that the MEK, retains “the capacity and will” to attack “Europe, the Middle East, the United States, Canada, and beyond.”

As Glenn Greenwald pointed out yesterday, whether the MEK is still an officially designated “terrorist” group has exactly zero to do with whether or not they carry out terrorism:

The history of the US list of designated terrorist organizations, and its close cousin list of state sponsors of terrorism, is simple: a country or group goes on the list when they use violence to impede US interests, and they are then taken off the list when they start to use exactly the same violence to advance US interests. The terrorist list is not a list of terrorists; it’s a list of states and groups which use their power to defy US dictates rather than adhere to them.

This was also exemplified earlier this month when the Obama administration decided to officially designate the Haqqani network a terrorist organization. The Haqqanis are a branch of the Taliban that launches attacks on occupying forces in Afghanistan. The Reagan administration funneled money and weapons to Islamic fighters in Afghanistan against the Soviets in 1980s. Back then, the Haqqani network were freedom fighters. Now the US says they’re officially terrorists.

And as Greenwald explains, “Saddam was put on it when he allied with the Soviets in the early 1980s, then was taken off when the US wanted to arm and fund him against Iran in the mid-1980s, then he was put back on in the early 1990s when the US wanted to attack him.”

Aside from the clear-as-day hypocrisy of this list, the decision to de-list MEK will have deleterious effects for US policy towards Iran. The Obama administration has stubbornly refused to reciprocate to Iranian concessions in the international negotiations over their nuclear program and has imposed harsh economic sanctions. The two things the administration had going for it was the fact that it was pretty clear to the world that they were blocking an immediate Israeli strike and also that negotiations are continuing, probably in an attempt to deal with it more freely after the US presidential elections. But now that the US has de-listed MEK and opened up the potential for more direct support of the group, which argues for the overthrow of the Iranian regime, how can the administration claim its policy is one of engagement and negotiations as opposed to subversion and aggression?

As Paul Pillar wrote yesterday:

The regime in Tehran will tacitly welcome this move (while publicly denouncing it) because it helps to discredit the political opposition in Iran—a fact not lost on members of the Green Movement, who want nothing to do with the MEK. The MEK certainly is not a credible vehicle for regime change in Iran because it has almost no public support there. Meanwhile, the Iranian regime will read the move as another indication that the United States intends only to use subversion and violence against it rather than reaching any deals with it.

So why de-list the MEK? The only credible answer is that the US aims to undermine the Iranian regime. And even though MEK has virtually zero support in Iran, and despite the embarrassing history the US has of aiding dissident groups in rival countries, Washington seems to view the MEK as instrumental in undermining Tehran. Furthermore, according to US officials, Israel has supported and is supporting the MEK to carry out terrorism in Iran and targeting Iranian nuclear scientists for assassination. Pillar says it might have been nice to mention this when the State Department was de-listing MEK, “But that, of course, would have required the politically inconvenient act of publicly addressing Israeli terrorism.” Better to just de-list MEK than to have Israel supporting an officially designated terrorist group.

MEK’s de-listing very well might come along with increased Israeli support for them…and increased US support.

By John Glaser

September 25, 2012 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

The Mistaken Decision to De-List the MEK

Paul Pillar’s response to the de-listing of the MEK is exactly right:

No good will come out of this subversion of the terrorist group list with regard to conditions in Iran, the behavior or standing of the Iranian regime, the values with which the United States is associated, or anything else. The regime in Tehran will tacitly welcome this move (while publicly denouncing it) because it helps to discredit the political opposition in Iran—a fact not lost on members of the Green Movement, who want nothing to do with the MEK. The MEK certainly is not a credible vehicle for regime change in Iran because it has almost no public support there. Meanwhile, the Iranian regime will read the move as another indication that the United States intends only to use subversion and violence against it rather than reaching any deals with it.

What may make this decision even more damaging over the long term for U.S.-Iranian relations The Mistaken Decision to De-List the MEK is that most Iranians loathe the MEK. De-listing the group is a mistake in its own right, but it is especially foolish because it does nothing but generate ill will from Iranians regardless of their views of the regime. Iranians will understandably consider the decision to remove the terrorist designation from the group as an insult, and many will take it as further proof of enduring American hostility towards Iran and Iranians and not just towards the current government.

It’s important to note that the decision by itself does not mean that the U.S. is supporting the MEK or aligning our government with the group, but it will likely be perceived that way. We shouldn’t discount the possibility that the decision to remove them from the FTO list will be exploited by the same pro-MEK advocates in the U.S. that lobbied for them until now. If they are removed from the FTO list now, it will probably be just a matter of time before Iran hawks begin agitating for funding, training, and eventually arming them to use against the Iranian government.

One of the standard, completely false talking points these advocates repeated was that the MEK was a democratic movement and the “main” Iranian opposition group. Many ex-officials, retired officers, and has-been politicians disgraced themselves with their fawning expressions of admiration for Maryam Rajavi. Leaving aside the de-listing decision for a moment, the conduct of these Americans and the absurd claims they made on behalf of a horrible political cult reflect just how corrupting and deluding anti-Iranian hawkishness can be. It shouldn’t be forgotten that these people went far beyond advocating on behalf of people at Camp Ashraf or arguing for de-listing. They were actively shilling for a monstrous, fanatical movement as if it were the legitimate representative of the Iranian people. That is something that shouldn’t be forgotten, nor should it be forgotten that several of the people speaking in support of this group serve in some capacity as advisers to the Republican presidential nominee.

By Daniel Larison

September 25, 2012 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Iranian Cult Is No Longer Officially a Terrorist Group!

Washington’s favorite Iranian terrorist group has likely won. By a forthcoming edict of the State Department, you can now no longer call the Mujahideen-e Khalq — formerly Saddam Hussein’s proxies against the Iranian regime — a terrorist organization. Erasing its status as a cult is a different story.

The State Department is set to remove what everyone simply calls the MEK from its list of terrorist groups, in advance of a court-imposed deadline for a decision. That will leave the organization free to fundraise and operate without attracting the attention of the FBI. The impact on U.S.-Iranian relations may be marginal, but the symbolism is enormous: As tensions with Iran over its nuclear program remain high, the Obama administration is wiping away the stigma from a cultish group that wants to overthrow the Iranian regime so badly it has attacked Iranian and other civilians to advance its agenda. And it comes after a long and deep-pocketed lobbying effort attracted a host of Washington politicos to advocate for the group.

“The delisting of the MEK, following a well-funded political lobby campaign, creates the dangerous impression that it is possible for terrorist organizations to buy their way off the [terrorism] list,” says Mila Johns of the University of Maryland’s National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism.

The MEK’s questionable practices extend beyond attacks on Iranian civilians. In a 2004 New York Times Magazine story, Elizabeth Rubin documented the group’s cult-like behavior. “Every morning and night, the kids, beginning as young as 1 and 2, had to stand before a poster of Massoud and Maryam, salute them and shout praises to them,” a former member told Rubin, referring to the “husband-and-wife cult” of leaders Massoud and Maryam Rajavi. Life in the MEK, Rubin reported, means enforced celibacy and public confessions of sexual desires. “Mujahedeen members have no access to newspapers or radio or television,” Rubin wrote, “other than what is fed them.”

Originally founded as a student organization in the 1960s to overthrow the Shah, the MEK attacked Western targets in pre-revolutionary Iran, and their victims included three U.S. Army officers. But they fell out of step with the Islamic radicals that took control of Iran in 1979, and turned their weapons on the new regime. Saddam Hussein became their sponsor during the Iran-Iraq war, yet the leadership moved to Paris. For over a decade, the MEK carried out bombings and hijackings on regime targets inside and outside Iran, including an audacious April 1992 coordinated raid on 13 Iranian diplomatic facilities around the world. The State Department listed them as a Foreign Terrorist Organization in 1997.

But it’s been years since the MEK attempted a terrorist attack. Most of its operations have centered around endearing itself to the U.S. by portraying itself as an advocate for a democratic Iran, a source of information on Iran’s nuclear program and an implacable enemy of Washington’s Tehran enemies. It turned over its weapons at a training camp in Iraq after the U.S. invasion that until recently was a de facto U.S. protectorate called Camp Ashraf. In Washington, supporters have spent years and millions of dollars waging a lobbying campaign to remove the group’s terrorist status, holding rallies outside of Congress and slathering the sides of buses with pro-MEK posters.

The sources of that money remain undisclosed. But it purchased prominent D.C. lobbying firms like Akin Gump and advocates like Reagan administration veteran Victoria Toensing. And it got an odd collection of supporters, from former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani on the right to former Vermont Governor Howard Dean on the left, plus retired Army Gen. Wesley Clark, ex-CIA director Michael Hayden, ex-FBI director Louis Freeh, ex-Obama national security adviser James Jones and a host of other notables.

The Iranian government, having been on the receiving end of MEK attacks, thinks the group still plans violence against it. Accordingly, some consider the MEK a diplomatic obstacle to resolving the Iranian nuclear question. The MEK also has support among U.S. Legislature who want to see the U.S. take a more bellicose turn toward Iran, so it’s possible that the group will rocket from the terrorist list to the halls of Congress.

Chances are, the State Department decision will merely entrench the impasse between Washington and Tehran. “I don’t think the world really looks that much different after the MEK delisting,” says Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “U.S.-Iran relations will remain hostile, and the MEK will remain a fringe cult with very limited appeal among Iranians.”

Byy Spencer Ackerman ,Danger Room

Danger Room senior reporter Spencer Ackerman recently won the 2012 National Magazine Award for Reporting in Digital Media.

September 25, 2012 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Money Talks: The Mujahideen-e-Khalq Episode

Money Talks: The Mujahideen-e-Khalq Episode as the Fundamental Display of Washington Lobbying Power

If you want to understand how things get done in Washington, perhaps the best lesson of the year comes from the State Department’s decision late Friday to remove the Iranian exile group Mujahideen-e-Khalq from the official list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations. The MEK never really lessened the activities that got it listed as a Foreign Terrorist Organization in the first place; in fact, they have intensified inside Iran. No, their path to de-listing came simply from buying off practically every prominent figure in Washington and rallying DC opinion to their side. It didn’t hurt also that the object of their terrorist activities happens to be a foreign country we don’t like.

But truly, the MEK went about securing their de-listing the way an oil company would secure a subsidy in an energy bill or the way a developer would secure an earmark for a new road near one of their land holdings. They just bought a bunch of lobbyists, spending millions of dollars to change their public image. And it paid off.

The campaign to bury the MEK’s bloody history of bombings and assassinations that killed American businessmen, Iranian politicians and thousands of civilians, and to portray it as a loyal US ally against the Islamic government in Tehran has seen large sums of money directed at three principal targets: members of Congress, Washington lobby groups and influential former officials.

Prominent among the members of Congress who have received fund is Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the chair of the House of Representatives foreign affairs committee. She has accepted at least $20,000 in donations from Iranian American groups or their leaders to her political campaign fund.

Other recipients include Congressman Bob Filner, who was twice flown to address pro-MEK events in France and has pushed resolutions resolutions in the House of Representatives calling for the group to be unbanned. More than $14,000 in expenses for Filner’s Paris trips were met by the head of an Iranian American group who also paid close to $1m to a Washington lobby firm working to get the MEK unbanned.

A Texas Congressman, Ted Poe, received thousands of dollars in donations from the head of a pro-MEK group in his state at a time when he was a regular speaker on behalf of its unbanning at events across the US, describing the organisation as the ticket to regime change in Iran.

It goes on and on, with money funneled to members of both parties, and lobbyists hired from the ranks of former elected officials on both sides as well. Luminaries like Ed Rendell, Howard Dean, Bill Richardson, Tom Ridge, Newt Gingrich, Rudy Giuliani and more were all paid to extol the virtues of the MEK. Big time lobby shops like DLA Piper, Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, and DiGenova & Toensing took $1.5 million in the last year alone to work on lawmakers and the State Department to get the de-listing. Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Hugh Shelton, former FBI Director Louis Freeh, former national security advisor James Jones and more all took MEK money and praised the organization. MEK also paid members of the Beltway media to further their efforts. Virtually everyone with a name in Washington got some piece of the action.

MEK got its money for this high-scale lobbying effort from the Iranian exile community, which has as its goal the overthrow of the current government in Iran. Their old benefactor was Saddam Hussein, who had exactly the same goal. Basically Saddam kept this group of militants on the border with Iran as his personal strike force, and George W. Bush cited the sheltering of the MEK as one of the reasons for the need to invade Iraq. All that history was forgotten when the money started flowing.

The subtext for this is that the MEK found it so easy as a known terrorist group to toss money at everyone in Washington and find purchase because their goals to overthrow Iran’s government lines up with what would be termed “pro-Israel” policies. You’re allowed to engage in terrorism, then, as long as you do it against an enemy of the United States, and in the best interest of an ally of the United States.

Glenn Greenwald takes five lessons from this episode, all of them worthwhile. Note in particular the parallels between DC establishment advocacy for a Muslim terrorist organization and the type of advocacy for other terrorist groups, which will get you prosecuted and thrown in jail faster than you can say “My Speaker’s Bureau fee is $25,000.” There’s also this:

The US government did not even pretend that terrorism had anything to do with its decision as to whether MEK should be de-listed. Instead, they used the carrot of de-listing, and the threat of remaining on the list, to pressure MEK leaders to adhere to US demands to abandon their camp in Iraq. But what does adhering to this US demand have to do with terrorism? Nothing. This list has nothing to do with terrorism. It is simply a way the US rewards those who comply with its dictates and punishes those who refuse.

I think the biggest lesson is that it exposes this industry of ex-elected officials and hangers-on in Washington that form a shadow government with tremendous power, which they use in service to whoever hires them. The lobbyist class around these former policymakers makes them in many ways stronger than when they were allegedly setting policy in the first place. This way, they can actually write the legislation instead of taking dictation about it.

By: David Dayen ,Firedoglake.com

September 25, 2012 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

When is a terrorist no longer a terrorist?

Question: When is a terrorist a terrorist?
Answer: When the US government says so.

When the Mujhadeen in Afghanistan were assassinating members of their government and the Russian troops dispatched to support it, they were, in Washington’s view, freedom fighters, even as their enemies branded them terrorists.

When they turned against an Afghan government imposed by the United States or revolted against a US invasion, they were once again branded terrorists.

When armed groups battling Gadaffy’s govermment were supported by NATO, they were called freedom fighters. When some recently and allegedly turned violently against the United States which is now dominating Libyan politics, they are once again castigated as terrorists.

And now, the United States Government through a decision by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has decided that the Iranian group Mujahedeen Khalq, or People’s Mujahedeen, that had been on the US State Department’s terrorist list for years, ha now been taken off the list.

That means they will no longer face financial and legal sanctions.

One day they were feared terrorists, the next day they were not. The "bad guys" became "good guys" with the swipe of a pen.

The New York Times says this feat was accomplished through what it describes as an "extraordinary" lobbying effort costing millions over many years.

Reports the Times: "The group, known as the M.E.K., carried out terrorist attacks in the 1970s and 1980s, first against the government of the Shah of Iran and later against the clerical rulers who overthrew him. Several Americans were among those killed. In the 1980s, it allied with Saddam Hussein, who permitted it to operate from Camp Ashraf.

But by most accounts, the M.E.K. has not carried out violent attacks for many years. While it is described by some critics as cult-like and unpopular with Iranians both inside and outside the country, the group has been able to gather large crowds at rallies in the United States and Europe to press its bid to reverse the United States’ terrorist designation, imposed in 1997."

The decision comes just before an October 1 cut off date ordered by a Federal appeals court

US News explains: "As recently as 2007, a State Department report warned that the M.E.K., retains "the capacity and will" to attack "Europe, the Middle East, the United States, Canada, and beyond.

The M.E.K., which calls for an overthrow of the Iranian government and is considered by many Iranians to be a cult, once fought for Saddam Hussein and in the 1970s was responsible for bombings, attempted plane hijackings, and political assassinations. It was listed as a foreign terrorist organization in 1997.

If the State Department does decide to delist M.E.K., whose name means "People’s Holy Warriors of Iran," it will be with the blessing of dozens of congressmen."

No less than 99 members of Congress–Democrats and Republican alike–signed to a Congressional resolution to take the "holy warriors" off the list.

Just last week at a rally in Paris, none other than former House speaker and hyper conservative Republican presidential candidate New Gingrich, now scurrying to pay off his campaign debts, was caught on camera bowing to the French based movement’s leader Maryam Rajavi.

Top lobbying firms have been paid high fees for rounding up support for M.E.K

US News explains: "Victoria Toensing of DiGenova & Toensing, a lobbying shop famous for its involvement in the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky scandal, was paid $110,000 in 2011 to lobby for the resolution. The firm Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld dedicated five lobbyists to getting signatures for the resolution, and was paid $100,000 in 2012 and $290,000 in 2011 to do so. Paul Marcone and Association similarly lobbied for the resolution, and received $5,000 in 2010 and $5,000 in 2011 for its efforts."

Glenn Greenwald has reported on Salon, "That close association on the part of numerous Washington officials with a Terrorist organization has led to a formal federal investigation of those officials,,,, paid MEK shill Howard Dean (a former Democratic liberal presidential candiate) actually called on its leader to be recognized as President of Iran while paid MEK shill Rudy Giuliani has continuously hailed the group’s benevolence."

The Pro-publica not for profit media organization has also revealed that a very prominent liberal journalist known for his Watergate reporting was paid to speak up for M.E.K

"On a Saturday afternoon last February, journalist Carl Bernstein got up on stage at the grand ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria in Manhattan and delivered a speech questioning the listing of an obscure Iranian group called the Mujahadin-e Khalq (MEK) on the U.S. government list of officially designated foreign terrorist organizations.

The speech, before a crowd an organizer put at 1,500, made Bernstein one of the few journalists who has appeared at events in a years-long campaign by MEK supporters to free the group from the official terrorist label and the legal sanctions that come with it. He told ProPublica that he was paid $12,000 for the appearance but that, "I was not there as an advocate."

Bernstein told the crowd that, "I come here as an advocate of the best obtainable version of the truth" and as "someone who believes in basic human rights and their inalienable status." He also challenged the State Department, saying that if the agency "has evidence that the MEK is a terrorist organization, have a show-cause hearing in court, let them prove it."

Listening to the talk was a bi-partisan group of prominent pols including ex-New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, former congressman Patrick Kennedy, D-R.I., former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, and former House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill.

This is a line up that is hard to rent, much less buy, but M.E.K and its well connected lobbyists have shown how money makes things happen in Washington.

It shows how porous is the terrorism issue too. It is subject to changes in political fashions, and how little the media knows or remembers and how open it is to being influenced by insiders, especially when there’s money to be paid for a few hours work.

It also shows the politics of provocation in action, part of a larger strategy of escalating tensions. The tactics range from sending a naval armada to menace Iran, perhaps in hopes of staging a contemporary "Tokin Gulf" incident in which any Iranian defensive maneuver –or attack by "militants" could be projected as an act of aggression justifying air strikes and drone attacks.

Even the decision to refuse visas to Iranians coming to a UN meeting seems part of the same strategy designed to show critics in Israel, and Republicans that the US is ready to get tough.
The delisting of an Iranian terror group fits right in to an approach that could lead to a "October Surprise" designed to get voters to rally behind the flag and their Commander in Chief.

By Danny Schechter

September 24, 2012 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Five lessons from the de-listing of MEK as a terrorist group

A separate justice system for American Muslims, the US embrace of terrorism, and other key political facts are highlighted

The Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), or People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran, is an Iranian dissident group that has been formally designated for the last 15 years by the US State Department as a "foreign terrorist organization". When the Bush administration sought to justify its attack on Iraq in 2003 by accusing Saddam Hussein of being a sponsor of "international terrorism", one of its prime examples was Iraq’s "sheltering" of the MEK. Its inclusion on the terrorist list has meant that it is a felony to provide any "material support" to that group.

Nonetheless, a large group of prominent former US government officials from both political parties has spent the last several years receiving substantial sums of cash to give speeches to the MEK, and have then become vocal, relentless advocates for the group, specifically for removing them from the terrorist list. Last year, the Christian Science Monitor thoroughly described "these former high-ranking US officials – who represent the full political spectrum – [who] have been paid tens of thousands of dollars to speak in support of the MEK." They include Democrats Howard Dean, Ed Rendell, Wesley Clark, Bill Richardson, and Lee Hamilton, and Republicans Rudy Giuliani, Fran Townsend, Tom Ridge, Michael Mukasey, and Andrew Card. Other prominent voices outside government, such as Alan Dershowitz and Elie Wiesel, have been enlisted to the cause and are steadfast MEK advocates.

Money has also been paid to journalists such as The Washington Post’s Carl Bernstein and the Chicago Tribune’s Clarence Page. Townsend is a CNN contributor and Rendell is an MSNBC contributor, yet those MEK payments are rarely, if ever, disclosed by those media outlets when featuring those contributors (indeed, Townsend can go on CNN to opine on Iran, even urging that its alleged conduct be viewed as "an act for war", with no disclosure whatsoever during the segment of her MEK payments). Quoting a State Department official, CSM detailed how the scheme works:

"’Your speech agent calls, and says you get $20,000 to speak for 20 minutes. They will send a private jet, you get $25,000 more when you are done, and they will send a team to brief you on what to say.’ . . . The contracts can range up to $100,000 and include several appearances."

On Friday, the Guardian’s Washington reporter Chris McGreal added substantial information about the recipients of the funding and, especially, its sources. As he put it, the pro-MEK campaign "has seen large sums of money directed at three principal targets: members of Congress, Washington lobby groups and influential former officials", including the GOP Congressman who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, Mike Rogers.

What makes this effort all the more extraordinary are the reports that MEK has actually intensified its terrorist and other military activities over the last couple of years. In February, NBC News reported, citing US officials, that "deadly attacks on Iranian nuclear scientists are being carried out by [MEK]" as it is "financed, trained and armed by Israel’s secret service". While the MEK denies involvement, the Iranian government has echoed these US officials in insisting that the group was responsible for those assassinations. NBC also cited "unconfirmed reports in the Israeli press and elsewhere that Israel and the MEK were involved in a Nov. 12 explosion that destroyed the Iranian missile research and development site at Bin Kaneh, 30 miles outside Tehran".

In April, the New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh reported that the US itself has for years provided extensive training to MEK operatives, on US soil (in other words, the US government provided exactly the "material support" for a designated terror group which the law criminalizes). Hersh cited numerous officials for the claim that "some American-supported covert operations continue in Iran today." The MEK’s prime goal is the removal of Iran’s government.

Despite these reports that the MEK has been engaged in terrorism and other military aggression against Iran – or, more accurately: likely because of them – it was announced on Friday the US State Department will remove MEK from its list of terrorist organizations. This event is completely unsurprising. In May, I noted the emergence of reports that the State Department would do so imminently.

Because this MEK scam more vividly illustrates the rot and corruption at the heart of America’s DC-based political culture than almost any episode I can recall, I’ve written numerous times about it. But now that the de-listing is all but official, it is worthwhile to take note of the five clear lessons it teaches:

Lesson One: There is a separate justice system in the US for Muslim Americans.
The past decade has seen numerous "material support" prosecutions of US Muslims for the most trivial and incidental contacts with designated terror groups. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that any Muslim who gets with sneezing distance of such a group is subject to prosecution. Indeed, as I documented last week, many of them have been prosecuted even for core First Amendment activities: political advocacy deemed supportive of such groups.

When they’re convicted – and marginalized Muslims, usually poor and powerless, almost always are – they typically are not only consigned to prison for decades, but are placed in America’s most oppressive and restrictive prison units. As a result, many law-abiding Muslim Americans have become petrified of donating money to Muslim charities or even speaking out against perceived injustices out of fear – the well-grounded fear – that they will be accused of materially supporting a terror group. This is all part of the pervasive climate of fear in which many American Muslims live.

Yet here we have a glittering, bipartisan cast of former US officials and other prominent Americans who are swimming in cash as they advocate on behalf of a designated terrorist organization. After receiving their cash, Howard Dean and Rudy Giuliani met with MEK leaders, and Dean actually declared that the group’s leader should be recognized by the west as President of Iran. That is exactly the type of coordinated messaging with a terrorist group with the supreme court found, in its 2010 Humanitarian Law v. Holder ruling, could, consistent with the First Amendment, lead to prosecution for "material support of terrorism" (ironically, numerous MEK shills, including CNN’s Townsend, praised the supreme court for its broad reading of that statute when they thought, correctly, that it was being applied to Muslims).

Yet other than a reported Treasury Department investigation several months ago to determine the source of Ed Rendell’s MEK speaking fees – an investigation that seems to have gone nowhere – there has been no repercussions whatsoever from this extensive support given by these DC luminaries to this designated terror group. Now that MEK will be removed from the terror list, there almost certainly never will be any consequences (as a legal matter, the de-listing should have no impact on the possible criminality of this MEK support: the fact that a group is subsequently removed from the list does not retroactively legalize the providing of material support when it was on the list).

In sum, there are numerous American Muslims sitting in prison for years for far less substantial interactions with terror groups than this bipartisan group of former officials gave to MEK. This is what New York Times Editorial Page Editor Andrew Rosenthal meant when he wrote back in March that the 9/11 attacks have "led to what’s essentially a separate justice system for Muslims". The converse is equally true: America’s political elites can engage in the most egregious offenses – torture, illegal eavesdropping, money-driven material support for a terror group – with complete impunity.

Lesson Two: The US government is not opposed to terrorism; it favors it.
The history of the US list of designated terrorist organizations, and its close cousin list of state sponsors of terrorism, is simple: a country or group goes on the list when they use violence to impede US interests, and they are then taken off the list when they start to use exactly the same violence to advance US interests. The terrorist list is not a list of terrorists; it’s a list of states and groups which use their power to defy US dictates rather than adhere to them.

The NYU scholar Remi Brulin has exhaustively detailed the rank game-playing that has taken place with this list: Saddam was put on it when he allied with the Soviets in the early 1980s, then was taken off when the US wanted to arm and fund him against Iran in the mid-1980s, then he was put back on in the early 1990s when the US wanted to attack him.

And now, with the MEK, we have a group that, at least according to some reports, appears to have intensified its terrorism, and yet they are removed from the list. Why? Because now they are aligned against the prime enemy of the US and Israel – and working closely with those two nations – and are therefore, magically, no longer "terrorists". As the Iran experts Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett wrote on Friday:

"Since when did murdering unarmed civilians (and, in some instances, members of their families as well) on public streets in the middle of a heavily populated urban area (Tehran) not meet even the US government’s own professed standard for terrorism?"

They answered their own question: "We have seen too many times over the years just how cynically American administrations have manipulated these designations, adding and removing organizations and countries for reasons that have little or nothing to do with designees’ actual involvement in terrorist activity." In other words, the best and most efficient way to be removed from the list is to start engaging in terrorism for and in conjunction with the US and its allies (i.e. Israel) rather than against them.

Lesson Three: "Terrorism" remains the most meaningless, and thus the most manipulated, term in political discourse.
The US government did not even pretend that terrorism had anything to do with its decision as to whether MEK should be de-listed. Instead, they used the carrot of de-listing, and the threat of remaining on the list, to pressure MEK leaders to adhere to US demands to abandon their camp in Iraq. But what does adhering to this US demand have to do with terrorism? Nothing. This list has nothing to do with terrorism. It is simply a way the US rewards those who comply with its dictates and punishes those who refuse.

Terrorism, at least in its applied sense, means little other than: violence used by enemies of the US and its allies. Violence used by the US and its allies (including stateless groups) can never be terrorism, no matter how heinous and criminal.

Lesson Four: Legalized influence-peddling within both parties is what drives DC.
MEK achieved its goal by doing more than merely changing the beneficiaries of its actions from Saddam to the US and Israel. It also found a way – how it did so remains a mystery – to funnel millions of dollars into the bank accounts of key ex-officials from both parties, a bipartisan list of DC lobbyist firms, and several key journalists. In other words, it achieved its policy aims the same way most groups in DC do: by buying influence within both parties, and paying influence-peddlers who parlay their political celebrity into personal riches.

So pervasive is this scam that most people have become utterly numb to it (that’s because people are willing to acquiesce to most evils when they become perceived as common; that acquiescence is often justified as worldly sophistication). As a result, there was no pretense here to hide these sleazy transactions. The very idea that Ed Rendell suddenly woke up one day and developed an overnight, never-before-seen passion for the MEK and Iran policy is just laughable. But the former Pennsylvania governor is a key advocate to enlist – he remains well connected within the Democratic Party and now has an important platform on MSNBC – so on the payroll he went.

Once the bipartisan list of DC officials receiving cash from MEK became known, it became almost impossible to imagine any outcome other than this one. As one person tweeted after reading this State Department decision: any American billionaire could easily have his birthday declared a national holiday by simply spreading the cash around enough to DC political and media figures on a bipartisan basis.

Lesson Five: there is aggression between the US and Iran, but it’s generally not from Iran.
Over the last decade, the US has had Iran almost entirely encircled, thanks in part – only in part – to large-scale ground invasions of the nations on its eastern and western borders. Some combination of Israel and the US have launched cyberwarfare at the Iranians, murdered their civilian scientists, and caused explosions on its soil. The American president and the Israeli government continuously and publicly threaten to use force against them.

And now, the US has taken a key step in ensuring that a group devoted to the overthrow of the regime, a group that sided with Saddam in his war against Iran, is able to receive funding and otherwise be fully admitted into the precincts of international respectability. Just imagine if Iran took steps to legitimize an American rebel group that has long been devoted to the overthrow of the US government and which has a long history of serious violence on US soil.

Not just the Iranian government, but also most of its citizens, are likely to perceive this de-listing as exactly what it is: yet another act of aggression toward their nation. As the Christian Science Monitor said of the group, it is "widely despised inside Iran". But the US has now officially offered a clear gesture of legitimization, if not support, for this group, one that only exacerbates the war-threatening tensions between the two nations.

UPDATE
Several commenters have raised questions about the motives of Dershowitz and Wiesel in supporting MEK. While motives can never be known with certainty – one can attempt only to make inferences based on conduct and circumstances – it was the JTA, the self-described "global news service of the Jewish people", which reported their involvement, and they suggested the motive was not any receipt of money but rather MEK’s alignment with Israel:

"The names on the growing list of influential American advocates to de-list the Mujahedin-e Khalq, or MEK — known in English as the National Council of Resistance of Iran — suggest an effort to give the bid a pro-Israel imprimatur. . . .

"On the record, the people involved insist there is no Israel element to what they say is a humanitarian endeavor to remove the movement’s followers from danger.

"’I don’t see any Israel issue at all,’ Dershowitz told JTA in an interview, instead casting it in terms of Hillel’s dictum, ‘If I am only for myself, who am I?’

"Off the record, however, figures close to the campaign use another ancient Middle Eastern dictum to describe the involvement of supporters of Israel: ‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend.’"

"A source close to the effort to bring pro-Israel voices into the initiative cited reports that Israel has allied with the MEK, which reportedly maintains agents in Iran and in the past has published details of Iran’s nuclear weapons program."

A separate JTA article reporting on the de-listing noted that "Iranian Americans sympathetic to the plight of MEK enlisted the support of a number of pro-Israel figures, including Nobel Peace laureate and Holocaust memoirist Elie Wiesel; Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz; and Irwin Cotler, the former Canadian justice minister." The original sentence has been clarified to reflect this report.

By Glenn Greenwald

September 24, 2012 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

American-Killing Terror Cult: US Delists Mujahedeen e-Khalq

Continuity of Agenda: Neo-Cons and Obama administration sponsor global terror against Iran.

As the US government confirms that terrorists involved in the Benghazi, Libya US consulate attack

Image: MEK is just one of many terrorist organizations, that despite being listed by the US State Department as such, still receives weapons, training, cash, and political support from the US government. This is a pattern seen repeated in Libya and most recently in Syria – each case spun and excused with a myriad of lies wrapped in false, constantly shifting narratives.

were indeed the very militants funded, armed, and provided air support in last year’s bid to overthrow the government of Libya, yet another disturbing announcement has been made. Terror organization Mujahedeen e-Khalq (MEK) will be delisted by the US State Department in order to clear legal obstacles in the way of overtly arming and funding the terrorists in pursuit of a proxy war with Iran, the LA Times reported in their article, “U.S. to remove Iranian group Mujahedin Khalq from terrorist list.”
….
The LA Times states specifically:

Some current and former U.S. officials have called for arming the MEK to conduct attacks against Iran, which experts say could tip the United States and Iran closer to war.

The lobbying effort to delist MEK has been led by former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Howard Dean, first “Secretary of Homeland Security” Tom Ridge, John Lewis, Ed Rendell, former FBI Director Louis Freeh, retired General Wesley Clark, Lee Hamilton who farcically oversaw the 9/11 Commission, former US Marine Corps Commandant and former Obama National Security Adviser General James Jones, and Alan Dershowitz. There are also members of the British Parliament including David Amess of the Parliamentary Committee for Iran Freedom, speaking on MEK’s behalf.

The US Has Already Been Arming MEK For Years

The delisting of MEK is merely a technicality to make more overt arming and funding for the group possible. In reality, and despite being long recognized as a dangerous, extremist organization with both innocent Iranian and American blood on their hands, the US has been arming, training, and funding MEK for years, beginning under the Bush administration and continuing unabated under Obama.

Covert support for the US-listed terrorist group Mujahedeen e-Khalq (MEK) has been ongoing since at least 2008 under the Bush administration, when Seymour Hersh’s 2008 New Yorker article “Preparing the Battlefield,” reported that not only had MEK been considered for their role as a possible proxy, but that the US had already begun arming and financing them to wage war inside Iran:

“The M.E.K. has been on the State Department’s terrorist list for more than a decade, yet in recent years the group has received arms and intelligence, directly or indirectly, from the United States. Some of the newly authorized covert funds, the Pentagon consultant told me, may well end up in M.E.K. coffers. “The new task force will work with the M.E.K. The Administration is desperate for results.” He added, “The M.E.K. has no C.P.A. auditing the books, and its leaders are thought to have been lining their pockets for years. If people only knew what the M.E.K. is getting, and how much is going to its bank accounts—and yet it is almost useless for the purposes the Administration intends.”

Seymour Hersh in an NPR interview, also claims that select MEK members have already received training in the US.

More recently, the British Daily Mail published a stunning admission by “US officials” that Israel is currently funding, training, arming, and working directly with MEK. The Daily Mail article states, “U.S. officials confirmed today that Israel has been funding and training Iranian dissidents to assassinate nuclear scientists involved in Iran’s nuclear program.” The article continues by claiming, “Washington insiders confirmed there is a close relationship between Mossad and MEK.”

In 2009, an extensive conspiracy was formulated within US policy think-tank Brookings Institution’s 2009 “Which Path to Persia?” report, proposing to fully arm, train, and back MEK as it waged a campaign of armed terror against the Iranian people.

In their report, they openly conspire to use what is an admitted terrorist organization as a “US proxy” (emphasis added):

“Perhaps the most prominent (and certainly the most controversial) opposition group that has attracted attention as a potential U.S. proxy is the NCRI (National Council of Resistance of Iran), the political movement established by the MEK (Mujahedin-e Khalq). Critics believe the group to be undemocratic and unpopular, and indeed anti-American.

In contrast, the group’s champions contend that the movement’s long-standing opposition to the Iranian regime and record of successful attacks on and intelligence-gathering operations against the regime make it worthy of U.S. support. They also argue that the group is no longer anti-American and question the merit of earlier accusations. Raymond Tanter, one of the group’s supporters in the United States, contends that the MEK and the NCRI are allies for regime change in Tehran and also act as a useful proxy for gathering intelligence. The MEK’s greatest intelligence coup was the provision of intelligence in 2002 that led to the discovery of a secret site in Iran for enriching uranium.

Despite its defenders’ claims, the MEK remains on the U.S. government list of foreign terrorist organizations. In the 1970s, the group killed three U.S. officers and three civilian contractors in Iran. During the 1979-1980 hostage crisis, the group praised the decision to take America hostages and Elaine Sciolino reported that while group leaders publicly condemned the 9/11 attacks, within the group celebrations were widespread.
Undeniably, the group has conducted terrorist attacks—often excused by the MEK’s advocates because they are directed against the Iranian government. For example, in 1981, the group bombed the headquarters of the Islamic Republic Party, which was then the clerical leadership’s main political organization, killing an estimated 70 senior officials. More recently, the group has claimed credit for over a dozen mortar attacks, assassinations, and other assaults on Iranian civilian and military targets between 1998 and 2001. At the very least, to work more closely with the group (at least in an overt manner), Washington would need to remove it from the list of foreign terrorist organizations.”

– page 117-118 of “Which Path to Persia?” Brookings Institution, 2009

The latest lobbying effort to delist MEK, led by some of the most adamant proponents for the West’s “War on Terror” is simply the latest move in a long-ago decided conspiracy to build up an armed terrorist group with which to fight a proxy war against Iran. That the conspiracy has been dutifully carried out over the course of two presidencies indicates a continuity in agenda, divorced from the alleged agendas and ideologies of each respective presidency…..

MEK is a Listed Terror Organization for a Reason

The delisting, funding, arming, and training of MEK is an indefensible crime against humanity, standing in direct violation of both United States law, as well as international accords agreed upon to stem the state sponsorship of terrorism.

MEK has carried out decades of brutal terrorist attacks, assassinations, and espionage against the Iranian government and its people, as well as targeting Americans including the attempted kidnapping of US Ambassador Douglas MacArthur II, the attempted assassination of USAF Brigadier General Harold Price, the successful assassination of Lieutenant Colonel Louis Lee Hawkins, the double assassinations of Colonel Paul Shaffer and Lieutenant Colonel Jack Turner, and the successful ambush and killing of American Rockwell International employees William Cottrell, Donald Smith, and Robert Krongard.

Admissions to the deaths of the Rockwell International employees can be found within a report written by former US State Department and Department of Defense official Lincoln Bloomfield Jr. on behalf of the lobbying firm Akin Gump in an attempt to dismiss concerns over MEK’s violent past and how it connects to its current campaign of armed terror – a testament to the depths of depravity from which Washington and London lobbyists operate.

To this day MEK terrorists have been carrying out attacks inside of Iran killing political opponents, attacking civilian targets, as well as carrying out the US-Israeli program of targeting and assassinating Iranian scientists. MEK terrorists are also suspected of handling patsies in recent false flag operations carried out in India, Georgia, and Thailand, which have been ham-handedly blamed on the Iranian government.

MEK is described by Council on Foreign Relations Senior Fellow Ray Takeyh as a “cult-like organization” with “totalitarian tendencies.” While Takeyh fails to expand on what he meant by “cult-like” and “totalitarian,” an interview with US State Department-run Radio Free Europe-Radio Liberty reported that a MEK Camp Ashraf escapee claimed the terrorist organization bans marriage, using radios, the Internet, and holds many members against their will with the threat of death if ever they are caught attempting to escape.

Conclusion

Clearly, all involved, from the Bush administration to Obama’s, are complicit in an overarching agenda to willfully arm terrorists to deploy against Iran. MEK’s history and even its current state is one of couching militant terrorism within the tenuous trappings of political activism – and provides a transparent comparison with which to use against Libyan and Syrian terrorists also armed, trained, funded, and supported by the West in pursuit of long since planned regime change.

Whether it is the US funding and arming Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) terrorists in Libya and in Syria, or delisting the already heavily US-armed and funded MEK in Iraq to carry out attacks across the border against Iran, the West itself is the premier purveyor of state sponsored global terror.

It is support that originates not within the alleged political ideologies of “Neo-Cons” or the current “liberal-Democrat” president, but from corporate-financier interests, articulated within their think-tanks, and merely rubber-stamped and sold to the public by troupes of proxy politicians using false paradigms to manipulate public perception. It is a singular, continuous agenda that will carry forth no matter who is elected into office in 2012, 2016 or beyond. Until the balance of power can be shifted from the corporate-financier interests on Wall Street and in the City of London, back into the hands of the people and their communities, such agendas will continue on.

Global Rresearch

September 23, 2012 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Terror delisting the MEK is a cynical sham

The dissident group’s lavish lobbying has paid off: hoping to look tough on Iran, the Obama administration has enlisted the MEK in a proxy war

US officials leaked to several news outlets Friday an impending decision by the Obama administration that it intends to remove the Iranian dissident group Mujahadeen e-Khalq (MEK) from the treasury department’s terror list.

Historically, the group joined together with Islamists to topple the Shah in 1979. But after it assassinated an Iranian president, prime minister and supreme court justice, Ayatollah Khomeini turned on its members and approved the massacre of hundreds of them.

At that point, the MEK set itself the mission of overthrowing the Iranian Islamist regime. It went into exile to France and Saddam Hussein also offered it refuge in Iraq. It is also known for assassinating US diplomats, military personnel and others.

It now claims it has renounced terror and devotes itself to establishing an Iranian democratic form of government that would replace the rule of the Ayatollahs. But former leaders and members of the MEK have noted the ruthlessness and duplicity of the group. They believe that the Iran it envisions would be a dictatorship rather than a democracy. These dissident former members decry the MEK’s slavish worship of its leader Maryam Rajavi in a cult of personality not unlike that of North Korea and other Communist regimes.

The Iranian dissidents have plotted for years to be removed from the terror list. They enlisted numerous Republican and Democratic officials to lobby on its behalf. Instead of paying lobbying fees to them, it offered honoraria ranging from $10,000-$50,000 per speech to excoriate the US government for its allegedly shabby treatment of the MEK.

Among those who joined the group’s gravy train are former Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell, Rudy Giuliani, Alan Dershowitz, and former FBI director Louis Freeh. Many of them profess to have little interest in the money they have collected. Instead, they claim they are sincerely moved by the group’s suffering in Iraq and wish to correct an injustice. I’m sure the money doesn’t hurt.

Analysts writing about the MEK and alienated members reject the group’s claim that it has renounced terror. Seymour Hersh recently published an expose reporting that as late as 2007, US special forces had offered Iranians training at a secret Nevada facility in covert operations. It provided them arms and communications equipment and black ops training for their anti-regime terror activities inside Iran.

A confidential Israeli source who is a former senior minister and IDF officer reported to me that the Mossad has used the MEK over many years, both to leak purported Iranian government documents of questionable provenance and engage in acts of sabotage against key figures in the Iranian regime. My source and other journalists have reported the MEK assassinated four nuclear scientists and caused an explosion that obliterated an Iranian Revolutionary Guard missile base.

Last week, the director of Iran’s nuclear program reported an August explosion disrupted the power lines to the new Fordo uranium enrichment facility. My source says this sabotage was also a product of the Mossad-MEK collaboration.

The US delisting of the group is a sham. The Obama administration isn’t even claiming the MEK has renounced terrorism. If it did, it knows that it’s likely such a statement would rebound should the MEK’s activities become exposed. The chief argument offered in defense of the change of heart is that the group has agreed to relocate from Camp Ashraf, where it’s been a thorn in the side of the Iraqi Shi’ite led government, to a US facility, from which the residents would be relocated to foreign countries.

So, we’re removing a terror group from the list not because it’s stopped being a terror group, but because it’s agreed to leave Iraq, where it had been a destabilizing influence. That’s not a principled position. It’s a position based on pure political calculation.

The MEK is useful in the covert war the US and Israel are waging against Iran’s nuclear program. It is our proxy, much as the Cuban rebels involved in the Bay of Pigs operation served our interests in the fight against Fidel Castro; and the Afghan mujahideen fought a dirty war for us against the Soviets.

In fact, Alan Dershowitz has argued that the MEK should be removed from the treasury list not because it has stopped being terrorist, but because it collaborated with US covert activities inside Iran, meaning that it was serving US interests. Or put more simply: the MEK may be terrorists, but they’re our terrorists.

Delisting the MEK serves several goals for President Obama. He can flex his muscles in the face of both the Iranians and Republicans. To the Iranians, he’s implicitly saying he will make alliance with their worst enemy as long as they resist him at the negotiating table. To Mitt Romney, he’s saying he’s willing to get tough with the Iranians. This inoculates him from campaign attacks claiming he’s soft on Iran or that he’s willing to let Iran get the bomb.

You can bet that one of the president’s campaign talking points will be that he delisted the MEK. It will establish his anti-Iran bona fides when the TV ads paid for by Sheldon Adelson’s anticipated $100m start airing in the coming weeks.

Just as President Obama’s anti-terror policies, including targeted assassinations and drone strikes, have betrayed his previous denunciations of such violations of constitutional principles, so his granting a seal of approval to the MEK marks a further erosion of his commitment to diplomacy and negotiation as the means for resolving international disputes, including the one with Iran.

guardian.co.uk

September 23, 2012 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Analysts Respond to Expected US Decision to delist MEK from FTO List

Jim Lobe and I wrote a report yesterday for IPS News about the expected US decision to delist the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (aka MEK, PMOI and NCRI) from its foreign terrorist organizations (FTO) list. Most analysts we interviewed predicted that the removal would only worsen already abysmal relations with Iran and possibly make any effort to defuse the gathering crisis over its nuclear programme yet more difficult. Here’s a round-up of what they had to say beginning with statements that came in following the article’s publication:

John Limbert, a retired career Foreign Service officer and former embassy hostage in Tehran who served as the first-ever Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Iran from 2009 to 2010 when he returned to teach at the US Naval Academy:

There may be reasons, but it’s a strange and disappointing decision.

I know the group claims it has abandon its violent and anti-American past. I wish I could believe them. They have a very dubious history and a similarly dubious present.

Farideh Farhi, Iran expert at the University of Hawaii:

As to the MEK delisting, especially after high-level leaks by members of the US intelligence community that the MEK was involved in terror operations inside Iran, the decision will no doubt make the Iranian leadership even more distrustful of US intentions regarding the future of Iran, particularly given the congressional support for the MEK to spearhead regime change. Less trust will make compromise less likely, presumably a preferred outcome for the high profile supporters of the MEK in Congress and elsewhere.

Note that the Obama Administration’s humanitarian argument for delisting says very little about the future operation of this group in the US and how their well-funded operation and agitation for regime change will be promoted or managed in the US. This ambiguity by itself will be a source of tension and will be used by hardliners inside Iran to further delegitimize all efforts to agitate for political reform from inside and outside of the country.

The issue is not about whether something needed to be done to help the poor souls caught in Iraq, abused by everyone including their own cult-like organization. The issue has to do with the wisdom of linking the highly political and politicized process of de-listing to a humanitarian effort.

Paul Pillar, a former top CIA analyst who served as the National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005:

“Delisting will be seen not only by the Iranian regime, but also by most Iranian citizens, as a hostile act by the United States.”

“The MEK has almost no popular support within Iran, where it is despised as a group of traitors, especially given its history of joining forces with Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War,” Pillar, who now teaches at George Washington University, added.

“Any effect of the delisting on nuclear negotiations will be negative; Tehran will read it as one more indication that the United States is interested only in hostility and pressure toward the Islamic Republic, rather than coming to terms with it.”

Seyed Hossein Mousavian, a former senior Iranian diplomat and nuclear negotiator currently at Princeton University:

“The Iranian security establishment’s assessment has long believed that foreign intelligence agencies, specifically the CIA, Israeli Mossad, and the UK’s MI6 utilise the MEK for terror attacks on Iranian nuclear scientists, nuclear sabotage and intelligence gathering,”…

“Therefore, the delisting of MEK will be seen in Tehran as a reward for the group’s terrorist actions in the country,” he wrote in an email exchange with IPS. “Furthermore, Iran has firmly concluded that the Western demands for broader inspections (of Iran’s nuclear programme), including its military sites, are a smokescreen for mounting increased cyber attacks, sabotage and terror of nuclear scientists.

“Delisting MEK would be considered in Tehran as a U.S.-led effort to increase sabotage and covert actions through MEK leading inevitably to less cooperation by Iran with the IAEA (the International Atomic Energy Agency).”

He added that government in Tehran will use this as a way of “demonstrating to the public that the U.S. is seeking …to bring a MEK-style group to power” which, in turn, “would strengthen the Iranian nation’s support for the current system as the perceived alternative advanced by Washington would be catastrophic.”

Karim Sadjadpour, analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace:

…said the move was unlikely to be “game-changer” in that “the MEK will continue to be perceived inside Iran as an antiquated cult which sided with Saddam Hussein during the (Iran-Iraq) war, and U.S. Iran relations will remain hostile.”

“It doesn’t help (Washington’s) image within Iran, certainly, and some Iranian democracy activists may misperceive this as a U.S. show of support for the MEK, which could have negative ramifications,” he noted.

Jamal Abdi, policy director at the National Iranian American Council:

“The biggest winner today is the Iranian regime, which has claimed for a long time that the U.S. is out to destroy Iran and is the enemy of the Iranian people,” said NIAC’s policy director, Jamal Abdi.

“It will certainly not improve U.S.-Iranian relations,” according to Alireza Nader, an Iran specialist at the Rand Corporation, who agreed that the “delisting reinforces Tehran’s longstanding narrative regarding U.S. hostility toward the regime.

“Nevertheless,” he added, “I don’t think it is detrimental to U.S. interests as Tehran suspects U.S. collusion with the MED anyhow, whether this perception is correct or not.”

Mila Johns, a researcher at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland:

“The entire atmosphere around the MEK’s campaign to be removed from the FTO list – the fact that (former) American government officials were allowed to actively and openly receive financial incentives to speak in support of an organisation that was legally designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, without consequence – created the impression that the list is essentially a meaningless political tool,” she told IPS.

“It is hard to imagine that the FTO designation holds much legitimacy within the international community when it is barely respected by our own government,” she said.

No other group, she noted, has been de-listed in this way, “though now that the precedent has been set, I would expect that other groups will explore this as an option.”

By Jasmin Ramsey

September 23, 2012 0 comments

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