Home » Articles » Page 80

Articles

MEK Cult women in Albania
The cult of Rajavi

MEK Terrorist Cult Members In Albania Who Mustn’t Think About Sex

For six years, Albania has been home to one of Iran’s main opposition groups, the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, or MEK. But hundreds of members have walked out – some complaining about the organisation’s rigid rules enforcing celibacy, and control over contact with family. Now, dozens languish in the Albanian capital, Tirana, unable to return to Iran or get on with their lives.

“I didn’t speak to my wife and son for over 37 years – they thought I’d died. But I told them, ‘No, I’m alive, I’m living in Albania…’ They cried.”

That first contact by phone with his family after so many years was difficult for Gholam Mirzai, too. He is 60, and absconded two years ago from the MEK’s military-style encampment outside Tirana.

Now he scrapes by in the city, full of regrets and accused by his former Mujahideen comrades of spying for their sworn enemy, the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The MEK has a turbulent and bloody history. As Islamist-Marxist radicals, its members backed the 1979 Iranian revolution that toppled the Shah. But relations with a triumphant Ayatollah Khomeini soon soured. When the government cracked down hard, the Mujahideen had to run for their lives.

Neighbouring Iraq offered sanctuary, and from their desert citadel during the Iran/Iraq war (1980-1988), the MEK fought on the side of Saddam Hussein against their homeland.

Gholam Mirzai was serving in the Iranian military when he was captured by Saddam Hussein’s forces at the start of that conflict. He spent eight years as a prisoner of war in Iraq. But in time, Iranian prisoners like Mirzai were encouraged to join forces with their compatriots. And that is what he did.

Mirzai is now a “disassociate” – one of hundreds of former MEK members who have left the organisation since they moved to Albania. With the help of funds from family, some have paid people smugglers to take them elsewhere in Europe, and perhaps two have made it back to Iran. But dozens remain in Tirana, stateless and officially unable to work.

So how did the battle-hardened members of the MEK – formerly a proscribed terrorist organisation in the United States and Europe – find their way to this corner of Europe?

In 2003, the allied invasion of Iraq made life perilous for the MEK. The organisation’s protector, Saddam Hussein, was suddenly gone, and the Mujahideen were repeatedly attacked – hundreds were killed and injured. Fearing an even worse humanitarian disaster, the Americans approached the Albanian government in 2013 and persuaded it to receive some 3,000 MEK members in Tirana.

Gholam Mirzai has left the MEK

MEK Terrorist Cult Members In Albania Who Mustn’t Think About SexFemale MEK fighters training during the Iran/Iraq war (1984)

“We offered them shelter from attacks and abuse, and the possibility to lead a normal life in a country where they are not harassed, attacked or brutalised,” says Lulzim Basha, leader of the Democratic Party, which was in government at the time, and is now in opposition.

In Albania, politics are deeply polarised – everything is contested. But, almost uniquely, the presence of the MEK isn’t – publicly, both governing and opposition parties support their Iranian guests.

For the MEK, Albania was a completely new environment. Gholam Mirzai was astonished that even children had mobile phones. And because some of the Mujahideen were initially accommodated in apartment buildings on the edge of the capital, the organisation’s grip on its members was looser than it had been previously. In Iraq, it had controlled every aspect of their lives, but here, temporarily, there was a chance to exercise a degree of freedom.

“There was some rough ground behind the flats where the commanders told us we should take daily exercise,” remembers Hassan Heyrany, another “disassociate”.

Heyrany and his colleagues used the cover of trees and bushes to sneak around to the internet cafe close by and make contact with their families.

“When we were in Iraq, if you wanted to phone home, the MEK called you weak – we had no relationship with our families,” he says. “But when we came to Tirana, we found the internet for personal use.”

Towards the end of 2017, though, the MEK moved out to new headquarters. The camp is built on a gently sloping hill in the Albanian countryside, about 30km (19 miles) from the capital. Behind the imposing, iron gates, there is an impressive marble arch topped with golden lions. A tree-lined boulevard runs up to a memorial dedicated to the thousands of people who have lost their lives in the MEK’s struggle against the Iranian government.

Uninvited journalists are not welcome here. But in July this year, thousands attended the MEK’s Free Iran event at the camp. Politicians from around the globe, influential Albanians and people from the nearby village of Manze, joined thousands of MEK members and their leader, Maryam Rajavi, in the glitzy auditorium. US President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, addressed the crowd.

Rudy Giuliani: “If you think this is a cult, then there’s something wrong with you”

“These are people who are dedicated to freedom,” he said, referring to the uniformly dressed and gender-segregated MEK members present in the hall.

“And if you think that’s a cult, then there’s something wrong with you,” he added, bringing the house down.

Powerful politicians like Giuliani support the MEK’s goal of regime change in Iran. The movement’s manifesto includes a commitment to human rights, gender equality and participatory democracy for Iran.

But Hassan Heyrany does not buy it any more. Last year he left the MEK, rejecting what he saw as the leadership’s oppressive control of his private life. Heyrany had joined the Mujahideen in his 20s, attracted by its commitment to political pluralism.

“It was very attractive. But if you believe in democracy, you cannot suppress the soul of your members,” he says.

The nadir of Heyrany’s life with the MEK was an evening meeting he was obliged to attend.

“We had a little notebook, and if we had any sexual moments we should write them down. For example, ‘Today, in the morning, I had an erection.’”

Romantic relationships and marriage are prohibited by the MEK. It was not always like that – parents and their children used to join the Mujahideen. But after the bloody defeat of one MEK offensive by the Iranians, the leadership argued it had happened because the Mujahideen were distracted by personal relationships. Mass divorce followed. Children were sent away – often to foster homes in Europe – and single MEK members pledged to stay that way.

Hasan Heyrani, MKO former member in Tirana

In that notebook, Heyrany says they also had to write any personal daydreams.

“For example, ‘When I saw a baby on television, I had a feeling that I wished to have a child or a family of my own.’”

And the Mujahideen had to read from their notebooks in front of their commander and comrades at the daily meeting.

“That’s very hard for a person,” Heyrany says.

Now he likens the MEK camp in Manze to Animal Farm, George Orwell’s critique of the Stalinist era in the USSR. “It’s a cult,” he says simply.

A diplomatic source in Tirana described the MEK as “a unique cultural group – not a cult, but cult-like.”

The BBC was not able to put any of this to the MEK, because the organisation refused to be interviewed. But in Albania, a nation that endured a punishing, closed, Communist regime for decades there is some sympathy for the MEK leadership’s position – at least on the prohibition of personal relationships.

“In extreme situations, you make extreme choices,” says Diana Culi, a writer, women’s activist and former MP for the governing Socialist Party.

“They have vowed to fight all their lives for the liberation of their country from a totalitarian regime. Sometimes we have difficulty accepting strong belief in a cause. This is personal sacrifice, and it’s a mentality I understand.”

Even so, some Albanians worry that the MEK’s presence threatens national security.

Two Iranian diplomats were expelled following allegations about violent plots against the Mujahideen, and the European Union has accused Tehran of being behind conspiracies to assassinate regime opponents, including MEK members, on Dutch, Danish and French soil. (The Iranian Embassy in Tirana declined the BBC’s request for an interview.)

A highly-placed source in the Socialist Party is also concerned that the intelligence services lack the capacity to monitor more than 2,500 MEK members with military training.

“No-one with a brain would’ve accepted them here,” he says.

A diplomat says some of the “disassociates” are certainly working for Iran. Gholam Mirzai and Hassan Heyrany have themselves been accused by the MEK of being agents for Tehran. It is a charge they deny.

Now both men are focused on the future. With help from family in Iran, Heyrany is opening a coffee shop, and he is dating an Albanian. At 40, he is younger than most of his fellow cadres and he remains optimistic.

Gholam Mirzai’s situation is more precarious. His health is not good – he walks with a limp after being caught in one of the bombardments of the MEK camp in Iraq – and he is short of money.

He is tormented by the mistakes he has made in his life – and something he found out when he first got in touch with his family.

When Mirzai left to go to war against Iraq in 1980, he had a one-month-old son. After the Iran/Iraq war ended, his wife and other members of his family came to the MEK camp in Iraq to look for Mirzai. But the MEK sent them away, and told him nothing about their visit.

This 60-year-old man never knew he was a much-missed father and husband until he made that first call home after 37 years.

“They didn’t tell me that my family came searching for me in Iraq. They didn’t tell me anything about my wife and son,” he says.

“All of these years I thought about my wife and son. Maybe they died in the war… I just didn’t know.”

BBC Albania MEK Rajavi Cult 9

Gholam Mirzai in Tirana today

The son he has not seen in the flesh since he was a tiny baby is nearly 40 now. And Mirzai proudly displays a picture of this grown-up man on his WhatsApp id. But renewed contact has been painful too.

“I was responsible for this situation – the separation. I can’t sleep too much at night because I think about them. I’m always nervous, angry. I am ashamed of myself,” Mirzai says.

Shame is not easy to live with. And he has only one desire now.

“I want to go back to Iran, to live with my wife and son. That is my wish.”

Gholam Mirzai has visited the Iranian Embassy in Tirana to ask for help, and his family have lobbied the authorities in Tehran. He has heard nothing. So he waits – without citizenship, without a passport, and dreaming of home.
Linda Pressly and Albana Kasapi, BBC News

0 comments
FacebookTwitterPinterestWhatsappTelegramSkypeEmail
Rouhani and Macron meeting
France

Is France Moving Against the MEK?

On October 30, a volley of tweets attributed to Alexis Kohler, chief of staff of the French President Emmanuel Macron, announced that France, taking into account the “negative consequences” of the presence of the National Council of Resistance (NCRI) on the French soil, will restrict its activities in the country. On November 5, however, the Élysée Palace disowned the tweets as fake, and the Twitter handle supposedly belonging to Kohler was suspended.
The incident raises a number of questions: Who was behind these tweets? What did they seek to achieve? Why did it take almost one week to take Kohler’s fake profile down? And what does it say about the French cyber-warfare capabilities? That aside, the news itself may not necessarily be groundless.
NCRI is an umbrella for the Mujahedeen-e Khalk, or MEK, also known as MKO, and People’s Mujahedeen Organization of Iran (PMOI), an organization of Iranian dissidents in exile that seeks to overthrow the Islamic Republic. It was on the European Union list of terrorist organizations until 2009 and on the U.S. list until 2012. Its presence in France harks back to 1981. The French government granted asylum to MEK’s then-leader Massoud Rajavi, exiled from Iran after losing a bloody power struggle against Ayatollah Khomeini, his former ally and the leader of the Iranian revolution of 1979. Ever since, the MEK’s presence in France was a source of friction in relations between Paris and Tehran.
Every year the group organized rallies in the Paris suburb of Villepinte, attended by a wide array of well-known and reportedly well-paid speakers, mostly former and current officials from the United States, European and Arab states. These speakers included, among others, former U.S. national security adviser John Bolton (before he assumed that position) and former New York City mayor and personal lawyer to President Donald Trump Rudy Giuliani. Their role was to provide legitimacy to the MEK and its “president-elect” Maryam Rajavi as the alternative to the current Islamic regime in Iran.
In July 2018, just as the Iranian president Hassan Rouhani was to embark on a trip to Paris to work on saving the faltering nuclear agreement, known as Joint Comprehensive Plan Of Action, or JCPOA, reports emerged about a bomb plot against the MEK gathering, allegedly hatched by the agents of Iranian intelligence. The case was never conclusively resolved. There remains some possibility that the “plot” was in reality a false flag operation concocted by the MEK and its foreign allies designed to sabotage diplomacy between the EU and Iran at a critical time. Reportedly, French intelligence has not entirely discarded the latter theory. Certainly, such a plot would only benefit those who seek to push the EU to join Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran.
This helps explain why the French authorities did not allow the annual MEK gathering in summer of 2019, ostensibly for “security concerns.” It is likely that the real motivation behind the decision, however, was the desire of Paris to explore diplomatic opportunities in its relations with Tehran. In the race to save the nuclear agreement, French President Emmanuel Macron emerged as the most energetic of the Western leaders, engaging with both Iran and United States in pursuit of de-escalation and new negotiations. In this context, the last thing Paris needed was some incident involving MEK on French territory.
There is another reason why Paris would want to curtail MEK activities: its efforts to release two French academics currently in Iranian jails – Fariba Adelkhah and Roland Marchal. French sources point to a precedent in 1986, when the French Prime Minister Jacques Chirac struck a deal with Tehran for the release of French hostages held prisoners by the Hezbollah in Lebanon. As a price, the MEK was forced to leave France and relocated to Iraq then. Similar dynamics may be at play now.
If asked to leave, the destination for remaining MEK cadres in France would be Albania, which already hosts around 3,000 members, following the U.S. and U.N.-brokered resettlement from their former base in Iraq. A complete eviction from France would be a serious setback for the MEK. Its continued relevance was fully premised on its ability to visibly project power and connections on both sides of the Atlantic and in the Persian Gulf. Annual public rallies were a medium to build up the lobby for the group. Being forced to trade Paris for Tirana, a capital of an impoverished Balkan nation, geographically far removed from both main Western capitals and Iran itself, is a patent downgrade. To this should be added the waning fortunes of the MEK’s champions in the U.S.: Bolton was fired, Giuliani is too busy dealing with his own legal troubles to continue lobbying for the MEK, and Trump himself is fighting for political survival amid the specter of an impending impeachment.
True, the MEK is still capable of performing such stints as recent gatherings in the French Senate and the European Parliament (EP) in Strasbourg. The EP in particular is an attractive platform for the MEK, since, unlike national parliaments, it represents MPs from 28 member states. Thus, a bigger diversity of views and sensitivities is present and more outlets for MEK efforts are available. But even there, its influence is on the wane. The MEK’s success to win recruits for its cause hinged on its ability to be all things to all people: for example, women rights defenders to the left, and promoters of better relations with Israel and Saudi Arabia to the right. However, the group committed a major strategic blunder by funding Vox, the Spanish extreme right party. This led some of the MEK’s supporters on the left to sever ties. Moreover, the MEK never managed to gain any foothold in official EP bodies dealing with Iran – its foreign affairs committee and its delegation for relations with Iran. In any case, small acts in parliaments reflect the group’s desperate attempts to remain relevant, and are no match for ambitious rallies the MEK was able to organize in previous years in France.
Throughout its history, the MEK showed remarkable resilience, and due to its chameleonic nature and deep pockets, managed to navigate the turbulent waters of Middle Eastern politics. It may be premature to write an obituary for the MEK just yet. But the French steps to curtail its activities, particularly if and when they’ll eventually lead to the group’s expulsion from France, are definitely contributing to its decline.
This article reflects the personal views of the author and not necessarily the opinions of the S&D Group and the European Parliament.
By Eldar Mamedov

Eldar Mamedov has degrees from the University of Latvia and the Diplomatic School in Madrid, Spain. He has worked in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Latvia and as a diplomat in Latvian embassies in Washington D.C. and Madrid. Since 2007, Mamedov has served as a political adviser for the social-democrats in the Foreign Affairs Committee of the European Parliament (EP) and is in charge of the EP delegations for inter-parliamentary relations with Iran, Iraq, the Arabian Peninsula, and Mashreq.

0 comments
FacebookTwitterPinterestWhatsappTelegramSkypeEmail
blank
Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Giuliani’s Terrorist Client

Rudy Giuliani’s high-dollar foreign clients could present legal problems: Experts

President Donald Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, now at the center of a congressional impeachment inquiry targeting the president, once dreamed of securing the top spot at the State Department, only to voluntarily remove himself from the shortlist just after his name started coming up.

Interested in Trump Administration?
Add Trump Administration as an interest to stay up to date on the latest Trump Administration news, video, and analysis from ABC News.
But the former New York City mayor’s decision to bow out from consideration for the secretary of state gig wasn’t necessarily a missed opportunity.
Since Trump took office, the president’s longtime friend, who became his personal lawyer in April 2018, has maintained numerous lucrative business endeavors representing foreign clients around the world and in at least two cases consulting with Trump on the matters.
Although much of his career has been focused on domestic politics, Giuliani has had a long history of consulting work on behalf of a wide range of foreign clients, from a high-level security consulting deal with the Qatari government in 2007 to a $4.3 million security contract with Mexico City.
Most of Giuliani’s past foreign work appears to have amounted to consulting for his foreign clients, not necessarily lobbying, according to a review of his work based on publicly available documents and media reports by ABC News, which means that he hasn’t had to register as a foreign agent under the Justice Department.
But some of the more recent foreign interests Giuliani has pursued have at times gained momentum thanks to the president’s support, raising the question about whether his relationship with Trump may have crossed a line when it comes to lobbying.
Experts have said Giuliani’s more recent work for his various foreign clients — often brought up to the president’s attention — could fall under the category of activities that need to be registered and reported under the Foreign Agent Registration Act, also known as FARA.
“It requires registration not just for lobbying, but for any activity that Giuliani intended to or believed might influence the U.S. government or the U.S. public with reference to any political interests of a foreign nation,”Josh Rosenstein, a lawyer with expertise in FARA compliance, told ABC News.”So grassroots work, media work, public relations work and speeches all may be covered. Even drafting a lobbying strategy or advising a foreign client on how to best interact with the U.S. government, without actually doing the lobbying for the client, may trigger FARA, unless another exemption applies.”

“Whether Mr. Guiliani has a legal obligation to register under FARA depends on a full examination of all the relevant facts, but based on published reports there are certainly sufficient grounds for the Justice Department to take appropriate investigative steps to obtain those facts,”said David Laufman, who oversaw the Justice Department’s FARA enforcement unit until last year. Laufman is now in private practice, as a partner at law firm Wiggin and Dana.
The obscure World World II-era law overseeing foreign lobbying in the U.S. has historically been seen as a Wild West with low enforcement rates and a gradual decline in disclosures. The law has been brought to public attention in recent years in light of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, which landed at least half a dozen foreign lobbying-related cases.
Even so, some of those FARA-related cases brought by the Justice Department have led to acquittals, demonstrating how difficult they can be to prosecute.
As ABC News has previously reported, prosecutors in the Southern District of New York are looking into Giuliani’s business ventures, focusing on whether there were any criminal violations of foreign lobbying laws in Giuliani’s work with foreign clients, according to sources.
In the past, Giuliani has argued that his foreign work falls outside the net of rules regulated by FARA. Last year, he told The Washington Post,”I don’t represent foreign government in front of the U.S. government. I’ve never registered to lobby.”
Giuliani declined to comment for this article. Below is a list of some of his most notable foreign ventures in the past few years:
Ukraine
More than a decade ago, shortly after withdrawing from the 2008 presidential race, Giuliani took on an advisory role with Vitali Klitschko, a former boxer who at the time was running for mayor of Kyiv. The two convened a press conference in Times Square in May 2008, according to press reports at the time, during which Giuliani told Klitschko that Ukraine needs”a leader like you who can deal with corruption, who can deal with reform of government, which is so necessary.”
Klitschko lost that race, but won the job when he ran again in 2014. He remains in the post today. After becoming mayor, Klitschko hired Giuliani on a $300,000 contract to advise Kyiv’s local authorities on how to restore order in the capital after the country’s Maidan Revolution, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Klitschko told The Washington Post earlier this month that he never paid Giuliani for his consultations, but the two appear to remain close. Giuliani recently tweeted his support of Klitschko:”The former champion is very much admired and respected in the US.”
Giuliani’s other former high-profile client in Ukraine is Pavel Fuks, a real estate developer and oligarch who once had business ties to Trump. Fuks is widely regarded as one of the most influential oligarchs in Russia and Ukraine, with investments in both countries, plus the U.K. and United States.
Fuks was heavily involved in one of Trump’s attempts to build a property in Moscow, though it ultimately fell through, according to Bloomberg. Fuks claims he paid $200,000 to attend the president’s inauguration in 2017, but later filed a lawsuit accusing an associate he says promised to score the VIP tickets of duping him out of the money and never getting him the tickets.
In summer 2017, specialists from Giuliani Security and Safety visited law enforcement officials in Kharkiv — Fuks’ hometown — to consult on emergency services, according to two press releases posted on the firm’s website. Giuliani later told Mother Jones that Fuks paid the contract.
“He was [a] sponsor of a preliminary study that my firm did of security and emergency management in Kharkiv and some on advice on a planned Holocaust Memorial,”Giuliani told the magazine.
Fuks has spoken highly of Giuliani, describing him as performing lobbying services in several interviews. Fuks called him”a star”in an interview with Bloomberg and described Giuliani’s firm as providing”lobbying services, and they are very strong in security.”
Fuks told The New York Times in June,”I would call [Giuliani] the lobbyist for Kharkiv and Ukraine — this is stated in the contract.”Giuliani took issue with Fuks’ characterization of him as a lobbyist, arguing to the newspaper that it”makes it sounds like I lobbied the U.S. government, which I never did.”
Experts who spoke to ABC News say Giuliani’s work for Fuks could have FARA implications depending on what specific work the former New York mayor did.
“I understand from some public reports that Mr Fuks hired Giuliani with the expectation that Giuliani would represent his interests in the U.S.,”Rosenstein told ABC News.”If that’s the case, and he served as a political consultant, for example, then FARA might be implicated.”
Another lawyer with expertise in FARA, Dan Petalas, told ABC News there is an exception for”bona fide trade or commercial activity,”which does not require registration, but added,”Whether the bona fide commercial activity exception applies depends entirely on the precise nature of the particular tasks and transactions Mr. Giuliani engaged in within the U.S. on behalf of the oligarch.”
More recently, Giuliani’s efforts on behalf of Trump in Ukraine have become a key aspect of an impeachment inquiry in Congress. Over the past year, Giuliani, in his capacity as Trump’s personal lawyer, met with multiple current and former Ukrainian officials in an effort to advocate for the incoming government in Kyiv to investigate the president’s domestic political rivals.
Giuliani has repeatedly said he is not being compensated for legal work on the president’s behalf, and the White House has deflected all questions about Giuliani to the lawyer himself.
Turkey

In early 2017, Giuliani had repeatedly pushed for the Trump administration to extradite Turkish cleric Fethullah Gulen, a political rival of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan living in voluntary exile in the United States, two former senior level administration officials with direct knowledge confirmed to ABC News.
Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, was also involved in a similar influence campaign against Gulen in late 2016, penning an op-ed in The Hill comparing Gulen to Osama bin Laden and urging the U.S. to”adjust our foreign policy to recognize Turkey as a priority.”In late 2017, Flynn pleaded guilty to charges including lying to federal authorities about the Turkish lobbying operation.
In the case of Giuliani’s anti-Gulen efforts, the former senior officials told ABC News that White House officials stepped in and stopped any action from ever happening. The sources said aides told Giuliani he should tell the Turkish government that if they wanted this individual extradited they should contact the Department of Justice directly, which would evaluate this request.
PHOTO: Turkish preacher Fethullah Gulen speaks to members of the media from his home, Sept. 22, 2016, at the Golden Generation Worship and Retreat Center in Saylorsburg, Pa. Picture Alliance via Getty Images, FILE
Turkish preacher Fethullah Gulen speaks to members of the media from his home, Sept. 22, 2016, at the Golden Generation Worship and Retreat Center in Saylorsburg, Pa.
It’s unclear why Giuliani was pursuing extradition of Gulen, but regardless of what was motivating Giuliani’s interest, Rosenstein says it would have foreign lobbying implications.
“That work — even if for a non-governmental foreign client — is political activity as defined by FARA, and I am hard pressed to see an applicable exemption,”Rosentstein told ABC News.”Working for a foreign client, in the interests of a foreign government, in seeking some action from the U.S. government, is FARA-registrable.”
Later in 2017, Giuliani pursued a separate interest in Turkey, unsuccessfully pushing to help stop the U.S. prosecution of his client, a Turkish-Iranian gold trader accused of bank fraud, money laundering and helping the Iranian government evade U.S. economic sanctions at the same time as the Turkish government was lobbying for the matter.
The effort to assist the gold trader, Reza Zarrab, went all the way up to the Oval Office, with Trump himself urging then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to press the Department of Justice to drop the case, as ABC News has previously reported, according to a source with knowledge of the situation.
Many top level aides, including Tillerson and then-White House chief of staff John Kelly, told the president he could not get involved in the matter, saying it would be interfering in an ongoing criminal investigation.
In some cases of foreign work, Giuliani has said he’s exempt from registering because he’s been acting as his client’s attorney. Petalas acknowledged the exception in FARA registration in cases of lawyers providing legal advice, but added that the exception applies only if the legal services are provided in connection with a judicial or agency proceeding.”

Rosenstein agreed.
“The lawyer’s exemption isn’t as broad as [Giuliani] wants to make it out to be,”Rosenstein said.”To be exempt as a lawyer, his work would need to be limited to representing the client in an actual criminal or civil proceeding — stepping out on the courthouse steps to have a press conference isn’t ‘legal work’ exempt from FARA, nor is government-relations consulting.”
Romania
In August 2018, Giuliani wrote a letter to the Romanian president, Klaus Iohannis, criticizing the country’s anti-corruption unit for being overzealous.
The Romanian news outlet Mediafax published Giuliani’s letter, in which he berated”excesses done by the National Anticorruption Agency (DNA) in the name of law enforcement,”and called for an amnesty for”those who have been prosecuted and convicted following such excesses.”
Giuliani’s letter conflicted with the State Department’s support of Romania’s anti-corruption agency, which the U.S. Embassy and several other Western partners credited with”considerable progress in combatting corruption”in Bucharest. The former U.S. ambassador to Romania, Michael Guest, told ABC News that Giuliani’s letter”clearly cut across U.S. policy.”
Guest added that Giuliani’s letter puzzled Romanian officials, too. Giuliani did not say on whose behalf he wrote the letter, and told The Washington Post that he”should have put in the letter that [he’s] not representing the president.”But he later told Politico that he had been paid by The Freeh Group, a consulting shop run by former FBI Director Louis Freeh, to send it.
Romanian President Klaus Iohannis arrives for the European Union leaders summit in Brussels, Oct. 18, 2019.
At the time, the Freeh Group had been representing a Romanian businessman, Gabriel Popoviciu, who was sentenced to seven years in prison in August 2017 in a case about a corrupt real estate deal in Bucharest. When Popoviciu was sentenced, Freeh released a statement saying he was”deeply disappointed.”
Giuliani’s letter to Iohannis did not name Popoviciu specifically. But the connection to Freeh’s firm suggests Giuliani may have written it in an effort to have Popoviciu granted”amnesty,”as the letter notes.
Central and South America
Giuliani has also been active in Central and South America, travelling to multiple countries to advise and meet with his foreign clients. Much of Giuliani’s work in the past couple years in the Latin America has focused on security consulting through his firm, Giuliani Security and Safety, none of which suggest any lobbying activity.
In May 2018, for example, Giuliani coordinated an effort for the New York Police Department to train and provide”technical support”Honduran national police, according to his website. In the Dominican Republic, he met with law enforcement officials and made suggestions for how to lower crime rates, and in Brazil, Giuliani met with a mayor in Brazil’s Amazon to develop a plan to reduce crime in the region, according to his company. Giuliani’s firm has announced similar security consulting gigs in Uruguay, El Salvador and Chile.
The former New York mayor’s work for the Brazilian state of Amazons, in particular, has received mixed reviews across the board, from Gov. Amazonino Mendes praising Giuliani’s security plan as having set a”milestone in the country’s history of fighting crimes,”to Brazilian prosecutors in 2018 launching an investigation into”any irregularities”in the bidding process of the Giuliani’s contract, according to a local news report. The status of this inquiry is unclear.

Iran (MEK)
Perhaps Giuliani’s most controversial foreign client has been the Mujahideen-e Khalq (MEK), an Iranian opposition group designated by the State Department in the late 1990s and early 2000s as a foreign terrorist organization. Giuliani’s affiliation with the MEK predates the Trump administration by several years, but reflects the breadth of his foreign connections and could spark renewed interest in his past clients.
In a 1997 press release, the State Department said the MEK”have committed, or pose a significant risk of committing, acts of terrorism that threaten the security of U.S. nationals or the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States.”
In 2012, the State Department decided to delist the MEK, but noted that in doing so,”the Department does not overlook or forget the MEK’s past acts of terrorism, including its involvement in the killing of U.S. citizens in Iran in the 1970s and an attack on U.S. soil in 1992.”
Several press accounts have noted that Giuliani was one of many American political figures of both parties who had spoke at MEK conferences. In a 2016 interview with The New York Times shortly after Trump’s election, Giuliani told the paper he”worked very hard to get [MEK] delisted”as a terrorist group.
During a background briefing with reporters in 2012, a State Department official said the decision to delist MEK as a terrorist group”was not made to appease any group of lobbyists, no matter how famous they are.”

By lucien bruggeman and soo rin kim, ABC News

0 comments
FacebookTwitterPinterestWhatsappTelegramSkypeEmail
Maryam Rajavi
Mujahedin Khalq Organization's Propaganda System

MEK against anyone who is pro-diplomacy

Following the Canadian federal elections, The Iranian Canadian Congress (ICC) reported about”a smear campaign linked to Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK) against Iranian-Canadian MP and Richmond Hill candidate Majid Jowhari.”[1]

Majid Jowhari of Iranian Canadian Congress

Liberal Majid Jowhari was re-elected, beating out the Conservative candidate Costas Menegakis who is supported by the Mujahedin Khalq Organization for his rivalry with Jowhari! ICC clarifies MEK’s smear campaign against Mr. Jowhari:
“On social media, fake accounts associated with MEK have distributed false information about Mr. Jowhari. Seemingly, the only reason behind the targeting of Mr. Jowhari by the MEK is that, aligned with PM Trudeau’s promise in 2015 to re-engage with Iran and reopen the embassies, Mr. Jowhari supported this promise as well and presented the views of his constituents to the Canadian government. Time and again we have also witnessed that the majority of Canadian-Iranians also support diplomacy and peace with Iran and are against policies of sanctions and war.”[2]
The very representative of the fake accounts associated with the MEK was denounced just a few months ago by Murteza Hussain of the Intercept. Morteza revealed that a character named Heshmat Alavi appears non existing but rather is a persona, a propaganda operation run by the MEK. Murteza’s revelations was widely covered by the main stream media and consequently Twitter suspended the account for a period but it was then reinstated. [3]


Heshmat Alavi was actively attacking before the reelection of the Iranian Canadian liberal candidate Majid Jowhari. This is one of the tweets of a thread of tweets that Alavi launched against Jowhari:
“@MajidJowhari , a Liberal MP in Canada known for his pro-#Iran regime views & policies, is up for reelection. This thread sheds light on Jowhari being a Tehran apologist/lobbyist, supported by @ICCongress , the mullahs’ lobby arm in Canada, and should not be reelected.”
Fortunately Jowhari won the election. However, the so-called Heshmat Alavi is the outcome of a team work by the MEK members who slur each and every person who advocates for peace and diplomacy with Iran. This team never stops demonizing all those who believe in engagement rather than war and sanctions and Jowhari is not the first person who is slammed with the tweets and previously published articles by fictional personas like Heshmat Alavi.
Negar Mortazavi consultant editor of The Independent and Trita Parsi founder of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC) are also some of other activists with Iranian origin that have been attacked by Alavi several times.
Jeremy Scahill is an investigative reporter and one of the three founding editors of The Intercept. In his podcast which was published a few days after Murtaza’s article, Scahill asked Negar Mortazavi to explain more about his colleague’s revelations.”What more can you tell us about this persona that Murtaza’s reporting indicates is a creation of the MEK, Heshmat Alavi?”, he asked Negar. [4]
“Murtaza actually talked to me and a few other Iran watchers”, Negar replied.”For us who observed Heshmat Alavi and who are the targets of Heshmat Alavi’s smear attacks for quite long time, it was obvious that this doesn’t seem like a real person. There was no photo of him. There was no video of him. There was all these murky articles. And also this clear line, if you look through his work, it wasn’t subtle, this clear, pro-MEK, as you said Mojahedin-e-Khalq line throughout his work. His articles, also his tweets, and also the way he attacks so many of us on Twitter. But it was a complete failure on the part of some credible media organizations.”[5]
“The goal of the project was ostensibly to fight Iranian propaganda online but, instead, the initiative focused on attacking critics of the Trump administration’s Iran policy”, Trita Parsi also told Aljazeera. [6]
“To make it worse, the fund that came from the State Department was actually designed to fight ISIS propaganda and Russian interference in the United States. Instead, the Trump administration diverted that money to fight critics of Trump’s Iran policy,”Parsi explained about financial resources of the MEK’s troll farm in social media. [7]
“Evidence of MEK machinations are substantiated by online campaigns intended to influence the narrative on Iran in favor of regime change,”Assal Rad a research fellow at NIAC wrote on Lobelog.”Former MEK members have confirmed the operation of MEK troll farms based in Albania, where members create thousands of inauthentic accounts and promote hashtags, propaganda, and tweets targeting anyone that favors diplomacy with Iran. The group also uses front organizations, like the OIAC, to take out paid ads that advance its cause at the expense of U.S. security interests in the region.”[8]
Actually, Heshmat Alavi’s persona is not the first one nor the last one that MEK has created to manipulate the social network running war mongers’ agenda against Iran. The MEK’s survival is based on more and more conflicts between the world and Iranian government. The MEK leaders do not care that the Iranian people are awfully impacted by the maximum pressure strategy that they support against Iran.
Mazda Parsi

References:
[1] ICC secretory, ICC Condemns Foreign-Linked Smear Campaign Against Richmond Hill MP Majid Jowhari, Iranain Canadian Congress, Iranain Canadian Congress Website, October 18th, 2019.
[2] ibid
[3] Hussain, Murtaza, An Iranian Activist Wrote Dozens of Articles for Right-Wing Outlets. But Is He a Real Person?, The Intercept, June 9th, 2019.
[4]Scahill, Jeremy, Intercepted Podcast: Donald Trump, Iran, and the Gulf of Tonkin Redux, the Intercept, October 22th, 2019.
[5] ibid
[6] Aljazeera, US-Iran tensions, trolls and the dubious case of Heshmat Alavi, June 18th, 2019.
[7] ibid
[8] Rad, Assal, Propaganda War to Real War: The MEK’s Treacherous Operation, Lobelog, July 1st, 2019.

0 comments
FacebookTwitterPinterestWhatsappTelegramSkypeEmail
Albania Poilice chief Ardi Veliu
Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Albania gov. accuses Tehran, Why?!

Behind the Scenes of Tirana’s Recent Allegation against Tehran

Albania Government is closely tied to the wealthy Iranian terrorist group

Albanian Police announced in a press briefing on Wednesday they have dismantled an ‘Iranian terrorist cell’ that allegedly planned an attack against the Mujahedin-e Khalq organization (MEK, a.k.a MKO, NCRI), a controversial Iranian group with a history of conducting terrorist attacks against Iranian civilians in the 80s.

Albania Poilice chief Ardi Veliu

The country’s police chief, Ardi Veliu, said the ‘terrorist cell’ plotted to target MEK members in Albania. He further claimed another ‘Iranian terrorist plot’ was foiled earlier in March 2018 against the MEK on the eve of the Persian new year.

Ardi Veliu displayed photos of 4 men who he said were members of the terrorist cell and provided no other evidence to support his claim. In addition, none of the alleged terrorist cell’s members have been arrested so far.

The Albanian government says it has been alerted about the plot by members of a Turkish criminal group.

Albanian Police have based their claim on statements by Edmond Brahimaj (Baba Mondi) leader of the Bektashi Order, an Islamic Sufi order based in Tirana, about an alleged plot to attack high-level MEK members attending Persian New Year festivities in Bektashi’s headquarters on March 2018. Two men were arrested at the time, but they were released later due to lack of sufficient evidence. The Albanian Police have not made it clear yet whether any of the 4 members of the alleged terrorist cell were among the 2 men arrested in 2018.

Albanian government’s announcement of foiling an ‘Iranian terrorist plot’ at this period of time raises a serious question: Why is the Albanian government baselessly accusing Iran of plotting a terrorist attack on the Albanian soil several months after claiming to have thwarted an attack against the Bektashi Order’s headquarters?

The truth is Prime Minister Edi Rama’s government has long sought to join the EU to recover its public image after years of economic failure and widespread corruption. But so far, it has not been able to make any significant progress in meeting the EU requirements for accession.

The latest round of European Union leaders’ talks to agree on launching membership negotiations with Albania failed on October 26, just five days before Tirana’s claim against Tehran, shattering the Rama government. The West, namely France, Netherlands and Denmark, believe that the Albanian government has failed to comply with the conditions for reform. Albania’s eastern neighbor, northern Macedonia, has also faced the same situation, but all European officials have acknowledged that Macedonians have taken important steps in fulfilling European terms, including renaming the country.

The failure of Edi Rama’s government to carry out favorable EU reforms has drawn strong criticism from both the people and the opposition. So the Rama government, which has long maintained good relations with the MEK, a group that has been on the terrorist list of the European Union and the United States for many years, is trying to divert attention from last week’s EU decision and the Socialist Party’s failure.

Also, in December 2018, Albania had announced the expulsion of two Iranian diplomats on charges of acting against the national security of Albania. However, the same claim was never substantiated by the Tirana authorities. The expulsion of Iranian diplomats was welcomed by senior US, Saudi Arabian, and Israeli officials as well as the MeK, prompting speculation of a backroom deal between these parties and Tirana.

Albanian government’s obsession with the MEK, the most recent example of which was Edi Rama’s UN speech on September 2019 in support of the group, shows that the Socialist government of Albania is closely tied to the wealthy Iranian terrorist group and Albania’s accusations against Iran in the past recent months is probably related to these ties.

BY Reza Alghurab, American Herald Tribune

0 comments
FacebookTwitterPinterestWhatsappTelegramSkypeEmail
MEK’s troll farm in Albania
Mujahedin Khalq Organization's Propaganda System

MEK and Fake News

The cabinet plans to combat fake news were presented in silence on Friday. A missed opportunity, thinks political editor David van der Wilde. “The Netherlands should be more concerned about it.”

Fighting fake news; on her arrival, Deputy Prime Minister Kajsa Ollongren saw it as one of her most important tasks. Substantial criticism immediately followed. The Minister of the Interior was called paranoid or declared to be Big Brother. And then it remained silent for months. Apart from an information campaign, fake news seemed to have disappeared from the agenda. Until this Friday.

heshmat alavi

The Politics and Social Media manipulation study was presented on the first day of the recess. On behalf of the minister, two UvA scientists looked into the state of digital debate. The conclusion? Not fake news but pulp, propaganda and fake followers cause the problems on the Dutch web.

With the relative silence and the noiseless report during the recess, the subject seems to be obscured. Tendentious sites such as DDS and GeenStijl crow victory and sceptics see their equal confirmed: That whole fake news story itself is completely fake. A special conclusion. Because whoever takes the trouble to read the research or to study the subject at all, sees something else.

Getting worse

The researchers do have concerns about what they call ‘junk news’. The foreign culprits are not extremely active, but there are problems nationally. There is a warning for politicians and opinion makers with joke followers and it is found that it makes it easier for right-wing conspiracy theories to reach the mainstream.

Researcher Richard Rogers explains to me that pulp and hyperpartite ‘news’ is being shared more and more easily, particularly during elections. Something that, according to Rogers, ‘only gets worse’. He also points to the fact that, although social media companies remove fake news, they are very closed.

For example, it is not disclosed which accounts are blocked or deleted by the companies or removed or why. That makes it difficult for researchers and journalists to see and report abuses. That does not really help in an open and democratic debate.

Influence brigades

Yet that is only part of the threat. Last year I went into the world of digital influence for De Nieuws BV for a few months. What I found was a world of digital armies and state influence. That reality is seen not only by security services and politicians. Numerous studies, dashboards and publications show that the problem exists.

For example, a 2017 study by Cambridge University already noticed that at least 29 countries with their own digital influence brigades are active worldwide. In addition to Russia and Iran, for example, allies are also involved in this. Germany has the ‘Cyberkommando des Bundeswehr’ on the digital front line and the British are deploying their 77th Brigade on Facebook.

Whether the Netherlands itself plays an active role in influencing, I have unfortunately not been able to find out or disprove. We do know through articles in NRC, Green Amsterdam and the New York Times that we have been the target of Russian influence operations. Fortunately, no attempts were made in the last few elections.

A good example of this is the story of the MEK. An Iranian Mojahedin cult with its own troll bunker in Albania. The group even managed to come up with its own writer in addition to the propaganda tweets: Heshmet Alavi . A ‘writer’ who managed to publish his stories on The Daily Caller, The Diplomat and Forbes and thus even influence Trump’s policies.

The Mojahedin Khalq (MEK) troll bunker

A good example of this is the story of the MEK. An Iranian Mojahedin cult with its own troll bunker in Albania. The group even managed to come up with its own writer in addition to the propaganda tweets: Heshmet Alavi . A ‘writer’ who managed to publish his stories on The Daily Caller, The Diplomat and Forbes and thus even influence Trump’s policies.

There are countless fascinating stories. These range from American useful idiots in the Mueller report, sent by Russian trolls with pocket money to demonstrate theatrically, to the “my tweet is right” by Marjolein Faber.

So, influencing you and me with false messages and propaganda pulp is not a fairy tale. That we have seen no evidence of foreign influence in the last few elections is good news. But it does not mean that the threat has disappeared. The Netherlands should therefore be more worried. A little more spotlight on this report would not have been out of place.
David van der Wilde, NPO Radio, Translated by Iran Interlink

David van der Wilde is a political editor for De Nieuws BV

0 comments
FacebookTwitterPinterestWhatsappTelegramSkypeEmail
blank
Mujahedin Khalq as an Opposition Group

MEK and War Agenda in Trump Admin

Trying to Exploit Iran’s Diverse Ethnic Population to Advance a War Agenda

On September 25, during the annual meeting of the United Nations General Assembly, United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI)—a pro-Israel, anti-Iran lobby group—held a “summit” in New York that was attended by, among others, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Israeli ambassador to the U.S. Ron Dermer, and Sigal Mandelker, the outgoing Under Secretary of Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, as well as diplomats from Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. As usual, tough rhetoric was uttered by all the speakers, and threats were made.

The day before the summit, another meeting was held that had allegedly been organized by Mark Wallace, the CEO of UANI, although it is widely believed that UANI was behind the meeting. The participants in the meeting were supposedly representatives of various Iranian opposition groups in exile, as well as ethnic secessionist groups. The meeting was, however, dominated by the Mojahedin-e-Khalq (MEK), a group that until 2011 was listed by the U.S. State Department as a terrorist organization and is despised by all Iranians due to its alliance with the regime of Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War and other acts viewed by virtually all Iranians as treason. Also present were the National Council of Resistance of Iran, MEK’s political arm, and the Organization of Iranian American Communities, another MEK front group. A fourth group, the U.S. Foundation for Liberty and Human Rights, appears to be linked with MEK, as the content of its website uses the same rhetoric as the MEK. Representatives of six ethnic groups also attended the meeting, none of which has any significant support inside Iran as best one can tell.

One of the groups participating in the gathering was the Arab Struggle Movement for the Liberation of Ahwaz (ASMLA). Ahwaz, or Ahvaz, is the provincial capital of Khuzestan, the oil-rich province in southwestern Iran near the border with Iraq. ASMLA claims to represent the minority Iranian Arabs in Khuzestan who are supposedly suppressed by Tehran. The group, founded in 1999, has carried out several terrorist attacks in Iran over the past fifteen years, including in January 2006, in May 2015, in June 2016, in January 2017, and in October 2018.

“This is the first time in history, since the Iranian revolution in 1978 and 1979, that such a broad cross-section of the leaders and delegates from Iranian dissident … groups have gathered in a convention for Iran’s future.” Wallace boasted despite the fact that those same “leaders” are either little known or are virtually universally despised in Iran.

This is not the first time that the U.S. far right has tried to exploit Iran’s diverse ethnic population in order to stir trouble in the country and advance its anti-Iran agenda. In fact, this practice has a long history that goes back to practically the 1979 revolution and the hostage crisis of 1979-1981. Since April 1980, when Washington cut diplomatic relations with Iran, successive U.S. administrations and the U.S. far right have seen exploiting ethnic grievances in Iran as a key route toward destabilizing the country.

The Clinton administration imposed a package of sanctions against Iran in 1996 that the Bush administration renewed in 2001 and again, indefinitely, in 2006. After preventing the European trio of Britain, France, and Germany from reaching an agreement with Iran over its nuclear program in summer of 2005, the Bush administration launched its efforts to exploit Iran’s ethnic minorities and the dissident groups that supposedly represent them, in order to either break up Iran into multiple weak states, or, at the very least, to stir up trouble and destabilize the country.

That strategy has a long history in the Middle East. Washington, for example—acting at the behest of the Shah of Iran—backed a Kurdish insurgency in Iraq until 1975. It has been best exemplified in the ways in which Israel has applied it to some of its Arab neighbors. In February 1982, three months before Israel invaded Lebanon in support of the Christian Falange militia, the Likud strategist Oded Yinon published an article [in Hebrew, whose translation was published by Israel Shahak, the Israeli academic and civil-rights advocate] in which he called on Israel’s leadership to adopt a policy of fragmenting the Arab world into a mosaic of ethnic and confessional groupings. “Every kind of inter-Arab confrontation would prove to be advantageous to Israel,” he argued, urging that Israel must reconfigure its geo-political environment through the Balkanization of the surrounding Arab states into smaller and weaker states.

Building on Yinon’s analysis ten years later, neoconservative historian Bernard Lewis—who would become a key informal adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney in the run-up and immediate aftermath of the U.S. invasion of Iraq—wrote in an essay in the journal Foreign Affairs:

Another possibility, which could even be precipitated by [Islamic] fundamentalism, is what as of late has become fashionable to call ‘Lebanonization.’ Most of the states of the Middle East – Egypt is an obvious exception – are of recent and artificial construction and are vulnerable to such a process. If the central power is sufficiently weakened, there is no real civil society to hold the polity together, no real sense of common national identity or overriding allegiance to the nation-state. The state then disintegrates – as happened in Lebanon – into a chaos of squabbling, feuding, fighting sects, tribes, regions and parties. If things go badly and central governments falter and collapse, the same could happen, not only in the countries of the existing Middle East, but also in the newly independent Soviet republics…

In their infamous “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” the policy document written in 1996 for Benjamin Netanyahu, the then-newly elected Prime Minister of Israel, Richard Perle et al. suggested that Israel should “work closely with Turkey and Jordan to contain, destabilize, and roll-back some of its most dangerous threats [meaning Iran and Iraq].” David Wurmser, one of the authors of the same report who served on Cheney’s national security staff from 2003 to 2007, went further, writing in a lengthier report that Syria and Iraq could easily fragment into separate ethno-sectarian segments, “a development that would enhance the security of Israel and the West.”

These ideas were clearly picked up by the Bush administration and later applied to Iran. “In the past six months, Israel and the United States have also been working together in support of a Kurdish resistance group known as the Party for Free Life in Kurdistan [known as PJAK or PEJAK],” Seymour Hersh reported in November 2006. “The group has been conducting clandestine cross-border forays into Iran, I was told by a government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon civilian leadership, as `part of an effort to explore alternative means of applying pressure on Iran.’”

In February 2007, the Telegraph of London reported that:

CIA officials are understood to be helping opposition militias among the numerous ethnic minority groups clustered in Iran’s border regions. In the past year there has been a wave of unrest in ethnic minority border areas of Iran, with bombing and assassination campaigns against soldiers and government officials… Funding for their separatist causes comes directly from the CIA’s classified budget but is now ‘no great secret,’ according to one former high-ranking CIA official in Washington.

In the same month, Cheney himself traveled to Pakistan and met with its then-president, General Pervez Musharraf. Pakistani government sources said at the time that the secret campaign against Iran by Jundullah was on the agenda when the two met. Jundallah was a Baluch terrorist group that for years staged terrorist attacks in Iran from its bases in Pakistan. In an interview later that month, Cheney referred to the Jundallah terrorists as “guerrillas” in an apparent effort to lend them legitimacy.

In April 2007, ABC News reported that, according to Pakistani and U.S. intelligence officials, Jundallah had been secretly encouraged and advised by U.S. officials since 2005.

In an interview with National Public Radio in June 2008, Hersh explained how the Bush Administration’s policy of “my enemy’s enemy is my friend” led it to support Jundallah and MEK. The next month, Hersh quoted Robert Baer, a former CIA clandestine officer who had worked for nearly two decades in South Asia and the Middle East, as saying, “The Baluchis [a small ethnic minority group residing in Iran’s and Pakistan’s provinces of Baluchistan] are Sunni fundamentalists who hate the regime in Tehran, but you can also describe them as Al Qaeda. These are guys who cut off the heads of nonbelievers—in this case, it’s Shiite Iranians. The irony is that we’re once again working with Sunni fundamentalists, just as we did in Afghanistan in the nineteen-eighties.” Baer repeated those assertions in the fall of 2008 at a symposium co-organized by this author on U.S.-Iran relations at the University of Southern California.

In the same article, Hersh also stated that the MEK received arms and intelligence, directly or indirectly, from the U.S., and that PJAK, “which has also been reported to be covertly supported by the United States,” operated against Iran from bases in northern Iraq for at least three years. PJAK used Iraqi Kurdistan as its base to carry out multiple raids into Iran that killed many civilians, as well as soldiers and policemen. At the time, the Bush administration denied helping PJAK, despite the fact that the group’s chief, Rahman Haj-Ahmadi, had traveled to Washington around the same time, reportedly to gain financial and military support for his militia. In 2009, the Obama administration declared PJAK a terrorist organization.

PJAK is still active in the border area between Iran, Turkey, and Iraq. When in December of 2017 there were scattered demonstrations in several Iranian cities against the terrible state of the Iranian economy, PJAK issued a statement asking people to rise up. It carried out terrorist attacks inside Iran on 27 July 2019 that killed and injured scores of people.

In December 2009, Selig Harrison reported in the New York Times that the Bush administration had provided support to Jundallah, as well some Kurdish groups operating in western Iran. According to his report, that assistance was sent through Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency, while the Kurdish groups received their support through Israel’s Mossad.

The Bush administration was not the only one that was trying to exploit the dissatisfaction of some of Iran’s ethnic groups to destabilize the country. Israel and Saudi Arabia were also participants. In January 2012, Mark Perry reported how Mossad agents, using U.S. passports and posing as CIA agents, tried to recruit members of Jundallah to fight their covert war against Iran.

Jundallah’s leader, Abdolmajid Rigi, was captured by Iran’s security forces and executed in June 2010. The Obama administration put Jundallah on the terrorist list in November 2010. The group then split into Pakistani and Iranian branches. The former attacks Shiites in Pakistan, while the Iranian branch, known as Jaish ul-Adl, continues to carry out terrorist attacks and kidnappings in Sistan and Baluchistan province in southeastern Iran, near the border with Pakistan. It is widely believed in Iran that Jaish ul-Adl is supported by Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates.

The Kurds and Baluchis are not the only ethnic groups that the Bush administration and its allies tried to exploit. In a July 2008 article, Hersh also mentioned possible U.S. support for separatists in Khuzestan province. As already pointed out, over the past 15 years, Iranian-Arab separatists have carried out bombing and terrorist attacks in Khuzestan, the latest of which took place in October 2018, when they attacked during a military parade. An armed group, Ahvaziya, claimed responsibility for the attacks. Ahvaziya is part of the ASMLA group that participated in the Washington meeting of Iranian separatist groups.

Iran has accused Saudi Arabia of funding, arming and training the group. After the attacks, Abdulkhalegh Abdulla, a former adviser to the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, wrote in a tweet that the attack was not terrorism because it was against Iran’s military, and that the attacks were part of what Mohammad bin Salman, the crown prince and de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, had threatened in May 2017, namely, that Saudi Arabia is “not waiting until there becomes a battle in Saudi Arabia,” and so it “will work so that it becomes a battle for them in Iran.” His tweet created deep anger in Iran.

As the author recently reported, the Trump administration has decided to continue what the Bush administration began. Before he was appointed as Trump’s national security adviser, in his “manifesto” for getting the U.S. out of the nuclear agreement with Iran, John Bolton advocated U.S. support “for Kurdish national aspirations, including Kurds in Iran” and providing “assistance to Balochis, Khuzestan Arabs, Kurds, and others…” After his appointment, Bolton, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Brian Hook—who is the State Department’s Special Representative for Iran and directs its “Iran Action Group”—met with some of the leaders of Iran’s Kurdish groups. Last June, Abdullah Mohtadi and Mustafa Hijri—who lead, respectively, the Iranian Communist Kurdish group Komala and the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran [KDPI]—travelled to Washington, with Mohtadi reportedly meeting with Pompeo and Hijri meeting with State Department officials. Komala’s office in Washington has registered with the Justice Department as a lobbying group to “establish solid and durable relations” with the Trump administration.

Both groups have carried out terrorist attacks inside Iran, and, under the guise of calling for a federal system, both have separatist tendencies. The separatist nature of the KDPI became clear when, back in 2012, Hijri asked the U.S. to declare Iran’s Kurdistan province a “no-fly zone,” so that his forces could attack government forces freely and eventually secede from Iran. Hijri has also called for “regime change” in Iran, and has declared the Islamic Republic “a common enemy” of the Kurds and Israel, asking the Jewish state for support.

The attempt by UANI, a group that reportedly receives a lot of its funding from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, to provoke ethnic strife in Iran may well lead to more bloodshed, but it will likely ultimately fail. Iranians of diverse backgrounds have lived together side-by-side and have preserved their nation for thousands of years. Iran’s true opposition inside the country—the reformists, religious-nationalists, secular leftists, labor groups, human rights activists, and others—and its supporters in the diaspora reject discrimination against minorities, ethnic tensions, economic sanctions, military threats, and foreign intervention. In the democratic Iran that the true opposition will eventually achieve, all Iranians, regardless of their ethnicity, religion, or gender, will be equal.

Muhammad Sahimi is a Professor at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

0 comments
FacebookTwitterPinterestWhatsappTelegramSkypeEmail
Rajavi_Giuliani
Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Paid speeches, MEK Terrorists, Legal woes

Giuliani’s work for Iranian group with bloody past could lead to more legal woes

Giuliani ally Michael Mukasey’s move to register as a lobbyist for an Iranian dissident group may spur the DOJ to investigate, experts say.

In the spring of 2017, former U.S. attorney general Michael Mukasey met with representatives of the Iranian dissident group Mujahedeen e-Khalq (MEK), a State Department-designated foreign terrorist organization until 2012.

Mukasey wasn’t alone. Joining him at the meeting was another high-profile American political figure: Rudy Giuliani.

For nearly a decade, the former law partners have pushed the agenda of the MEK, giving paid speeches and writing newspaper op-eds expressing support for a group linked to the deaths of six Americans in the 1970s.

But it wasn’t until late last month that Mukasey registered as a foreign agent lobbying pro bono for MEK’s political arm. Giuliani still hasn’t, raising the possibility that the Justice Department could target him in an illegal lobbying probe, experts say.

“This is the kind of scenario that very commonly leads them to launch an investigation,” said Josh Rosenstein, a Washington-based lawyer who advises clients on compliance with federal lobbying laws.

If Giuliani and Mukasey were”working together or in parallel,”Rosenstein added,”then it’s a huge problem for Giuliani.”

Mukasey’s move to register as a lobbyist for the MEK’s political affiliate comes as Giuliani, the former New York City mayor-turned-personal lawyer to President Donald Trump, is facing growing legal peril connected to his international business activities.

Rudy Giuliani

Giuliani’s overseas dealings, primarily in Ukraine, are under fresh scrutiny after two of his associates were charged last week in a scheme to funnel foreign money to U.S. politicians.

The New York Times has reported that Giuliani’s business dealings are under federal investigation and prosecutors may be looking at his exposure for failing to file as a foreign agent.

Legal experts say Giuliani’s work on behalf of the MEK and its political arm, the National Council of Resistance of Iran, also raises questions about whether he may have run afoul of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA. The law requires American citizens to disclose to the Justice Department any lobbying or public relations work on behalf of a foreign entity, regardless of whether they’re paid for the representation.

A review of the group’s government filings shows that Giuliani met with MEK officials at least once every year since 2014. A range of issues were discussed, including “Iran’s nuclear weapons as well as Iran’s terrorism in the region, including Iraq and Syria” in 2014, the plight of Iranian dissidents living in Iraq in 2015, and the protests in Iran in 2018.
During that period, he has appeared at MEK-related events in Poland, Albania, Paris and Washington. FARA experts say Giuliani’s speech in Washington in May 2018 and U.S.-based writings in support of the group are particularly problematic.

“This certainly walks like a FARA issue and talks like a FARA issue,” said Matthew Sanderson, a defense lawyer who specializes in foreign lobbying cases.

He said the Justice Department will likely try to “develop facts to determine whether these efforts to influence public opinion in the U.S. were at the request or direction of MEK, a foreign interest.”

“This is a particularly unusual situation because Mr. Giuliani was acting as the president’s counsel, all while acting in ways that suggest he was simultaneously representing certain foreign interests,” Sanderson said.

In an interview with NBC News, Giuliani said he has no reason to register as a foreign agent because, unlike Mukasey, he’s not planning to speak to U.S. government officials about the MEK.

“I’m not doing what he’s doing,”Giuliani said.”He’s not registering for any previous activity. He’s registering because he’s asking for a specific meeting with the government.”

Giuliani would not elaborate on the reason for the meeting. Mukasey declined comment.

Representatives for the group’s political arm did not return requests for comment.

Formed in the 1960s as a Marxist-Islamist movement, the MEK has a bloody history.

The group, whose name translates as “People’s Holy Warriors of Iran,” is accused of killing six Americans before the 1979 Iranian revolution and assassinating Iranian diplomats in the subsequent years.

A longtime ally of the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, the MEK was placed on the State Department’s terror blacklist in 1997. The group enlisted an A-list cast of former American political and law enforcement leaders as part of its effort to remove itself from the terrorist list and enhance its reputation in the West.

The strategy worked. In 2012, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced a decision to remove the group from the list.

Daniel Benjamin, a State Department counterterrorism coordinator from 2009 to 2012, has focused extensively on the network of American politicians who have been paid by MEK, including Giuliani and Mukasey.

“I found it pretty distasteful that they were shilling for this group even if it was delisted,” said Benjamin, now a professor at Dartmouth College. “This is a group that has American blood on its hands, and it’s never owned up to that.”

Benjamin said the group has long attracted anti-Iran hard-liners who recruit like-minded peers.

“Look at those who have gone on their gravy train and then go to their events and say MEK is going to bring democracy and peace to Iran,” Benjamin said. “Basically these guys bring aboard their pals. Especially among the hardest line anti-Iran folks, this is the place to go. Though plenty of people become much more hard line once their pockets are filled with MEK money.”

“The big question,” Benjamin added,”is where does all this money come from?”

Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, described the organization as a fringe group with mysterious benefactors that garners scant support in its home country.

“Their population in Iran hovers between negligible and nill,” Sadjadpour said.
Still, the MEK’s roster of supporters includes an array of prominent Americans: former FBI Director Louis Freeh; former Democratic governors and presidential candidates Howard Dean and Bill Richardson; Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton; and former Obama national security adviser James L. Jones.

In speeches and media interviews, Giuliani and the others have insisted the MEK is now a democratic-minded opposition group committed to overturning the mullah-led government in Tehran. They say their support for the group is also based on humanitarian motives — to ensure the safety of the Iranian dissidents living in Iraq who face the threat of attacks.

Giuliani’s MEK advocacy dates to at least 2010. In December of that year, he and Mukasey were among a group of prominent Republicans who traveled to a rally in Paris where they called on the Obama administration to remove MEK from the U.S. list of foreign terrorist organizations.

“For your organization to be described as a terrorist organization is just really a disgrace,” Giuliani declared before a crowd of Iranian exiles, according to an article in The Washington Post.

Mukasey urged the White House to offer “all possible technical and covert support to those fighting to end oppression in Iran.”

“What it has done and what it is doing is nothing less than an embarrassment,” he told the crowd, according to The Post.

The following year, Giuliani and Mukasey co-wrote an op-ed in the National Review with two other MEK supporters defending the organization.

In the 2011 piece, headlined “MEK is not a terrorist group,”Giuliani and the others argued against suggestions that the authors were providing material support to a terror group. The MEK has”provided valuable intelligence to the United States to Iranian nuclear plans,”they wrote.

In his FARA filing, dated Sept. 26, Mukasey wrote that he’s not being compensated for his MEK advocacy.

“The registrant has agreed to communicate with executive branch and legislative officials in the United States government on behalf of the foreign principal and its members on an unpaid basis,”the filing says.”However, the foreign principal will reimburse the registrant for direct expenses such as filing costs and travel.”

The filing lists Sept. 20, 2019, as the date of the agreement with MEK.

Sanderson, the defense lawyer who focuses on government lobbying, said the listing of that date could pose problems for Mukasey if he started doing lobbying work for MEK before then.

“Filing a late registration, especially if you’re not accurate in your description, could result in charges,”Sanderson said.

But Sanderson added that filing late is still better than not filing at all.”If you approach the government and proactively say, ‘I’m registering,’ even if it’s late, you’re in a much better position than if the government comes to your door.”

Giuliani would not say how much the group pays him for his appearances. He said there’s no reason why the Justice Department would target him for activities that dozens of other former U.S. politicians and military figures are participating in.

“If I have to register, so do three former heads of the joint chiefs of staff and eight very prominent Democrats and eight very prominent Republicans,”Giuliani said.

In an interview with NBC News’ Andrea Mitchell in Poland this past February, Giuliani said he worked to get the MEK off the terror list because”there was no evidence of any kind of terrorist activity for over 20 years, if any, and they were basically revolutionaries who overthrew the shah.”

“They believe in democracy, in human rights, rights of women,”said Giuliani, who was appearing at an MEK event.

In the interview, he also defending advocating for the MEK while also working as the president’s personal lawyer.

“I’m a private lawyer, so private lawyers have private clients,”Giuliani said.”This has been a client of mine for years. Maybe if I was taking a new position. Maybe if i was taking a bold new different position. I’m just repeating what I said 11 years ago, 10 years ago.”

Mukasey told The New York Times in 2011 that he had been paid his standard speaking fee — $15,000 to $20,000, according to the Web site of his speakers’ agency — to deliver talks at MEK-related events.

He insisted that his decision to advocate on behalf of the group was not driven by money.”There’s no way I would compromise my standing by expressing views I don’t believe in,”Mukasey told The Times.

Federal prosecutors have brought few FARA cases over the years. But the law garnered renewed attention during the special counsel’s investigation into Russian election interference.

Two Trump associates, Paul Manafort and Rick Gates, were charged with failing to register as foreign agents.

Giuliani’s contacts with the MEK extended into this past summer. In July, he traveled to Albania to meet with the group’s president, Maryam Rajavi.

An article from the MEK’s official website said Giuliani”emphasized that America stands on the side of the Iranian people and supports their struggle for freedom.”
By Julia Ainsley, Andrew W. Lehren and Rich Schapiro – nbcnews.com

0 comments
FacebookTwitterPinterestWhatsappTelegramSkypeEmail
Maryam Rajavi
Mujahedin Khalq Organization's Propaganda System

Maryam Rajavi mirrors Chalabi

Ahmad Chalabi, the Iraqi politician who died in 2015, is widely known for pushing for the U.S. invasion of Iraq. From exile he helped provide the manufactured excuses needed by the United States for the invasion in 2003 but was eventually denied any share in power after the fall of Saddam Hussein.
Chalabi was perhaps the Iraqi most closely associated with President George W. Bush’s decision to go to war. He cultivated close ties with journalists in Washington and London, American lawmakers, the neoconservative advisers who helped shape Bush’s foreign policy, and a wide network of Iraqi exiles, many of whom were paid for fabricating and distributing intelligence against Saddam Hussein’s government.
It was later revealed that his group, the Iraqi National Congress, received more than $100 million from the C.I.A. and other agencies between its foundation in 1992 and the start of the war. He cultivated friendships with a circle of hawkish republicans – Dick Cheney, Douglas J. Feith, William J. Luti, Richard N. Perle and Paul D. Wolfowitz – who were central in the United States’ march to war.
Chalabi was used by the American warmongers to ‘sell’ the claim that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and that he had refused to fully cooperate with United Nations weapons inspections as an excuse to launch war against the country.
But the case for the war was predicated on flawed intelligence, and a 2006 report by the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded that “false information” from sources affiliated with the “Iraqi National Congress” was used to support key intelligence community assessment on Iraq and was widely distributed in intelligence products prior to war.
Did Chalabi push the U.S. into the war or was he rather used by advocates of war to produce excuses and announce false intelligence? It was later proved that Chalabi was truly the loudspeaker of the White House warmongers whenever they were not able to directly show their faces. They needed a so-called opposition group to do the job for them or at least to pull the trigger.
Now the Iranian Maryam Rajavi, leader of the Mojahedin-e Khalq Organization (MEK, MKO, NCR, NLA, Rajavi Cult) is playing (and has played for a long time) the same role as the Iraqi Ahmad Chalabi, this time in relation to Iran.
Now the Iranian Maryam Rajavi, leader of the Mojahedin-e Khalq Organization (MEK, MKO, NCR, NLA, Rajavi Cult) is playing (and has played for a long time) the same role as the Iraqi Ahmad Chalabi, this time in relation to Iran.
On Monday September 30, 2019 in Washington, the group, which has close ties with the warmongers of the White House, announced baseless details blaming the missile drone attack against Saudi oil facilities on Iran. Without any evidence, the MEK claimed that the decision for the attack was taken by the Supreme National Security Council, presided over by President Rouhani and with the presence of Foreign Minister Zarif.
This echoes the small task the MEK was previously given to promote the manufactured nuclear crisis against Iran. In August 2002, Alireza Jafarzadeh, the representative of the National Council of Resistance (a front organization for the MEK) to the U.S., appeared in a press conference in Washington and issued some nuclear intelligence against Iran. This was later proven to have been handed over to the MEK by Israeli Intelligence. This was being done while the group was listed as a terrorist entity by the U.S. State Department. The Americans only needed an Iranian opposition group to start the crisis, it wasn’t fussy about which one.
The MEK is a highly controversial group. It was responsible for killing several Americans in Iran during the 1970s. In 1992 its members attempted a violet attack on Iran’s U.N. delegation in New York. In 2012 it was removed from the U.S. State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations after an intense lobbying campaign that included paying retired U.S. government officials and leaders. Its supporters in the White House say the MEK has been an essential conduit for sensitive information about Iran’s nuclear program.
MEK members in Iraq were largely disarmed after the 2003 American invasion. The group had been granted protection by Saddam Hussein before the invasion and by the US army after the invasion and lived at Camp Ashraf for two decades. After the U.S. troop withdrawal in 2009, many group members moved in 2012 from Camp Ashraf to Camp Liberty, an abandoned U.S. military base. They have been now granted a remote and isolated base in Albania under the Trump Administration where the leaders have reconstructed their cultic internal relations and are doing their job in exactly the same way as performed by Ahmad Chalabi – the manufacture of excuses and false narratives to pave the way for war.
The MEK’s well financed meetings in Paris and now Albania are used as a platform for American politicians to announce their policy of regime change in Iran and the imposition of ‘maximum pressure’ sanctions. It is the only so-called opposition group which fully and unequivocally supports this policy to push the U.S. into war with Iran.
The Trump administration is conflicted about Iran. Even as the warmongers in the White House push for war there are others who are beginning to pull back. The MEK played its role in promoting accusations about Iran’s involvement in the Saudi missile attack. But this time, unlike Chalabi’s accusations, neither politicians nor media have given credence to Maryam Rajavi’s claims. It could well be that history lessons have been learned.
Ebrahim Khodabandeh

0 comments
FacebookTwitterPinterestWhatsappTelegramSkypeEmail
USA double standards on terrorists
Mujahedin Khalq Organization as a terrorist group

Democratic cover for terrorist proxies like MEK

Back in 1981, a 3-year-old girl Zahra Nourbakhsh, was on a bus together with her family, when it was set on fire by the agents of the Mujahedin Khalq Organization (the MKO, MEK, PMOI, Cult of Rajavi) in Shiraz, Iran. In that traumatic incident, she was severely injured and her two-year-old sister was killed. [1]
This was one of the many terrorist attacks of the MEK against Iranian civilians and authorities. However, Advocacy for violent groups such as the MEK, as a tool to run the agenda of superpowers, is not a taboo. Ted Carpenter, vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C, analyzes this phenomenon in his book “Gullible Superpower: U.S. Support For Bogus Foreign Democratic Movements”.
In his book Carpenter focuses on ten separate case studies of times the United States gave “democratic” cover to movements that were far from deserving. These include the Islamic fundamentalist Mujahideen in Afghanistan, Nicaraguan and Salvadoran death squads, the authoritarian Jonas Savimbi of Angola, the organ-trafficking Kosovo Liberation Army, Ahmed Chalabi’s National Iraqi Congress, and the People’s Mujahedin of Iran. [2]
“Gullible Superpowers has an excellent chapter on the Iranian group Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK),” writes James Bovard of the American Conservative. “That organization sprang up in the 1960s and proceeded to kill Americans in the 1970s and large numbers of Iranians in subsequent decades. NBC News reported in early 2012 that MEK had carried out killings of Iranian nuclear scientists and that it was “financed, trained and armed by Israel’s secret service.” [3]
Advocacy for the MEK as the enemy of their enemy is not limited to the US and Israel. The group is also embraced by the regional rival of Iran, Saudi Arabia. However, Albanian government should also be added to the list of MEK’s friends although it has never been involved in serious political engagements or arguments with Iranian government. Actually, the motivation of Albanian authorities to receive the MEK is based on money. It was chosen as a safe haven for the group because the US wanted so.
Reza Alghurabi of the American Herald Tribune writes, “Under pressure from the Iraqi government and the country’s civil activists who demanded the expulsion of the MEK from Iraq, the U.S. government was forced to choose Albania, which was suffering from extremely weak economic conditions, as the final destination of the terrorist group.” [4]
Alghurabi explains how the US government “was forced to choose” Albania: “The Americans lured the Albanian officials into hosting the MEK by donating a $25 million package which was offered to Albania under the pretext of promoting reforms in the country. Furthermore, another $20 million was donated to the UN refugee agency by the U.S. to help resettle the MEK in Albania.” [5]
Nevertheless, this is not the only financial resource that Albania enjoys by the side of the MEK. The MEK is notoriously known for its lavish payments to its sponsors. Speakers at the MEK events are usually paid hefty sums of money for a ten-minute speech on behalf of the group. So, it is quiet natural for the MEK to fund the Albanian government and its authorities. In exchange the Albanian authorities serve them with hostile acts towards Iran.
“Edi Rama’s UN speech on September 27, 2019 in which he denounced Iran and praised the MEK, has raised speculations that the terrorist group influences Albanian officials,” Alghurabi writes. “In addition, Ilir Meta, another member of Albania’s socialist party and the Albanian president, had also visited MEK’s headquarters in Manze earlier and met with the group’s leader Maryam Rajavi.” [65]
Double standards on terrorism point to an awkward attitude among politicians in the US, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Albania. As far as a terrorist group is beneficial, it can be considered as democratic. “MEK apologists continue to portray the group as idealistic freedom fighters devoted to democracy,” James Bovard states. “A simple online search shows that the Farsi translation of the group’s name is “holy warriors of the people.” But as long as the MEK serves the purposes of the Saudi and Israeli governments and their American string-pullers, there will be plenty of Washingtonians who pretend that the Iranian people do not loathe MEK.” [7]
They can pretend anything they are willing too but the absolute truth is that the MEK is loathed by the Iranian people.
Mazda Parsi

Sources:
[1] https://www.nejatngo.org/en/posts/6767
[2] Carpenter, Ted Galen, Gullible Superpower: U.S. Support For Bogus Foreign Democratic Movements, Cato Institute, February 19th , 2019.
[3] Bovard, James, Idiocy or Perfidy? How We Get Hooked on Foreign Democracy Crusades, the American Conservative, October 2nd , 2019.
[4] Alghurabi, Reza, Why Did Saudis Decide to Expand Their Relations with Albania?, American Herald Tribune, October 6th, 2019.
[5] ibid
[6] ibid
[7] Bovard, James, Idiocy or Perfidy? How We Get Hooked on Foreign Democracy Crusades, the American Conservative, October 2nd , 2019.

0 comments
FacebookTwitterPinterestWhatsappTelegramSkypeEmail
Newer Posts
Older Posts