US policy change on banned Iranian group came after extraordinary fundraising operation to transform its Images.. To the US government, the People’s Mojahedin Organisation of Iran (MEK) was a terrorist group alongside al-Qaida, Hamas and the Farc in Colombia. The MEK landed on the list in 1997 with American blood on its hands and by allying itself with Saddam Hussein along with a long list of bombings inside Iran.
The campaign to bury the MEK’s bloody history of bombings and assassinations that killed American businessmen, Iranian politicians and thousands of civilians, and to portray it as a loyal US ally against the Islamic government in Tehran has seen large sums of money directed at three principal targets: members of Congress, Washington lobby groups and influential former officials.
Adding hope to every other group that had found itself labeled a terrorist organization after a decade of bloody anti-US attacks and killing a number of US military officers, the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MeK), one of the inaugural members of the US State Department’s list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations, has been ordered removed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton…
Among the foreign countries and overseas organizations that hire people to advocate for them in Washington, D.C., one doesn’t expect to find a group that’s listed on the U.S. government’s roster of foreign terrorists. But the Mujahedin e-Khalq — a cult-like Iranian group whose killing of U.S. officials landed it on the terrorist list in 1997 — has been paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to a high-profile…
Ed Rendell, a Democrat, received $160,000 for appearing at seven pro-MEK rallies and conferences, his office confirmed to NBC in March. Each event typically involves five to 10 former officials who speak in favor of removing the group from the terrorist list. The typical fee for a speaker at one of the events has been in the $20,000 range, according to news reports. Pro-MEK groups are thought to have spent millions of dollars on the events …
McColm added that”[t]he financial arrangements for speakers were handled by the Iranian-American Community. For the legal at heart, there were no funds provided by NCRI/MEK or any other so-called front groups.”NCRI stands for National Council of Resistance of Iran and is recognized by the State Department as an alias for the MEK …
I asked the most important one: given the definition laid out in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, was he at all concerned that his advocacy on behalf of the Iranian dissident group the MEK aka MKO/PMOI could be defined as material support for terrorism under the PATRIOT Act?..
The Mujahadin-e Khalq .. has returned to the news, this time with a report that ex-Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein was paid $12,000 to give a speech at an event held on behalf of the MEK’s aka MKO/PMOI ongoing battle to be taken off the U.S. State Department’s list of terrorist organizations.
journalist Carl Bernstein got up on stage at the grand ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria [1] in Manhattan and delivered a speech questioning the listing of an obscure Iranian group called the Mujahadin-e Khalq (MEK) on the U.S. government list..In the past few years, pro-MEK groups have marshaled considerable financial resources to bring high-profile speakers …
..Dr. Gerson is walking in the same path with a designated terrorist group, Mojahedin Khalq Organization MKO/MEK/NCR, and repeating its very same baseless claims. At least nobody expected him to slam a humanitarian guideline set by the United Nations so hard in favor of a terrorist group that is waging a psychological war against international institutions…