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Mujahedin Khalq Organization as a terrorist group

The MEK are current terrorists not former terrorists

“The Enemy of My Enemy is My Friend”…US to Remove MEK from Terrorist List?

If asked to name a terrorist organization most Americans could likely name Al Qaeda, Al Shabbab, and a few others. Few are probably familiar with the Mujahedin-e Khalq or Peoples Mujaheddin of Iran known by its initials MEK. 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 MEK has been designated a terrorist group by the “The Enemy of My Enemy is My Friend”…US to Remove MEK from Terrorist List? US State Department since 1995. The MEK, however do not simply attack Americans. According to The American Muslim: “The M.E.K. are terrorists. They were driven out of Iran and given a home at a place called Camp Ashraf in Iraq by Saddam Hussein, who they supported. Saddam Hussein used the M.E.K. to carry out terrorist acts in Iran.” In 2001, the MEK “renounced” terrorism. Irrespective of this renunciation, a 2004 FBI report on the MEK which was revealed in June 2011 states that the MEK The long and short is that the MEK are current terrorists not former terrorists. So why would the US consider removing the designation from the group?
Many people are likely familiar with some of the more recent activities of the MEK. The MEK is responsible for assassination of 5 Iranian nuclear scientists since 2007 and possibly destroyed a missile site. Trained, financed and supported by Isreal, the MEK has been used to disrupt the Iranian nuclear operations causing a delay of years to Iran’s objective of creating a nuclear weapon. In March 2012 Richard Engel & Robert Windrem of NBC News reported that:

“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.” And then “”… Two senior U.S. officials confirmed for NBC News the MEK’s role in the assassinations, with one senior official saying, “All your inclinations are correct.” A third official would not confirm or deny the relationship, saying only, “It hasn’t been clearly confirmed yet.” All the officials denied any U.S. involvement in the assassinations.”"

It is certainly interesting that a terrorist organization that is now taking action which supports the US’ agenda may suddenly be reclassified as not being a terrorist organization. This post is not intended to question the validity of the decision simply educate and highlight the point that in world politics “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”.

By Chris Mark ,Globalriskinfo

May 21, 2012 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Of Terrorists and Freedom Fighters

Conor Friedersdorf passes along a bit of “insight” from Jonah Goldberg’s The Tyranny of Cliches. Goldberg wrote:

It is simply absurd to contend that because people may argue over who is or is not a terrorist that it is therefore impossible to make meaningful distinctions between terrorists and freedom fighters.

As usual, Goldberg has missed the point. The phrase “one’s man terrorist is another man’s Of Terrorists and Freedom Fighters freedom fighter” is a cliche because the truth it conveys is so banal and obvious that it often seems redundant to mention it. A group can employ terrorist tactics while also seeking to achieve self-determination for the people it claims to represent. While the phrase may sometimes be used to justify terrorist attacks, it expresses a truth about the nature of political violence that partly explains but does not excuse the atrocious acts carried out by “liberation” groups.

The LTTE (Tamil Tigers) really were terrorists (they pioneered suicide bombing), and for the Tamils in Sri Lanka and southern India they were also freedom fighters. The IRA really were terrorists, and Irish republicans and more than a few Irish-Americans saw them as fighting the good fight against the remnants of the British Empire. The KLA really were terrorists, but many Albanians in Kosovo and elsewhere perceived them as the “liberation” army they claimed to be. The point is that terrorists can be perceived by many people in their own community as freedom fighters in spite of their atrocious tactics. Their status as terrorists is determined by the civilian targets they attack or the indiscriminate tactics they use to attack them. Their political reasons for targeting civilians or killing indiscriminately don’t change anything.

Some governments refuse to tolerate the use of terrorist tactics under any circumstances, but some tacitly or openly endorse the use of such tactics when the targets happen to be the “right” ones. Unfortunately, when it comes to dealing with Iran, the U.S. has adopted the second approach. The U.S. attitude towards the MEK over the decades is a good example of how very changeable governments can be. At one point, the MEK was obviously an anti-American terrorist organization responsible for the deaths of American citizens. Later, Hussein’s support for the MEK was unimportant, because Hussein was perceived as the lesser of two evils in the conflict between Iran and Iraq. Once Hussein’s Iraq became the main regional enemy, his support for the MEK was suddenly turned into part of the indictment against him. Once Hussein was overthrown, not only was the MEK no longer to be considered a terrorist group, but in some circles it was seen as a valuable ally in opposing the Iranian regime. According to some reports, the Obama administration is on the verge of capitulating to the disgraceful campaign to have this terrorist group removed from the FTO list. It is somewhat fitting that the MEK is a terrorist group that is not recognized by the vast majority of Iranians in Iran or in the diaspora as “freedom fighters.” The only people foolish enough to believe that the MEK is interested in anyone’s freedom are those paid to say so and those so hostile to Iran that they will ally with anyone with the same goal of regime change.

By Daniel Larison

May 19, 2012 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

NDAA Provisions attacking Freedom of Speech Struck Down

A federal judge has ruled unconstitutional portions of this year’s National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) which provided for indefinite imprisonment for journalists and activists who reported Juan Cole on organizations deemed ‘terrorist’ by the US government.

Judge Katherine Forrest ruled,

“The statute at issue places the public at undue risk of having their speech chilled for the purported protection from al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and ‘associated forces’ – i.e., ‘foreign terrorist organizations.’ The vagueness of Section 1021 does not allow the average citizen, or even the government itself, to understand with the type of definiteness to which our citizens are entitled, or what conduct comes within its scope.”

The vagueness is such that prominent figures such as Rudy Giuliani have palled around with the MEK (Mojahedin-e Khalq or People’s Holy Jihadis) of Iran, which was on the terrorism watch list for years, with no adverse reaction from the government. But now the Israel lobbies have succeeded in getting the MEK, which has a secret alliance with Israeli intelligence, removed from the list! So could you meet them before? Report on their views? Now? Note that remaining on the list is Lebanon’s Hizbullah, a national liberation organization that got back Lebanese territory from an illegal Israeli invasion and occupation that killed tens of thousands of people.

If we let the US government determine to whom we can speak and what we can say, assuming our words represent no clear and present danger of provoking violence, we may as well just trade in our US passports for an Iranian one.

You know, the Right Wing in Congress has been pulling this stuff for decades, and it only stops when the real Americans put their feet down. Ted Kennedy used to just rule this kind of bullcrap out of bounds in the Senate. But apparently Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi just don’t care, and neither does Barack Obama. There are a whole series of bad decisions that the three of them could have stopped if they had bothered.

May 19, 2012 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

State Department Poised to Raise Chances of War With Iran

The State Department, according to a report in today’s Wall Street Journal, is poised to do something that could increase the chances of war with Iran. Hillary Clinton

Let’s set the context:

We’re in the midst of negotiations with Iran, trying to keep it from building a nuclear bomb. Within Iran there is disagreement about how hard a line to take in the negotiations. Obviously, all other things being equal, it would be good to strengthen moderate voices within Iran and undermine hardliners–particularly hardliners who want the talks to fail altogether so that Iran can proceed to build a bomb.

Here is part of the narrative the hardliners are pushing:

Iran needs nuclear weapons to defend itself. It is beset by enemies. The Sunni states would love to overthrow our government. Just recall that Iraq, when it was a Sunni-run state, attacked us, starting a war that killed hundreds of thousands of Iranians. And note that Sunni states are currently trying to abet the overthrow of our ally in Syria–just one domino away from the fall of our own government. And don’t forget about the American-Zionist axis: prominent Americans and Israelis openly call for regime change in Tehran, and we suspect that this is the secret goal of the Obama administration.

OK, so that’s the narrative that we don’t want to strengthen–particularly the America-Zionist-axis-is-bent-on-regime-change part. Here, then, is an example of something we probably shouldn’t go out of our way to do: Take an Iranian-exile group that is devoted to overthrowing the Iranian government, and that has long been on America’s list of terrorist organizations, and give it our seal of approval by taking it off that list.

That would be stupid, right? Yet that’s what, according to today’s report in the Journal, the State Department is leaning toward.

The group in question is the Mujahedin-e Khalq, or MEK, which got onto our list of terrorist organizations decades ago by, among other things, killing Americans.

Now, if MEK had, as it claims, left its terrorist ways behind, this "delisting" of it, though geopolitically unfortunate, might be legally or morally defensible. However, within only the last few months, according to NBC News, MEK agents have murdered people by placing bombs on their cars.

The murdered people were Iranian scientists, and the assassinations were apparently orchestrated by Israel–facts that may raise MEK in the esteem of some Americans. But that doesn’t make the killings any more legal or less terroristic. What it does do is make them very powerful talking points for Iranian hardliners who want to derail negotiations by warning about the American-Zionist axis: "America embraces Israel’s proxy anti-Iranian terrorists, terrorists who openly favor regime change in Iran, and then tells us we don’t need a nuclear deterrent to keep us safe from America and Israel?"

There’s more bad news: the campaign to delist MEK is well financed (the source of funding is unclear), and includes paying large speaking fees to influential American politicos–transactions that tend to be accompanied by these politicos suddenly saying nice things about MEK. And for all we know the people funding this scheme would be willing to make big campaign contributions to a sufficiently compliant Obama administration.

The good news is that the final decision may not be imminent and could be months off–and will probably be made by Hillary Clinton. And surely she knows that if she caves in to the political pressure being mustered on behalf of MEK, she’ll be guaranteeing herself a place in the diplomats’ hall of shame.

By Robert Wright ,The Atlantic.com

May 19, 2012 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Apparently terrorism isn’t terrorism if it targets Iran

The Obama administration is moving to delist an Iranian dissident group from the State Department terrorism list, which, as recently as January, reportedly detonated a magnetic bomb Apparently terrorism isn't terrorism if it targets Iran under the car of an Iranian scientist. Perhaps unintentionally, the message the move would send appears to be: This activity is OK as long as it’s against Iran.

Last night, The Wall Street Journal’s Jay Solomon and Evan Perez reported that the exile group Mujahedin-e Khalq, or MeK is on its way to being removed from the official U.S terror list after an agressive two-year lobbying campaign in Washington by the group. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has yet to give the final green light but officials say the plan will likely go through so long as MeK leaves a former paramilitary base in Iraq, called Camp Ashraf, from which the group has launched cross-border strikes into Iran. According to The Journal, "Mrs. Clinton purposefully tied the closing of Camp Ashraf to the designation issue to defuse a thorny diplomatic issue between Washington and Baghdad." The other sticking point, according to The Journal, was resolved: "The group has already renounced terrorism." Great! But have they really?

According to a lengthy investigation by NBC News’ Richard Engel and Robert Windrem in February, they haven’t. The report cites U.S. officials accusing MeK of assassinating Iran’s nuclear scientists:

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.

According to Engel and Windre, the MeK attacks were carried out with the training of Mossad, the Israeli secret service, "Two senior U.S. officials confirmed for NBC News the MEK’s role in the assassinations, with one senior official saying, ‘All your inclinations are correct.’" The MeK has denied involvement in the attacks.

While some foreign policy hawks may rejoice at the idea of an Iranian dissident group setting back Iran’s nuclear program, grisly assassinations are certainly a technique that should give one pause, especially if the U.S. is to have a consistent policy on terrorism. Strategically, even avowed defenders of Israel, such as The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, have criticized the tactic of thwarting Iran’s nuclear program by murdering scientists.

"If I were a member of the Iranian regime (and I’m not), I would take this assassination program to mean that the West is entirely uninterested in any form of negotiation (not that I, the regime official, has ever been much interested in dialogue with the West) and that I should double-down and cross the nuclear threshold as fast as humanly possible," Goldberg wrote in January. "Once I do that, I’m North Korea, or Pakistan: An untouchable country."

While the Journal doesn’t mention MeK’s reported role in the attacks, it does forecast what Iran’s response would be if MeK was delisted. "Western and Iranian diplomats are concerned that the MeK issue could draw serious recriminations from Tehran, which has been fixated on neutralizing the group," reads the report. "Many of Iran’s top leaders, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, were targets of MeK attacks during the 1980s." Clearly, like any country, Iran takes assassination attempts on its people seriously. As Reuters reports today, Iran hanged a man it said was working with Mossad in the killing of one of its nuclear scientists in 2010. But more to the point: Isn’t the U.S. ceding some of its credibility with this flexible definition of terrorism?

Update: This post was updated to clarify that NBC News linked MeK to the assassination of Iran’s nuclear scientists and The Wall Street Journal did not.

By John Hudson ,The Atlanticwire

May 17, 2012 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Is One Man’s Terrorist Another Man’s Freedom Fighter?

The ongoing saga of Mujahedin-e-Khalq is a good example of how the unfortunately imprecise cliche ought to be understood.

In his new book, The Tyranny of Cliches, Jonah Goldberg goes on a rant against the phrase, Is One Man's Terrorist Another Man's Freedom Fighter? "One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter," writing, "It is simply absurd to contend that because people may argue over who is or is not a terrorist that it is therefore impossible to make meaningful distinctions between terrorists and freedom fighters." Is that what those who invoke the phrase are saying? Like a lot of cliches, it doesn’t really make literal sense and is probably best avoided, but I suspect what many people mean when they use it is something like, "As a descriptor, terrorist is almost never applied rigorously and consistently to describe the tactics a group is using — rather, it is invoked as a pejorative to vilify the actions only of groups one wishes to discredit. People who agree with the ends of the very same groups often don’t think of them as terrorists, the negative connotation of which causes them to focus on what they regard as the noble ends of allies they’re more likely to dub freedom fighters."

Put more simply, it’s possible to rigorously determine who is a terrorist if you go by the actual meaning of the word, but in practice the term is almost never applied in accordance with a strict definition.

And today I can alert you to an especially Orwellian example.

Back when the Bush Administration wanted to go to war in Iraq, despite the fact that it had nothing to do with 9/11, they did their best to persuade terrorist-hating Americans that Saddam Hussein was a sponsor of terrorism. For example, the Bush White House published a document called "Saddam Hussein’s Support for International Terrorism." Check out this bullet point especially:

Iraq shelters terrorist groups including the Mujahedin-e-Khalq Organization (MKO), which has used terrorist violence against Iran and in the 1970s was responsible for killing several U.S. military personnel and U.S. civilians.

Nowadays, Iran is Public Enemy Number One. Mujahedin-e-Khalq, also known as MEK, is still a terrorist organization. That is to say, it both uses violence to terrorize civilian employees of the Iranian regime and appears on America’s official list of foreign terror-sponsoring organizations. But various prominent Americans are being paid big bucks to help get MEK off the official list of terror groups.

And they’re reportedly poised to succeed. As my colleague Bob Wright puts it:

If MEK had, as it claims, left its terrorist ways behind, this "delisting" of it, though geopolitically unfortunate, might be legally or morally defensible. However, within only the last few months, according to NBC News, MEK agents have murdered people by placing bombs on their cars. The murdered people were Iranian scientists, and the assassinations were apparently orchestrated by Israel — facts that may raise MEK in the esteem of some Americans.

But that doesn’t make the killings any more legal or less terroristic.

As Glenn Greenwald writes:

The application of the term "Terrorist" by the U.S. Government has nothing to do with how that term is commonly understood, but is instead exploited solely as a means to punish those who defy U.S. dictates and reward those who advance American interests and those of its allies (especially Israel). Thus, this Terror group is complying with U.S. demands, has been previously trained by the U.S. itself, and is perpetrating its violence on behalf of a key American client state and against a key American enemy, and — presto — it is no longer a "foreign Terrorist organization."

If you want to know the intended rather than literally expressed meaning of, "One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter," you need look no further than the story of MEK.

By Conor Friedersdorf ,The Atlantic

May 17, 2012 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Hillary’s Terrorists

Hillary Clinton is about to delist a dangerous terror group

On May 21, 1975, Col. Paul Shaffer, a military attaché to the US mission in Iran, kissed his wife Hillary Clinton is about to delist a dangerous terror group and two children goodbye, and entered a waiting car with his colleague, Lt. Col. Jack Turner, whose wife was getting their three children ready for school. It was the last time the families of these two US servicemen would see them alive.

As the Iranian driver pulled into a side street to avoid traffic a car blocked their passage and another car rammed them from behind. Three gunmen appeared and fired at the two Americans pointblank, killing them instantly: the three escaped in a third car, leaving a leaflet on the blood-drenched seat. The leaflet denounced “US imperialism” and bore the imprint of the Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK), or “People’s Crusaders,” a Marxist-Islamist group led by Massoud and Maryam Rajavi.

All in all, the MEK killed 6 Americans in Iran: Lt. Col. Louis Lee Hawkins, an Army comptroller, cut down by gunman in front of his Tehran home, and William Cottrell, Donald Smith, and Robert Krongard, all employees of Rockwell International. They wounded Air Force Gen. Harold L. Price, and tried and failed to kidnap the US ambassador, Douglas MacArthur II. After the Iranian Revolution, the MEK supported the takeover of the US embassy in Tehran, opposed the release of the diplomats – calling a mass demonstration in protest – and demanded their execution.

Today, the MEK is campaigning to be taken off the US State Department’s list of terrorist organizations – and they’re on the brink of success. According to the Wall Street Journal:

“Senior U.S. officials said on Monday that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has yet to make any final decision on the MeK’s status. But they said the State Department was looking favorably at delisting MeK if it continued cooperating by vacating a former paramilitary base inside Iraq, called Camp Ashraf, which the group had used to stage cross-border strikes into Iran.”

What the article fails to mention is that those “cross border strikes into Iran” took place during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, when the MEK enjoyed the patronage of Saddam Hussein: MEK cadre fought on the Iraqi side during that conflict. They also were useful to Saddam in repressing internal enemies of the regime: after the 1991 Gulf war, MEK fighters were used by Saddam to crush uprisings in the south and in Iraqi Kurdistan. Maryam Rajavi told her followers: “Take the Kurds under your tanks, and save your bullets for the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.”

MEK has been described as a cult, most notably in a scary report by Human Rights Watch, a fascinating Al Jazeera video report, and in a remarkable piece by Elizabeth Rubin in the New York Times. Rubin relates the testimony of Salahaddin Mukhtadi, an Iranian historian living in exile, who says dissident MEK members “are locked up if they disagree with anything. And sometimes killed.” In the MEK cult, having particular friendships is strictly forbidden: sitting and talking together is considered a crime, especially when the subject is one’s past life before joining the cult. Wives are ordered to divorce their husbands, celibacy is mandatory, and families are broken up: nothing must come between the members and their devotion to the cause. Forced confessions and “criticism sessions” occur on a daily basis, in which participants are subjected to group abuse called “ideological cleansings.”

After the American invasion and occupation of Iraq, Massoud Rajavi ordered his followers to greet the Americans as liberators – and promptly went into hiding. He has not been seen since, but is said to retain his control over the cult, using his wife, Maryam – who has been proclaimed the self-styled “President” of Iran by the group –as a front. The US government took charge of the MEK facility, known as Camp Ashraf, and, although the Bush administration continued to characterize the group as a terrorist organization, President Bush cited Massoud’s cult as the source of “intelligence” on Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program. Prominent neoconservatives began agitating for utilizing the MEK the way the Bush administration had used Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress, but efforts to openly put them on the CIA payroll stalled, along with the administration’s war plans. Somebody in the Bush administration must have figured out that funding and supporting a terrorist group that had killed Americans would not sit well while we were conducting an international “war on terrorism.”

However, it turns out the Bush administration secretly brought MEK cadre to the US for military training, including communications intercepts and other clandestine cloak-and-dagger stuff: the program supposedly ended just before the Obama administration took office. Apparently the MEK were turned over to the Mossad, who utilized them to carry out the assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists in Iran.

The MEK’s campaign to get their terrorist group legitimized has been characterized by large cash payments to prominent politicians and public figures in both parties: the list of MEK endorsers reads like a political Who’s Who of Washington bigwigs. The payments are ostensibly for speaking engagements at MEK rallies, but the size of these disbursements – ranging upward from $50,000 – indicates some good old-fashioned bribery.

There is an awful lot of MEK cash sloshing around the halls of Congress, and the cultists haven’t been shy about handing it out. Whether the Clinton Foundation or some Clinton-affiliated “charity” has partaken of the MEK’s largesse is presently unknown, but, as they say at the National Enquirer, “inquiring minds want to know.”

It’s fair to ask: where is all this unaccounted for cash coming from? While the Rajavi-ites use the familiar methods employed by cults to strip their members of all their assets – see the Al Jazeera video for a heart-rending account of how a major MEK spokesman ripped off his own elderly parents – it seems likely that, during their sojourn as Saddam Hussein’s favorite assassins, the MEK received compensation from the Iraqi dictator for slaughtering the Kurds and other regime opponents so efficiently and ruthlessly. Which means people like former Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell, who has shilled for the MEK, and former Democratic party chairman Howard Dean, are recipients of Saddam’s gold.

Like so much of US foreign policy, the idea that the US would legitimize a crazed cult like the MEK sounds like the plot of a bad thriller. Yet it’s all about the timing: as the US-Iran nuclear talks loom, the prospect of our State Department in effect legalizing the MEK and its activities in the US is an open provocation that could possibly shut down the sensitive negotiations – and pave the way for war with Iran. No doubt hardliners within the Obama administration are using the MEK issue as a backdoor way to torpedo the Baghdad talks: whether they will succeed remains to be seen. As one State Department official told the Wall Street Journal: “To make that assertion on your own that the MeK will be removed is a realistic one. But in policy making you never know for sure what will happen.”

I have to add that the MEK, while claiming to have “renounced” terrorism, exists in an atmosphere seething with violence, and my own experience with them has borne this out. Whenever I have written about them I have invariably received emails from MEK supporters laden with explicit threats of violence. This is to be expected from members of a psycho cult, but in the case of the MEK it’s not like they’ve never killed any Americans before. Just ask the families of Paul Shaffer, Jack Turner, Louis Lee Hawkins, William Cottrell, Donald Smith, and Robert Krongard.

Antiwar.com

May 16, 2012 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Is Israel flirting with Iranian terrorists?

Israel’s image as a victim of terror is taken for granted by most Americans. Thus, the NBC report from February 9 of this year was all the more stunning. Obama administration officials leaked to Trita Parsi NBC that Israel had teamed up with a violent, cultish, US-terror listed Iranian organization called the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK) to assassinate Iranian scientists.

Citing US government sources, NBC reported that Israel financed, trained and armed the MEK to carry out the deadly attacks on Iranian nuclear scientists. That Israel had a role in the assassination of the scientists took few by surprise. That it collaborated with a fundamentally anti-Israeli, Marxist-Islamist terror organization to pull off the attacks was perhaps a bit more surprising. (That the Obama administration would divulge this information and embarrass its close ally Israel publicly was also unexpected.)

The MEK’s history of violence and anti-Israeli activities is long and bloody. In the 1970s, it established deep ties with Yasser Arafat and both provided and received training from the PLO fighters. Much of the late Shah’s antipathy towards Arafat was rooted in the latters ties to the MEK and other opponents of the Pahlavi dynasty, publicly complaining “that some of the groups of the [Palestinian] resistance trained Iranian saboteurs to infiltrate our territory, kill our people and blow up various installations.”

Only days after the 1979 revolution toppled the Shah’s regime, Arafat showed up uninvited in Tehran, hoping that his investment in the Iranian opposition would translate into political, financial and military support to the PLO by the new Iranian regime.

Massud Rajavi, the head of the MEK, greeted Arafat in Tehran with a Kalashnikov as a welcoming gift. When Saddam Hussein invaded Iran in 1980, Rajavi fled Iran for Iraq, where he enjoyed the protection of Saddam Hussein until 2003. A former MEK fighter told me that Arafat visited the MEK’s military camp in Iraq (Ashraf).

Israeli diplomats knew that whoever seized power in Iran in 1979 would be no lover of Israel—whether it was the Islamists who opposed Israel on religious and ideological grounds, or the leftists who viewed Israel as an outpost for American imperialism in the region. The MEK was unique since it fell in both categories.

Exactly when Israel’s ties with the MEK were established is unclear. But by the early 1990s, as I describe in my book, a relationship was forming, though its full nature and extent remains unknown.

At the time, Deputy Defense Minister Ephraim Sneh pushed Yitzhak Rabin to signal Tehran that Israel could also play the terrorist card. Sneh argued that whenever Iran used Islamic Jihad or Hamas to blow up a bus in Jerusalem, Israel should use the MEK to respond in kind in Tehran.

But cooler heads prevailed. Rabin refrained from entering into a public relationship with the organization. But the Labor government left the door to the MEK half open: it permitted the Iranian terrorist group to use two Israeli satellites to beam their TV broadcasts into Iran.

Even the MEK’s alleged revelation of the Iranian nuclear facilities at Natanz in 2002 was based on information leaked to the organization by Israel, according to Israeli intelligence expert Ronen Bergman. Indeed, a former US State Department official told me recently that while Israel does not publicly acknowledge its ties to the MEK, Israeli officials privately tell the US that the MEK is “useful.”

All of this has fueled suspicions in DC that the current multi-million dollar lobbying campaign by the MEK to get off of the State Department’s terror list is bankrolled by Israeli sources. Dozens of former US officials have received tens and thousands of dollars in speakers’ fees from the MEK or its surrogates to speak out on their behalf. These former officials have likely violated US laws on material support to terrorist organizations, and several of them have had their records subpoenaed by the US Treasury in an ongoing investigation.

Political one-night stands are not unusual in the Middle East. Even tactical collaboration with sworn enemies takes place. But associating Israel with a cultish Iranian terror group is damaging to Israel on several levels.

First, any attempt by Israel to hold the higher moral ground and point fingers at the regime in Tehran will be lost if Israel itself is entangled with violent terrorist groups that kill indiscriminatingly. This may have implications for other states’ willingness to collaborate against terrorist groups targeting Israel.

Second, if Israel teams up with an organization described by the US State Department as “fundamentally undemocratic” and “not a viable alternative to the current government of Iran,” the argument that peace in the region would be achieved if only the other states in the region were as democratic as Israel will become even more unconvincing.

And finally, this will likely undermine Israel’s ability to rebuild ties with the Iranian people down the road. The MEK has the dubious honor of being the only entity more disliked by the Iranian people.

It’s simply an association Israel should avoid.

Dailybeast.com

May 16, 2012 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

MeK and That Dastardly T-Word

In the news section, Jason Ditz tells us that the State Department is preparing to remove the Iranian dissident group Mujahedin-e Khalq (MeK) from their official list of terrorist organizations. This, after years of praise and advocacy from elite members in American politics, from Ed Randell to John Bolton to Howard Dean and Rudy Giuliani. These types of people collected payments from the MeK for their advocacy to get the group removed from the State Department’s list, which amounts to “material support” for terrorist groups, a felony. Of course, such well-connected, high-society types don’t get prosecuted for unlawful behavior unless it involves betraying the sanctity of marriage. And the fact that the U.S. government secretly trained MeK fighters in recent years and is now being employed by Israel to conduct acts of terrorism inside Iran probably won’t increase the likelihood of such prosecutions.

Interestingly, Glenn Greenwald has dug up the following bit of history. A document written by the Bush administration in the lead up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, still in the archives of the White House’s website, seeks to justify the war on the basis of Saddam’s support for the very “terrorist” group we are now supporting!

Iraq shelters terrorist groups including the Mujahedin-e-Khalq Organization (MKO), which has used terrorist violence against Iran and in the 1970s was responsible for killing several U.S. military personnel and U.S. civilians.

This makes flagrantly clear that, as Greenwald writes, “the application of the term ‘Terrorist’ by the U.S. Government has nothing to do with how that term is commonly understood, but is instead exploited solely as a means to punish those who defy U.S. dictates and reward those who advance American interests and those of its allies (especially Israel).”

For another example, think back to the height of Obama’s war in Libya. Preeminent AEI jingo Marc Thiessan tried to justify ousting Gadhafi because, of course, he was a committed terrorist. After all, Theissan wrote, Gadhafi was:

the man who blew up Pan Am 103 over Scotland, killing 270 people; destroyed a French passenger jet over Niger, killing 171 people; bombed the La Belle discotheque in West Berlin, killing two U.S. soldiers and injuring more than 50 American servicemen; established terrorist training camps on Libyan soil; provided terrorists with arms and safe haven…

See how easy that is? Theissan and other supporters of the war went through this rap sheet repeatedly, refusing to highlight the fact that the NATO-backed rebels had direct ties to al-Qaeda and had themselves committed serious acts of “terror.”

So a terrorist is whoever our military and political leadership say it is. Until they begin to collude with them, then they’re not terrorists anymore.

By John Glaser

May 16, 2012 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Likely victory for MeK shills

Former U.S. officials, paid to advocate for a designated Terror group, are now on the verge of succeeding Likely victory for MeK shills

A bipartisan band of former Washington officials and politicians has spent the last two years aggressively advocating on behalf of the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MeK), an Iranian dissident group that has been formally designated for the last 15 years by the U.S. State Department as a “foreign Terrorist organization.” Most of those former officials have been paid large sums of money to speak at MeK events and meet with its leaders, thus developing far more extensive relations with this Terror group than many marginalized Muslims who have been prosecuted and punished with lengthy prison terms for “materially supporting a Terrorist organization.” These bipartisan MeK advocates have been demanding the group’s removal from the Terror list, advocacy that has continued unabated despite (or, more accurately, because of ) reports that MeK is trained and funded by the Israelis and has been perpetrating acts of violence on Iranian soil aimed at that country’s civilian nuclear scientists and facilities (also known as: Terrorism).

Now, needless to say, the State Department appears likely to accede to the demands of these paid bipartisan shills:

The Obama administration is moving to remove an Iranian opposition group from the State Department’s terrorism list, say officials briefed on the talks, in an action that could further poison Washington’s relations with Tehran at a time of renewed diplomatic efforts to curtail Iran’s nuclear program.

The exile organization, the Mujahedin-e Khalq, or MeK, was originally named as a terrorist entity 15 years ago for its alleged role in assassinating U.S. citizens in the years before the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran and for allying with Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein against Tehran.

The MeK has engaged in an aggressive legal and lobbying campaign in Washington over the past two years to win its removal from the State Department’s list. . . . Senior U.S. officials said on Monday that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has yet to make any final decision on the MeK’s status. But they said the State Department was looking favorably at delisting MeK if it continued cooperating by vacating a former paramilitary base inside Iraq, called Camp Ashraf, which the group had used to stage cross-border strikes into Iran.

This highlights almost every salient fact about how Washington functions with regard to such matters. First, if you pay a sufficiently large and bipartisan group of officials to lobby on your behalf, you will get your way, even when it comes to vaunted National Security and Terrorism decisions; if you pay the likes of Howard Dean, Fran Townsend, Wesley Clark, Ed Rendell, Rudy Giuliani, Tom Ridge and others like them to peddle their political influence for you, you will be able to bend Washington policy and law to your will. As Andrew Exum put it this morning: “I guess Hizballah and LeT just need to buy off more former administration officials.”

Second, the application of the term “Terrorist” by the U.S. Government has nothing to do with how that term is commonly understood, but is instead exploited solely as a means to punish those who defy U.S. dictates and reward those who advance American interests and those of its allies (especially Israel). Thus, this Terror group is complying with U.S. demands, has been previously trained by the U.S. itself, and is perpetrating its violence on behalf of a key American client state and against a key American enemy, and — presto — it is no longer a “foreign Terrorist organization.”

Third, this yet again underscores who the actual aggressors are in the tensions with Iran. Imagine if multiple, high-level former Iranian officials received large sums of money from a group of Americans dedicated to violently overthrowing the U.S. government and committing acts of violence on American soil, and the Iranian Government then removed it from its list of Terror groups, thus allowing funding and other means of support to flow freely to that group.

Fourth, the rule of law is not even a purported constraint on the conduct of Washington political elites. Here, the behavior of these paid MeK shills is so blatantly illegal that even the Obama administration felt compelled to commence investigations to determine who was paying them and for what. As a strictly legal matter, removing MeK from the Terror list should have no effect on the criminality of their acts: it’s a felony to provide material support to a designated Terror group — which the Obama DOJ, backed by the U.S. Supreme Court, has argued, in a full frontal assault on free speech rights, even includes coordinating advocacy with such a group (ironically, some of this Terror group’s paid advocates, such as former Bush Homeland Security adviser Fran Townsend, cheered that Supreme Court ruling when they thought it would only restrict the political advocacy of Muslims, not themselves).

The fact that the Terror group is subsequently removed from the list does not render that material support non-criminal. But as a practical matter, it is virtually impossible to envision the Obama DOJ prosecuting any of these elite officials for supporting a group which the Obama administration itself concedes does not belong on the list. The removal of this group — if, as appears highly likely, it happens — will basically have the same effect, by design, as corrupt acts such as retroactive telecom immunity and the shielding of Bush war crimes and Wall Street fraud from any form of investigation: it will once again bolster the prime Washington dictate that D.C. political elites reside above the rule of law even when committing violations of the criminal law for which ordinary citizens are harshly punished.

* * * * *

Speaking of the assault on the free speech rights of Muslim critics of the U.S. under the guise of “material support” prosecutions (an assault which also erodes free speech rights for everyone), Michael May has a great long article in The American Prospect on the horrendous, free-speech-threatening prosecution of Tarek Mehanna, whose extraordinary sentencing statement I published here.

UPDATE: In 2003, when the Bush adminstration was advocating an attack on Iraq, one of the prime reasons it cited was “Saddam Hussein’s Support for International Terrorism.” It circulated a document purporting to prove that claim (h/t Hernlem), and one of the first specific accusations listed was this:

So the group that was pointed to less than a decade ago as proof of Saddam’s Terrorist Evil is now glorified by both political parties in Washington and — now that it’s fighting for the U.S. and Israel rather than for Saddam — is no longer a Terror group.

By Glenn Greenwald

May 16, 2012 0 comments

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