Mujahedin Khalq Terror group

Blowback: In Aiding Iranian Terrorists, the U.S. Repeats a Dangerous Mistake

A New Yorker article reports that U.S. Special Forces funded and trained a group called MEK, extending a long history of short-sighted, enemy-of-my-enemy foreign policy.

American foreign policy can get complicated. In the 1980s, the U.S. supported Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein because he was the greatest enemy of our enemy, the Islamic Republic of Iran. He’s dead now because the U.S. invaded his country in 2003, a war heavily premised on claims that he was supporting terrorism, namely al-Qaeda. He wasn’t supporting al-Qaeda. But he did support another terrorist group, called Mujahideen-e Khalq, or MEK. Now many leading American officials want the U.S. to support MEK because they are an enemy of Iran. According to a new New Yorker article by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, the Bush administration gave MEK money, guns, and even training at a Nevada base starting in 2005.

In other words, if Hersh’s story is true, then the U.S. supported the terrorist ally of its enemy, whom we killed in part because we thought he supported some other terrorists that he actually didn’t, because those terrorists are the enemy of our other enemy. Got it?

Even if Hersh is wrong, there is a long list of U.S. leaders and officials who would like to make him right. Members of the "MEK lobby," as it’s often called, support at least removing the group from the list of officially designated terrorist groups, and often some combination of arming or funding the fighters. They include: two former CIA directors, a former FBI director, a former attorney general, Bush’s first homeland security chief, Obama’s first national security adviser, Rudy Giuliani, and Howard Dean. A House resolution calling for MEK to be de-listed as a terrorist group has 97 co-sponsors.

It’s not a coincidence that the pro-MEK position can seem confusing, even contradictory. The world is too complicated and interconnected for "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" to work as a foreign policy mandate. It leads the U.S. to work against its own long-term interests, "solving" short-term problems by creating bigger, longer-term problems. For example: supporting Arab dictators to suppress the Arab Islamist parties that may soon take over, supporting Latin American rightist who ended up being murderous dictators, supporting anti-Soviet fighters who later turned against us, and so on. Sometimes, the U.S. even supports enemies-of-our-enemies who are actively and currently also our enemy: Afghan drug ring leader Ahmed Wali Karzai, for example, or, starting in 2003, Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi.

Still, let’s assume, for the purposes of discussion, that American MEK enthusiasts are right in arguing that the radical Marxist group, which assassinated six Americans in the 1970s, has since become, and always will be, as American as apple pie. Supporting this terrorist group is still likely to do far more harm than good.

The U.S. has a long history of arming rebels, insurgents, and outright terrorists who want to fight our enemies for us. Even when it works — and it often doesn’t — the U.S.-sponsored fighters often spread small arms, exacerbate anti-American attitudes, and entrench a cycle of violence that can continues for years and sometimes spin out of control. When Congress shoveled millions of dollars into CIA programs to support anti-Soviet fighters in Afghanistan, much of the guns and money by design went to the extremists. A December 1984 CIA memo identified "fundamentalists" such as Mujahideen leader (and current American enemy) Gulbidden Hekmatyar as "the best fighters" and thus best recipient of American backing. Even the Afghan extremists who didn’t turn against the U.S. did use their arms and money to rampage across Afghanistan, sowing the chaos, violence, mistrust, corruption, crime, and poverty that has plagued the country for now 30 years.

Again, let’s give the MEK and their American backers the benefit of the doubt, and assume that the group, though it has long behaved as a terrorist organization, will now act more like freedom-fighter rebels, combating the Iranian regime without harming Iranian society. (This would be mostly new for them, and most Iranians don’t see them this way.) Supporting the group is still likely to backfire and do more harm to U.S. interests than good.

The 30-year U.S.-Iran conflict can, generally speaking, take one of four paths: regime change from within (a revolution, which the failed 2009 protests show is extremely unlikely), regime change from without (a U.S.-led war, also extremely unlikely after the Iraq debacle), a "grand bargain" where both sides find acceptable terms for peace, or the status quo. The first two options are too unlikely to plan around and the status quo, most observers seem to agree, isn’t working so well. That leaves a grand bargain. This logic is as obvious in Washington as it is in Tehran, but a combination of mutual mistrust and the domestic politics of both countries have stymied three attempted peace deals in a row.[..]

The revelation that the U.S. supported MEK (despised within Iran not so differently from how Americans despise, say, al-Qaeda) will probably make a "grand bargain" for detente less likely.[..]

This will probably also worsen popular Iranian perceptions of the U.S. and popular appetite for detente. How can the U.S. say it stands with the Iranian people, Iranians might ask, when it funds the terrorist group that attacks Iranian people? …This news — not to mention photos from the big pro-MEK that Congress holds every year — will likely drive the Iranian public and regime closer together, entrench the hardliners within the regime, and set back American "soft power" outreach to Iranians.

There might be some short-term gains for supporting the MEK. The group may have supplied valuable intelligence on the Iranian nuclear program and has been linked to the killings of Iranian nuclear scientists (though it’s not clear if this actually does much good). But the long-term effects, though impossible to predict, could be far worse. No matter which militant group we’re supporting in what corner of the world, that history always seems to repeat itself.

By Max Fisher , The Atlantic

April 8, 2012 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Our Men in Iran?

From the air, the terrain of the Department of Energy’s Nevada National Security Site, with its arid high plains and remote mountain peaks, has the look of northwest Iran. The site, some sixty-five miles northwest of Las Vegas, was once used for nuclear testing, and now includes a counterintelligence training facility and a private airport capable of handling Boeing 737 aircraft. It’s a restricted area, and inhospitable—in certain sections, the curious are warned that the site’s security personnel are authorized to use deadly force, if necessary, against intruders.

It was here that the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) conducted training, beginning in 2005, for members of the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, a dissident Iranian opposition group known in the West as the M.E.K. The M.E.K. had its beginnings as a Marxist-Islamist student-led group and, in the nineteen-seventies, it was linked to the assassination of six American citizens. It was initially part of the broad-based revolution that led to the 1979 overthrow of the Shah of Iran. But, within a few years, the group was waging a bloody internal war with the ruling clerics, and, in 1997, it was listed as a foreign terrorist organization by the State Department. In 2002, the M.E.K. earned some international credibility by publicly revealing Our Men in Iran? —accurately—that Iran had begun enriching uranium at a secret underground location. Mohamed ElBaradei, who at the time was the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations’ nuclear monitoring agency, told me later that he had been informed that the information was supplied by the Mossad. The M.E.K.’s ties with Western intelligence deepened after the fall of the Iraqi regime in 2003, and JSOC began operating inside Iran in an effort to substantiate the Bush Administration’s fears that Iran was building the bomb at one or more secret underground locations. Funds were covertly passed to a number of dissident organizations, for intelligence collection and, ultimately, for anti-regime terrorist activities. Directly, or indirectly, the M.E.K. ended up with resources like arms and intelligence. Some American-supported covert operations continue in Iran today, according to past and present intelligence officials and military consultants.

Despite the growing ties, and a much-intensified lobbying effort organized by its advocates, M.E.K. has remained on the State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations—which meant that secrecy was essential in the Nevada training. “We did train them here, and washed them through the Energy Department because the D.O.E. owns all this land in southern Nevada,” a former senior American intelligence official told me. “We were deploying them over long distances in the desert and mountains, and building their capacity in communications—coördinating commo is a big deal.” (A spokesman for J.S.O.C. said that “U.S. Special Operations Forces were neither aware of nor involved in the training of M.E.K. members.”)

The training ended sometime before President Obama took office, the former official said. In a separate interview, a retired four-star general, who has advised the Bush and Obama Administrations on national-security issues, said that he had been privately briefed in 2005 about the training of Iranians associated with the M.E.K. in Nevada by an American involved in the program. They got “the standard training,” he said, “in commo, crypto [cryptography], small-unit tactics, and weaponry—that went on for six months,” the retired general said. “They were kept in little pods.” He also was told, he said, that the men doing the training were from JSOC, which, by 2005, had become a major instrument in the Bush Administration’s global war on terror. “The JSOC trainers were not front-line guys who had been in the field, but second- and third-tier guys—trainers and the like—and they started going off the reservation. ‘If we’re going to teach you tactics, let me show you some really sexy stuff…’ ”

It was the ad-hoc training that provoked the worried telephone calls to him, the former general said. “I told one of the guys who called me that they were all in over their heads, and all of them could end up trouble unless they got something in writing. The Iranians are very, very good at counterintelligence, and stuff like this is just too hard to contain.” The site in Nevada was being utilized at the same time, he said, for advanced training of élite Iraqi combat units. (The retired general said he only knew of the one M.E.K.-affiliated group that went though the training course; the former senior intelligence official said that he was aware of training that went on through 2007.)

Allan Gerson, a Washington attorney for the M.E.K., notes that the M.E.K. has publicly and repeatedly renounced terror. Gerson said he would not comment on the alleged training in Nevada. But such training, if true, he said, would be “especially incongruent with the State Department’s decision to continue to maintain the M.E.K. on the terrorist list. How can the U.S. train those on State’s foreign terrorist list, when others face criminal penalties for providing a nickel to the same organization?”

Robert Baer, a retired C.I.A. agent who is fluent in Arabic and had worked under cover in Kurdistan and throughout the Middle East in his career, initially had told me in early 2004 of being recruited by a private American company—working, so he believed, on behalf of the Bush Administration—to return to Iraq. “They wanted me to help the M.E.K. collect intelligence on Iran’s nuclear program,” Baer recalled. “They thought I knew Farsi, which I did not. I said I’d get back to them, but never did.” Baer, now living in California, recalled that it was made clear to him at the time that the operation was “a long-term thing—not just a one-shot deal.”

Massoud Khodabandeh, an I.T. expert now living in England who consults for the Iraqi government, was an official with the M.E.K. before defecting in 1996. In a telephone interview, he acknowledged that he is an avowed enemy of the M.E.K., and has advocated against the group. Khodabandeh said that he had been with the group since before the fall of the Shah and, as a computer expert, was deeply involved in intelligence activities as well as providing security for the M.E.K. leadership. For the past decade, he and his English wife have run a support program for other defectors. Khodabandeh told me that he had heard from more recent defectors about the training in Nevada. He was told that the communications training in Nevada involved more than teaching how to keep in contact during attacks—it also involved communication intercepts. The United States, he said, at one point found a way to penetrate some major Iranian communications systems. At the time, he said, the U.S. provided M.E.K. operatives with the ability to intercept telephone calls and text messages inside Iran—which M.E.K. operatives translated and shared with American signals intelligence experts. He does not know whether this activity is ongoing.

Five Iranian nuclear scientists have been assassinated since 2007. M.E.K. spokesmen have denied any involvement in the killings, but early last month NBC News quoted two senior Obama Administration officials as confirming that the attacks were carried out by M.E.K. units that were financed and trained by Mossad, the Israeli secret service. NBC further quoted the Administration officials as denying any American involvement in the M.E.K. activities. The former senior intelligence official I spoke with seconded the NBC report that the Israelis were working with the M.E.K., adding that the operations benefitted from American intelligence. He said that the targets were not “Einsteins”; “The goal is to affect Iranian psychology and morale,” he said, and to “demoralize the whole system—nuclear delivery vehicles, nuclear enrichment facilities, power plants.” Attacks have also been carried out on pipelines. He added that the operations are “primarily being done by M.E.K. through liaison with the Israelis, but the United States is now providing the intelligence.” An adviser to the special-operations community told me that the links between the United States and M.E.K. activities inside Iran had been long-standing. “Everything being done inside Iran now is being done with surrogates,” he said.

The sources I spoke to were unable to say whether the people trained in Nevada were now involved in operations in Iran or elsewhere. But they pointed to the general benefit of American support. “The M.E.K. was a total joke,” the senior Pentagon consultant said, “and now it’s a real network inside Iran. How did the M.E.K. get so much more efficient?” he asked rhetorically. “Part of it is the training in Nevada. Part of it is logistical support in Kurdistan, and part of it is inside Iran. M.E.K. now has a capacity for efficient operations than it never had before.”

In mid-January, a few days after an assassination by car bomb of an Iranian nuclear scientist in Tehran, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, at a town-hall meeting of soldiers at Fort Bliss, Texas, acknowledged that the U.S. government has “some ideas as to who might be involved, but we don’t know exactly who was involved.” He added, “But I can tell you one thing: the United States was not involved in that kind of effort. That’s not what the United States does.”

Seymour M. Hersh,

April 7, 2012 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Report: U.S. trained MEK terror group

The New Yorker documents ample material support from the U.S. to MEK: A clear felony if true
When the U.S. wants to fund, train, arm or otherwise align itself with a Terrorist group or state sponsor of Terror — as it often does — it at least usually has the tact to first remove them from its formal terrorist list (as the U.S. did when it wanted to support Saddam in 1982 and work with Libya in 2006), or it just keeps them off the list altogether despite what former Council on Foreign Relations writer Lionel Beehner described as “mounds of evidence that [they] at one time or another abetted terrorists” (as it has done with close U.S. allies in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, along with the El Salvadoran death squads and Nicaraguan contras armed and funded in the 1980s by the Reagan administration). But according to a new, multi-sourced report from The New Yorker‘s Seymour Hersh, the U.S. did not even bother going through those motions when, during the Bush years, it trained the Iranian dissident group Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK) at a secretive Department of Energy site in Nevada:

It was here that the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) conducted training, beginning in 2005, for members of the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, a dissident Iranian opposition group known in the West as the M.E.K. . . . The M.E.K.’s ties with Western intelligence deepened after the fall of the Iraqi regime in 2003, and JSOC began operating inside Iran in an effort to substantiate the Bush Administration’s fears that Iran was building the bomb at one or more secret underground locations. Funds were covertly passed to a number of dissident organizations, for intelligence collection and, ultimately, for anti-regime terrorist activities. Directly, or indirectly, the M.E.K. ended up with resources like arms and intelligence. Some American-supported covert operations continue in Iran today, according to past and present intelligence officials and military consultants.

Despite the growing ties, and a much-intensified lobbying effort organized by its advocates, M.E.K. has remained on the State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations – which meant that secrecy was essential in the Nevada training. ”We did train them here, and washed them through the Energy Department because the D.O.E. owns all this land in southern Nevada,” a former senior American intelligence official told me. “We were deploying them over long distances in the desert and mountains, and building their capacity in communications — coördinating commo is a big deal.”

A JSOC spokesman told Hersh that ”U.S. Special Operations Forces were neither aware of nor involved in the training of M.E.K. members,” but a MEK lawyer refused to confirm or deny the report, arguing that any such training would undercut the U.S. Government’s claims that MEK belongs on the Terrorist list.

In February, NBC News‘ Richard Engel and Robert Windrem reported, based on two anonymous “senior U.S. officials,” that MEK was the group perpetrating a series of “sophisticated” assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists (using bombs and rifles). NBC also reported that Israel — specifically its Mossad intelligence service — is “ financing, training and arming” MEK: in other words, that Israel is a state sponsor of this designated Terrorist group. Various reports have also indicated that the MEK, with Israeli support, was responsible for a string of explosions on Iranian soil. Hersh obtained independent confirmation of all these claims:

The former senior intelligence official I spoke with seconded the NBC report that the Israelis were working with the M.E.K., adding that the operations benefitted from American intelligence. He said that the targets were not “Einsteins”; “The goal is to affect Iranian psychology and morale,” he said, and to “demoralize the whole system — nuclear delivery vehicles, nuclear enrichment facilities, power plants.” Attacks have also been carried out on pipelines. He added that the operations are “primarily being done by M.E.K. through liaison with the Israelis, but the United States is now providing the intelligence.” An adviser to the special-operations community told me that the links between the United States and M.E.K. activities inside Iran had been long-standing. “Everything being done inside Iran now is being done with surrogates,” he said.

So let’s review what we have here. If this report is true, it means the U.S. Government actively trained a group that the U.S. Government itself legally categorizes as a “foreign terrorist organization,” a clear felony under U.S. law:

Whoever knowingly provides material support or resources to a foreign terrorist organization, or attempts or conspires to do so, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 15 years, or both, and, if the death of any person results, shall be imprisoned for any term of years or for life.

That alone compels serious DOJ and Congressional investigations into these claims. Worse, this reportedly happened at the very same time that the U.S. aggressively prosecuted and imprisoned numerous Muslims for providing material support for groups on that list even though many of those prosecuted provided support that was far, far less than what the U.S. Government itself was providing to MEK. Meanwhile, right at this moment, America’s closest ally — Israel — is clearly a state sponsor of this designated Terrorist organization, providing training, funding and arms to it, and the U.S. may very well be as well (independent of all else, given that Israel is the largest recipient of U.S. aid, the U.S., at the very least, is financing a state sponsor of Terror).

At the same time, a glittering bipartisan cast of former Washington officials is receiving large payments from this designated Terrorist group, meeting with its leaders, and then advocating on its behalf — again, providing far more material support than many powerless, marginalized Muslims who have been and continue to be prosecuted under this law. All of this appears to be clearly criminal regardless of whether MEK belongs on the list — once a group is placed by the State Department on the list, whether justifiably or not, it is a felony to provide material support to it — but MEK appears to be doing exactly that which is typically considered Terrorism: assassinating civilian scientists (and severely wounding their wives) with bombs and causing other civilian-killing explosions on Iranian soil in order to induce fear.

In the above-linked LA Times Op-Ed by CFR’s Lionel Beehner, he derides the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism as ”one of the biggest farces of U.S. foreign policy.” Indeed it is, but that’s equally true of the pervasive, righteous use of the term “terrorist” or “terrorism supporter” in our political and media discourse generally. Anyone in government, media and think tank circles who routinely and angrily accuse others of being “terrorists” or “supporters of terrorism” without recognizing that the U.S. and its closest allies are plainly and routinely guilty of that is just a rank propagandist. That the U.S., in the midst of its vaunted War on Terror, directly trained a group on its own Terrorist list — while its closest ally and Washington’s venerated former officials continue to provide ample support to that group even as it escalates its violent acts – is about as conclusive a demonstration of that fact as one could have conjured.

* * * * *
UPDATE: As L.Boogie notes in comments, the law that criminalies the providing of “material support” to a designated terrorist organization explicitly includes in its definition section exactly that which The New Yorker reports the U.S. gave and perhaps continues to give to MEK:

(b) Definitions.— As used in this section—
(1) the term “material support or resources” means any property, tangible or intangible, or service, including currency or monetary instruments or financial securities, financial services, lodging, training, expert advice or assistance . . .
(2) the term “training” means instruction or teaching designed to impart a specific skill, as opposed to general knowledge; and
(3) the term “expert advice or assistance” means advice or assistance derived from scientific, technical or other specialized knowledge.

I know that, in light of recent American history, it’s easy to forget this, but U.S. government officials — whether current or former — are no more entitled to commit felonies and violate U.S. statutes than any other citizens are.

By Glenn Greenwald

April 7, 2012 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Hersh: U.S. Trains and Facilitates MEK Terror Attacks in Iran

When is a terrorist not a terrorist? When he’s OUR terrorist.

This just about knocked my socks off! Sy Hersh, reporting in the New Yorker, one ups Mark Perry and just about everybody else with a story that the Bush administration provided MEK operatives terror training at secret facilities in Nevada starting in 2005:

“We did train them here, and washed them through the Energy Department because the D.O.E. owns all this land in southern Nevada,” a former senior American intelligence official told me. “We were deploying them over long distances in the desert and mountains, and building their capacity in communications

The Iranian dissident agents received the full panoply of spook training offering by U.S. Special Forces operatives:

They got “the standard training,” he said, “in commo [communications], crypto [cryptography], small-unit tactics, and weaponry—that went on for six months…”

The communications training in Nevada involved more than teaching how to keep in contact during attacks—it also involved communication intercepts. The United States…at one point found a way to penetrate some major Iranian communications systems. At the time…the U.S. provided M.E.K. operatives with the ability to intercept telephone calls and text messages inside Iran—which M.E.K. operatives translated and shared with American signals intelligence experts.

The MEK had been designated a foreign terrorist organization by the State Department in 1997. But just when you’re exhaling and saying: phew, at least it was only in the Bush era, Hersh informs you that though the training ended before Obama took office, the MEK terror activities using U.S. supplied arms and logistical support continue inside Iran to this day:

Some American-supported covert operations continue in Iran today, according to past and present intelligence officials and military consultants.

This means of course that certainly George Bush, and implicitly Barack Obama couldn’t give a crap about the terror designation, which makes it an empty exercise and a laughingstock. So the U.S. kills Osama bin Laden in cold blood as an Islamist terrorist while we maintain our own set of Muslim terrorists inside Iran doing our bidding there. If this isn’t the rankest hypocrisy, I don’t know what is.

The next time you hear Tom Ridge, Howard Dean, Rudy Giuliani or Alan Dershowitz spout the lies of Maryam Rajavi that the MEK long ago renounced terrorism remember Sy Hersh’s story. This also reinforces the total sleaziness of these leading American political figures taking wads of cash from Iranian dissident terrorists blowing up Iranians on Iranian soil. I can understand that this would actually please Dershowitz, but the others? Perhaps they have a tad more moral conscience and common sense?

Iran leading U.S. lawyer argues bizarrely that while the MEK has reounced terror, if the U.S. HAD trained the group that this gave it an official heksher, meaning that it should no longer be on the terror list since it was doing the bidding of the American government. This argument turns the MEK into the equivalent of our Hmong tribesmen during the Vietnam war or the Bay of Pigs anti-Castro forces waging war to topple Fidel. In other words, they may be terrorists but they’re OUR terrorists.

This rounds out reports offered by a confidential Israeli source to me that the Mossad has been running MEK agents inside Iran as well who bombed a missile base and assassinated five nuclear scientists. Hersh now adds to this that the U.S. is providing critical intelligence information that aids in these attacks.

Though Hersh doesn’t say so explicitly, he exposes Leon Panetta as a bald-face liar in this passage:

In mid-January, a few days after an assassination by car bomb of an Iranian nuclear scientist in Tehran, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, at a town-hall meeting of soldiers at Fort Bliss, Texas, acknowledged that the U.S. government has “some ideas as to who might be involved, but we don’t know exactly who was involved.” He added, “But I can tell you one thing: the United States was not involved in that kind of effort. That’s not what the United States does.”

Let’s be very explicit: the U.S. is waging a war of terror against Iran. It is a war little different from the war Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda waged against us. The only difference is that we’re pissed about their alleged nuclear program and Al Qaeda was pissed at our alleged offenses against Islam. In perpetrating these acts of terror against Iran we are a terrorist nation. Plain and simple. Whether or not you believe that an Iranian bomb is a danger to humanity, there is no justification to engage in terror.

The next time Obama trumpets a captured Iranian terrorist attempting to attack a U.S. target the world should laugh in his face. He’s little more than a friggin’ hypocrite.

April 7, 2012 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Hersh: US facilitates MEK terror in Iran

American Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymore Hersh, reporting in the New Hersh: US facilitates MEK terror in Iran Yorker, says that the Bush administration provided MEK operatives terror training at secret facilities in Nevada starting in 2005.

“We did train them here, and washed them through the Energy Department because the D.O.E. owns all this land in southern Nevada,” a former senior American intelligence official told me. “We were deploying them over long distances in the desert and mountains, and building their capacity in communications.”

The Iranian dissident agents received the full panoply of spook training offering by U.S. Special Forces operatives:

They got “the standard training,” he said, “in commo [communications], crypto [cryptography], small-unit tactics, and weaponry—that went on for six months…”

The communications training in Nevada involved more than teaching how to keep in contact during attacks—it also involved communication intercepts. The United States…at one point found a way to penetrate some major Iranian communications systems. At the time…the U.S. provided M.E.K. operatives with the ability to intercept telephone calls and text messages inside Iran—which M.E.K. operatives translated and shared with American signals intelligence experts.

The MEK had been designated a foreign terrorist organization by the State Department in 1997. Hersh writes that though the training ended before Obama took office, the MEK terror activities using U.S. supplied arms and logistical support continue inside Iran to this day.

“Some American-supported covert operations continue in Iran today, according to past and present intelligence officials and military consultants.”

This means of course that certainly George Bush, and implicitly Barack Obama were not concerned about the terror designation, which makes it an empty exercise and a laughingstock.

April 7, 2012 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Investigative reporter Hersh details U.S. training of MEK terrorists

Although the dissident Iranian group known as the Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK) has been listed as a foreign terrorist organization by the State Department since 1997, there have been Investigative reporter Hersh details U.S. training of MEK terrorists long-standing rumors that it was also being used by the United States as part of its efforts to destabilize the Iranian government.

Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh has been following these allegations for years. Only now, however, does he appear to have pieced the whole story together — or perhaps the subject has taken on fresh urgency as the result of a vigorous lobbying effort, which spans both political parties, to have MEK taken off the list of terrorist organizations and given open support.

Last August, for example, Christina Wilkie reported at the Huffington Post on a high level pro-MEK presentation:

“Onstage next to former FBI director Louis Freeh,” she wrote, “sat Ed Rendell, the former Democratic governor of Pennsylvania and current MSNBC talking head; former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean; former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Hugh Shelton. … In addition to those named above, the commissioned figureheads include Obama’s recently-departed National Security Adviser Gen. James Jones; former Bush Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge; onetime State Department Counselor Philip Zelikow and former CIA directors Porter Goss and James R. Woolsey.”

Another presentation this past winter included Dean, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, and Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein.

Wilkie’s article raised questions about the lavish funding of these pro-MEK events, and just last month the Treasury Department launched an investigation of that funding, with subpoenas being issued to speaking agencies representing Rendell, Ridge, Freeh, and Shelton.

“The investigation, being conducted by the Treasury Department, is focused on whether the former officials may have received funding, directly or indirectly, from the People’s Mujahedin of Iran, or MEK, thereby violating longstanding federal law barring financial dealings with terrorist groups,” investigative correspondent Michael Isikoff explained. “The sources, all of whom spoke on condition of anonymity, said that speaking fees given to the former officials total hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

“The investigation comes at a time of intense internal debate about the MEK,” Isikoff continued, “in part spurred by assertions it could prove a useful ally in pressuring the Iranian government to suspend its nuclear program. NBC News reported recently that MEK operatives, trained by the Israeli Mossad, are believed by some U.S. intelligence officials to have been involved in the assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists — a report that the group has denied as ‘absolutely false.’”

In the context of this ongoing controversy, Hersh’s article in the current issue of The New Yorker appears intended as a reminder of some of the more questionable aspects of past U.S. relations with the MEK. He begins by describing the former nuclear test site in a desolate region of Nevada where the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) began secretly training MEK members in 2005.

“We did train them here, and washed them through the Energy Department because the D.O.E. owns all this land in southern Nevada,” a former senior American intelligence official told Hersh. “We were deploying them over long distances in the desert and mountains, and building their capacity in communications.”

Hersh was apparently aware of this training as early as 2008, when he told NPR’s Terri Gross, “We’re funding a group that is on U.S. terrorist list to work against the Iranian government. They’ve been on the border for years. The enemy of my enemy is my friend (even if they’re on our terrorist watch list). This group has had covert training in America (in Nevada).”

More than two years earlier, Raw Story investigative reporter Larisa Alexandrovna had exposed the same connections, writing in April 2006, “The Pentagon is bypassing official US intelligence channels and turning to a dangerous and unruly cast of characters in order to create strife in Iran in preparation for any possible attack, former and current intelligence officials say. One of the operational assets being used by the Defense Department is a right-wing terrorist organization known as Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK), which is being ‘run’ in two southern regional areas of Iran.”

According to Hersh’s sources, the MEK training continued at least to 2007 but had ended before the start of the Obama administration. A retired four-star general told Hersh that “the men doing the training were from JSOC, which, by 2005, had become a major instrument in the Bush Administration’s global war on terror.

“The JSOC trainers were not front-line guys who had been in the field,” the general stated, “but second- and third-tier guys—trainers and the like—and they started going off the reservation. ‘If we’re going to teach you tactics, let me show you some really sexy stuff…’ I told one of the guys who called me that they were all in over their heads, and all of them could end up trouble unless they got something in writing. The Iranians are very, very good at counterintelligence, and stuff like this is just too hard to contain.”

“The M.E.K. was a total joke,” a senior Pentagon consultant told Hersh, “and now it’s a real network inside Iran. How did the M.E.K. get so much more efficient? Part of it is the training in Nevada. Part of it is logistical support in Kurdistan, and part of it is inside Iran. M.E.K. now has a capacity for efficient operations that it never had before.”

By Muriel Kane

April 7, 2012 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

War on the MKO or war of the MKO

When the US President first spoke of the "war on terror", the world might barely think of a day when American politicians openly support a terrorist designated group , the Mojahedin khalq War on the MKO or war of the MKO Organization. Seemingly the war on terror has turned into the war of terror. The world can also expect the day US Congress will be lobbied by Al-Qaida supporters to delist their notorious cult as what the MKO is doing today. “It’s extraordinary that so many distinguished public servants would shill for a group that has American blood on its hands, “according to a US official who was shocked by his colleagues’ dual approach towards terrorism.[1]

The facts on terrorist substance of the Mujahedin Khalq Organization are “indisputable” for the US State Department, according to Reza Marashi, director of research at the National Iranian American Council and a former Iran desk officer at the US State Department. ”the requisite evidence to legally maintain the MEK’s terrorist designation is ample and indisputable,”He writes.[2]

But the juicy story here is that an indisputably designated terrorist group is sponsored by Israel and a heavy bunch of former US politicians. The MKO runs ads on American TV channels and newspapers.[3] The ads imperatively call on Secretary Clinton to delist the group. Deadly attacks on Iranian nuclear scientists were carried out by the MKO which is armed, trained and funded by Israeli Mossad, US officials told NBC News.[4]

For the US former officials who advocate the MKO’s cause in the Capital Hill, the case seems to be the matter of money. Some of these former top government officials, who have publicly advocated delisting of the group, have received federal subpoenas from the Treasury Department. The investigation is focused on figuring out where the speaking fees the MKO rally panelist – including conferences in European Capitals- received come from.[5]

Ed Rendell, former Pennsylvania governor and ex-chairman of the democratic National Committee, who was the first person to receive subpoena and has received $160,000 over the past year from the MKO – or allegedly from its exiled sympathizers-claims that the fees came from wealthy American and foreign supporters of the MKO not the group itself but NBC News offers one clue for the source of the money. A small Pennsylvania based speakers firm called Speakers Access wrote an email in September inviting a Washington based national Security Expert to speak at a conference in Geneva, Switzerland "on behalf of our client ,National Council of Resistance of Iran, Foreign Affairs Committee”, according to Michael Isikof, National investigative correspondent of the AFP.[6]

Isikof continues ,”the email was later turned over to the FBI and other US officials. The Speakers Access executive who wrote the email, who asked not to be identified ,said the email was a “mistake “ and that the client was actually another organization–“the committee for Human Rights in Iran”, which is not on the terror list but which has the same contact in Paris as the National Council of Resistance of Iran.[7]

It is obvious that the money come from the MKO — under different cover names. The legendary wealth of the group will not end soon. But as Clare Malone of The Prospect writes,” more disturbing is the fact that the MEK is basically a cult. In a 2009 report on the group, the Rand Corporation characterizes the MEK’s practices as ‘cultic’ and their recruitment tactics as ‘deceptive “. She also quotes from Elizabeth Rubin as a journalist who spent an extended amount of time in Camp Ashraf that Friendships and all emotional relationships are forbidden in the MKO. [8]

As a matter of fact, the case of the MKO designation in US FTO list sounds complicated but one thing is clear: The MKO’s Cult-like nature is today as destructive as its capacity for terrorism. "The group — which was once allied with Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, is also viewed warily because of the slavish devotion of its followers to its Paris based leader, Maryam Rajavi,” states Isikoff.[9]

As it was reported in the media, a few weeks ago US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton told that a decision on the MKO’s terrorist designation is pending in part to see if the group peacefully relocates to the new Temporary Transit Location near Baghdad. It’s definitely a weird criterion to define a group’s status as a foreign terrorist organization.” simply put, it is unacceptable to delist a designated FTO in return for them agreeing to relocate” Reza Marashi asserts, ”so as long as the MEK’s organizational structure remains in place, it legally remains a terrorist organization – regardless of where its base is located.”[10]

The case especially for the leaders of the MKO got more complicated when on March 27, 2012 Reuters reported that the Obama administration on Monday urged a US appeals court not to interfere with its review and decision making process over whether to remove the group from US terror list.[11]

According to Reuters, the States Department urged the court to stay out of the matter, saying it was continuing to evaluate the matter, consulting with the intelligence and other government agencies and that it had met with representatives of the Mujahedin-e Khalq .[12]

By the way, the MKO found it easy to buy its legitimacy in the US. As it goes for the MKO,” money talks” to US politicians.

Pro-MKO newspaper and TV ads are the evidence of this true fact. In the United States of America – land of Double Standards – nothing is impossible. You may see other terrorist groups including Al Qaida spending millions of dollars on lobbying to get delisted. For so0me of US former officials Law enforcement seems to be kind of joke.

By Mazda Parsi

References:
[1]Isikof, Michael, Ex-US officials investigated over speeches to Iranian dissident group on terror list, AFP, March 17, 2012
[2]Marashi, Reza, Money vs. Facts: Mujahedin-e Khalq Is a Terrorist Organization, Huffingtonpost, March 15 2012
[3]Malone, Clare, What’s Up with All the MEK Ads?, The Prospect, March 9,2012
[4] Engel, Richard& Windrem, Robert, Israel teams with terror group to kill Iran’s nuclear scientists, US officials tell NBC News, MSNBS, February 9, 2012
[5] Isikof, Michael, Ex-US officials investigated over speeches to Iranian dissident group on terror list, AFP, March 17, 2012
[6] ibid
[7] ibid
[8] Malone, Clare, What’s Up with All the MEK Ads?, The Prospect, March 9,2012
[9] Isikof, Michael, Ex-US officials investigated over speeches to Iranian dissident group on terror list, AFP, March 17, 2012
[10] Marashi, Reza, Money vs. Facts: Mujahedin-e Khalq Is a Terrorist Organization, Huffingtonpost, March 15 2012
[11]Reuters, U.S. urges court to stay out of decision on Iranian group, March 26, 2012
[12] ibid

April 5, 2012 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

MEK: The Gift That Keeps On Corrupting

Glenn Greenwald published another scathing exposé of the Mujahideen e-Khalq (MEK) and their persistent corrupting influence on American politicians of all stripes. The State Department is now in the process of determining whether the MEK should be removed from the list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations, a designation that was given to the MEK 17 years ago, when the department first began such designations. In the 1970s, the MEK assassinated three U.S. military officers and three American contractors, all working with Iranian government ministries during the period of the Shah. A former Justice Department official, Jeremiah Goulka, has done the most comprehensive study of the group on behalf of the U.S. Army, which sent him to Iraq following the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, to assess the organization and recommend what to do with them.

According to two op-ed pieces by Goulka, appended to the Greenwald account, the MEK is swimming in cash, and pays prominent American politicians of all stripes an average of $30,000 per lecture to tout the MEK cause and press for its removal from the State Department list. According to Goulka, the group, like the Iraqi National Congress of Ahmed Chalabi, seeks nothing less than to be installed by the United States as the next post-Islamic Republic government of Iran. To pursue that agenda, the MEK desperately is seeking to be taken off the FTO list. Greenwald and Goulka are pressing hard to stop that from happening.

In his introduction to the two Goulka pieces, Greenwald chastised Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for claiming that there are negotiations to relocate the MEK to another camp inside Iraq, and that their cooperation in this effort could influence the decision on their terror list status. The State Department is being sued by backers of the MEK in Federal Court, to force a firm deadline of 30 days on the State Department’s determination of the MEK’s status.

Goulka publicized a long list of prominent American has-beens who are on the MEK dole. He noted that many of them are also in the private security business, and they stand to make a windfall profit if Iran is "liberated" and in desperate need of security assistance. Among those he highlighted: Tom Ridge, Francis Fragos Townsend, Rudolph Giuliani, Louis Freeh, and Hugh Shelton. Other MEK boosters-for-hire are in law firms that do work with homeland security and military contractors. These include Howard Dean, Ed Rendell, and John Bolton.

April 4, 2012 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Money trail leading from the Israeli Lobby & MEK to key US figures

Mark Dankof and Mark Glenn discuss the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (MEK), its cultic character, its blood-stained history since the 1960’s, its present relationship to Israeli intelligence, its current trail of violent crimes in Iran, and the sordid money trail leading from the Israeli Lobby and the MEK to key figures in the American political establishment seeking to have the MEK delisted from the State Department list of terrorist organizations.

Mujahedin e Khalq–designated a dangerous terrorist organization by the US government AND YET, in violation of US law, politically-powerful and well-connected individuals from Rudy Giuliani to Howard Dean to Tom Ridge are being paid tens of thousands of dollars each to advocate on behalf of this organization.

What’s the ‘real deal’ here?

Simple, as always, when it comes to American foreign policy decisions–

ISRAEL.

Unable to have her agents and assassins move about the world freely as she has in times past, Israel now plans to use this dangerous terrorist group in doing her dirty work for her, including carrying out acts of terrorism on American soil to further the cause of war against Iran, if indeed this has not already been the case viz a viz the mouch-touted assassination plot against the Saudi Ambassador and the killing of the Iranian medical student in Houston, Texas recently

We are joined once again by the one and only Mark Dankof to discuss this very important topic.

Link to the Audio File

The Ugly Truth

April 4, 2012 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Giuliani openly promotes terrorism

Rudolph “Rudy” Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City during the time surrounding the tragic events of September 11, 2001, is now coming out in support of terrorism.

As absurd as it sounds, it is unfortunately true. He has voiced support for the terrorist group known as Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), even going as far as to claim that supporting terrorism is the only thing that can stop the Iranian nuclear program.

Keep in mind; this is the same group which, according to anonymous U.S. officials, is working with the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad to carry out terrorist attacks and assassinations in Iran.
Giuliani openly promotes terrorism as a way to stop Iranian nuclear program
According to the International Business Times, Giuliani made these disturbing statements at a press conference earlier this week in Paris, France.

He spoke with former U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey, the former chief of Homeland Security Tom Ridge, the former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, and former Representative for Rhode Island Patrick Kennedy.

It is impossible to deny at this point that this terrorist group has some very powerful allies in Washington.

“I have a feeling that the only thing that will stop [Ayatollah Ali Khamenei] and the only thing that will stop [President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad is if they see strength, if they see power, if they see determination, if they see an America that is willing to support the people that want to overthrow the regime of Iran,” Giuliani said.

The MEK is still officially listed as a foreign terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department, which makes one wonder how anyone except these Washington players would be treated if they openly expressed support for an organization like al Qaeda, al Shabaab or the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

Something tells me that if you were not in such a position of power, you very well might be targeted as a supposed supporter of terrorism.

Seeing as providing “material support or resources” to any organization on the State Department’s list is actually a crime, one must wonder how these people supporting and promoting the MEK are not held accountable for their actions.

Indeed, three former senior U.S. officials are currently under investigation for accepting speaking fees from the MEK.

These individuals include Ed Rendell who is the former Governor of Pennsylvania, former mayor of Philadelphia, former Chairman of the Democratic National Committee and former Chairman of the National Governors Association; former Director of the FBI Louis Freeh and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, retired General Hugh Shelton.

However, these are not the only political figures who have been paid to speak by the MEK. Indeed, others include former Vermont Governor and Democratic National Chairman Howard Dean, retired General Wesley Clark, Chief of Staff for the Bush White House Andy Card, former Governor of New Mexico Bill Richardson and former Representative Lee Hamilton, who incidentally was the co-chairman of the 9/11 Commission.

How these individuals who claim to be opposed to terrorism and so often point to the tragic events of September 11, 2001 as justification for the erosion of our freedoms can turn around and openly support a designated terrorist organization is beyond comprehension.

Giuliani was invited to the conference in Paris by the French Committee for a Democratic Iran. It is unclear if he was paid and if so, how much he actually received, but Giuliani charges up to $100,000 for every speaking engagement so one must assume it didn’t come cheap.

The United States Treasury Department alleges that groups like the French Committee for a Democratic Iran actually act as a front, allowing for funds to be funneled to speakers by the MEK without having any direct ties.

“This is an utter lie and there is not even a scintilla of truth to it,” MEK spokesman Hossein Abedini said in a statement which was prepared to respond to the allegations.

“The MEK, as the legitimate opposition to the clerical regime, enjoys international recognition in Europe and the U.S. The objective of this failed propaganda is to weaken the widespread public support of the members of Congress, officials and scores of U.S. generals for … revoking of the illegitimate and unjust terror listing of the MEK,” he added.

The MEK has a long and ugly history of terrorist activities, although they claim to have stopped such actions.

However, the MEK is widely regarded as having assisted Saddam Hussein in crushing the uprisings in southern Iraq in 1991 and even participated in or helped with the massacre of Iraqi Kurds.

Suffice it to say, it is nothing short of disturbing to see anyone, especially these high-powered former officials, openly supporting terrorism and the murder of innocent people.

The fact that every single person involved with the MEK is not being investigated and arrested shows just how little our government actually cares about fighting terrorism. In reality, the “War on Terror” is just a flimsy pretext to engage in neo-colonialist adventurism abroad while robbing us blind and stripping us of our rights here at home.

by Madison Ruppert

April 4, 2012 0 comments

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