The Third View on Mujahedin Khalq

The Disgraceful Pro-MEK Campaign Continues

Ken Maginnis wants Western governments to jump on the bizarre pro-MEK bandwagon to which he belongs:

In adapting policy to meet the increasing threats from Iran and the increasingly obvious vulnerability of the ruling religious establishment, the West should be seeking to develop proper relationships with those identifiable moderate influences who courageously pursue freedom and democracy. Mayram Rajavi, the president of one of those rare moderate groups, the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), has consistently offered a voice of moderate and informed opinion. Yet the West stubbornly cuddles up to Rouhani while treating NCRI with something akin to disdain.

Maginnis’ post is a good example of the egregious misuse of the word “moderate” in U.S. foreign policy debates about the Near East. He urges the U.S. and other Western governments to cultivate closer ties with the NCRI, which is the political umbrella group that includes the Mujahideen-e Khalq totalitarian cult. He repeatedly dubs Rajavi and the NCRI as “moderate” when they are nothing of the kind. This is a reminder that “moderate” is often the preferred word to describe groups that sane people would abhor but which are deemed useful in an effort to destabilize a foreign government.

The MEK is neither moderate nor democratic, and it seeks only its the aggrandizement of its leaders. The group is understandably distrusted and loathed by most Iranians for its past record of hostilities against Iran, and it doesn’t speak for any of the legitimate opposition to Iran’s regime. Anyone advocating for Western support of this organization and its allies is not helping anyone inside Iran. All that MEK boosterim does is to try to whitewash a monstrous group that has killed both Americans and Iranians. Maginnis is just one of many current and former Western politicians and officials to be recruited into the disgraceful campaign to legitimize this monstrous group. This campaign relies on deceiving Western audiences into thinking that the MEK and its friends are something that they are not, and if Western governments are to avoid pursuing another disastrous policy of regime change they can’t be allowed to succeed.

By Daniel Larison

February 22, 2015 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Bin Laden and Bibi, Together At Last, Israel’s alliance with al-Qaeda

Remember the brouhaha a few months ago when it was revealed that fighters of the Nusra Front, the al Qaeda

affiliate in Syria, had seized territory adjacent to Israel? The “let’s intervene in Syria” crowd was up in arms: this supposedly proved the absolute necessity of going full-bore into the region, with US bombing raids and unrestrained support for “moderate” jihadists out to overthrow Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad. After all, we can’t leave our loyal ally, Israel, at the mercy of Osama bin Laden’s heirs, can we?

As it turns out, however, Nusra has left the Israelis alone – and, indeed, it looks like there is a de facto alliance between bin Laden’s boys and Bibi’s bombardiers. As the Wall Street Journal reports:

“Nusra Front, however, hasn’t bothered Israel since seizing the border area last summer – and some of its severely wounded fighters are regularly taken across the frontier fence to receive treatment in Israeli hospitals.”

We are told by the Israelis that they don’t check the identities of these injured fighters: “We don’t ask who they are, we don’t do any screening… Once the treatment is done, we take them back to the border and they go on their way,” says one Israeli military official. This from a country one can’t enter from the United States without an extensive interrogation at the airport.

Like most reporting on Israel, this story is chock full of hasbara, with the disturbing news of terrorist fighters treated in Israeli hospitals leavened with a touching tale of a young Syrian boy given a prosthetic arm due to the beneficence of his Israeli hosts. Yet this is overlaid with some darker overtones. While reporter Yaroslav Trofimov is careful to note “it would be a stretch to say that the U.S. and Israel are backing different sides in this war,” he goes on to write:

“But there is clearly a growing divergence in US and Israeli approaches over who represents the biggest danger – and who should be seen, if not as an ally, at least as a lesser evil in the regional crisis sparked by the dual implosion of Syria and Iraq.”

Indeed, Trofimov’s reportage refutes his careful qualifications. He points out that, while leaving Nusra alone – its encampments are “yards” away from a border that is a frequent site of tours by Israeli schoolchildren – the Israelis have begun attacking Assad’s troops and their Hezbollah allies. He also cites Amos Yadlin, former chief of Israeli military intelligence and a likely defense minister if Bibi should lose the election, who avers:

“There is no doubt that Hezbollah and Iran are the major threat to Israel, much more than the radical Sunni Islamists, who are also an enemy. Those Sunni elements who control some two-thirds to 90% of the border on the Golan aren’t attacking Israel. This gives you some basis to think that they understand who is their real enemy – maybe it isn’t Israel.”

This has always been the Israeli perspective, no matter who sits in the Prime Minister’s office. In a 2003 meeting with then undersecretary of state John Bolton, Ariel Sharon made a point of saying that, while the US should indeed attack Iraq, “Israel was concerned about the security threat posed by Iran, and stressed that it was important to deal with Iran even while American attention was focused on Iraq.” Israel is clearly taking a side in the religious civil war wracking the Muslim world: while the Saudis and the Gulf sheikdoms supply weapons and money to Sunni jihadists fighting for control of the Levant – including not only Nusra but also ISIS – the Israelis are bombing Assad and sending injured jihadists back onto the battlefield.

None of this is very surprising. Israel has never hesitated to ally with the worst elements on earth in order to advance what its leaders regard as the Jewish state’s interests. From South Africa’s apartheid regime to the death squads of Central and South America, to the Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK) – an Iranian exile group of Marxist terrorists – Israel has always given a helping hand to whoever merits it according to their amoral calculus. And as Israeli and American interests began to radically diverge – a process that has been ongoing since the demise of the Soviet Union – it makes perfect sense that they should align with our worst enemies.

The conventional wisdom that the 9/11 attacks showed there’s no daylight between the US and Israel – “We’re all Israelis now!” exulted the Israel Firsters before the smoke cleared over Manhattan – was quite wrong. Netanyahu told an audience at Bar Ilan University “We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq.” Al-Qaeda’s act, he averred, had “swung American public opinion in our favor.”

Yet American opinion has always been pro-Israel, with very little sympathy for the Palestinians: what Bibi meant was that the Israeli strategic perspective – constantly pushing for the US to fight its wars – was more popular as the Bush administration began its rampage across the Middle East.

However, this war fever was necessarily of limited duration: once the madness had worn off, and the backlash against the post-9/11 hysteria began to roll in, the US public turned against the War Party. That’s when the long range impact of the “war on terrorism” on the “special relationship” between Washington and Tel Aviv began to be felt.

It didn’t take long for the “We’re all Israelis now” propaganda to wear thin in Washington. For in order to defeat radical Islamism it was necessary for the US to split the jihadist base from the leadership and dry up the pool of recruits that were flocking to bin Laden’s banner. Far from drawing away from the Muslim world, it was more than ever important for Washington to court it – and to eventually take advantage of the Sunni-Shi’ite split in favor of the latter.

We are seeing this today in the war against ISIS, with Iranian-led Iraqi Shi’ite troops on the ground getting air support from the US – and the Israelis helping the other side, albeit as discreetly as possible, along with their de facto Saudi and Gulf state allies. The open propaganda war now being waged by the Israelis against their supposed American allies is increasingly taking on a military aspect in the battle for the Levant.

The Obama administration is determined to forge a deal with the Iranians for the simple reason that it cannot defeat the jihadists without occupying not only Iraq but also Syria and parts of Lebanon – a political, economic, and military impossibility. The Israelis, who see Iran as their principal – indeed, only – rival for regional hegemony are equally determined that this must not come to pass. The “special relationship,” which has been strained ever since the latter part of George W. Bush’s second term, has now reached the breaking point. And this is going to be true no mater who sits in the Oval Office.

Bibi is now playing the only card he has left: the well-funded and politically entrenched Israel lobby, which could formerly make or break politicians. Yet the power of this lobby has necessarily diminished over the years as the geopolitical realities of the post-9/11 era set in.

On the intellectual front, the publication of The Israel Lobby, by leading foreign policy “realists” John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, set the tone for what was to come. In exposing the key role played by Israel’s fifth column in distorting the making of American foreign policy – and dragging us into the disastrous Iraq war – the book broke the lobby’s monopoly on elite opinion and set the stage for its subsequent political defeats. The lobby’s attempt to quash the nomination of Chuck Hagel was not only defeated, but the sheer nastiness of the smear campaign aimed at him discredited the Israel Firsters among key opinion-makers and in Democratic party circles.

The final straw was Sen. Tom Cotton’s “open letter” to Iran’s leaders – which was really a letter to the American people, telling them that in any conflict between Washington and Tel Aviv GOP hard-liners would side with the latter. The backlash against this open attempt to sabotage American diplomacy in the interests of a foreign power provoked outraged cries of “treason” and calls for the 47 Senators to be charged under the Logan Act. While Cotton’s letter hardly falls under the restrictions imposed by the Logan Act – and the call itself is a dangerous not to mention stupid invocation of the growing authoritarian impulse in American politics – this kind of reaction is telling. It shows that the American people are waking up to the inordinate – and inappropriate – influence wielded by the Israeli government on our domestic political scene, and that Bibi’s playing of this particular card no longer trumps the President’s hand.

And that’s a cause for optimism. For the Israel lobby and the War Party are, in many instances, virtually identical. Diminish the power of the former, and you have clogged the engine of the latter. Which is not to say the machinery that churns out endless war propaganda has been silenced – far from it – but it is getting more difficult to start it, and, once started, it tends to stall.

Justin Raimondo,

February 17, 2015 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

The Nisman Murder and the AMIA Terror Bombing: A Tangled Thread

The evidence already available about Argentine Prosecutor Alberto Nisman’s death from a gunshot to the head creates a strong presumption that he was murdered. He was about to present publicly his accusation that President Christina Fernández de Kirchner and her foreign minister, Héctor Timerman conspired to absolve Iran of the 1994 AMIA bombing and lift the Interpol red notices on the accused Iranians.

And it was Nisman’s 2006 request for the arrest of six former senior Iranian officials for the bombing that prompted his push for those red notices. In the context of Argentine political culture, with its long experience of impunity for crimes committed by the powerful, the circumstances of his death have led to a general conviction that the government must have been behind his murder.

But there is good reason to be cautious about that assumption. Nisman’s case against Kirchner was problematic. The central accusation in his affidavit, made 96 times, according to press accounts, was that Kirchner and Timerman had sought to revoke the Interpol arrest warrants against the former Iranian officials. But Ronald K. Noble, the secretary general of Interpol for fifteen years until last November, denied Nisman’s accusation. Noble declared, “I can say with 100 percent certainty, not a scintilla of doubt, that Foreign Minister Timerman and the Argentine government have been steadfast, persistent and unwavering that the Interpol’s red notices be issued, remain in effect and not be suspend or removed.”

Noble’s denial raises an obvious question: Why would the Kirchner government, knowing that Nisman’s main claim could be easily refuted, have any reason to kill him on the eve of the presentation of his case? Why give those seeking to discredit the government’s policy on the AMIA bombing the opportunity to shift the issue from the facts of the case to the presumption of officially sponsored assassination?

The Kirchner-Timerman negotiation of an agreement with Iran in January 2013 for an “international truth commission” on the AMIA bombing that would have sent five respected international judicial figures to Iran to question the accused Iranians. That was a way of getting around the Iranian refusal to subject former high-ranking officials to Argentine justice. But Nisman was trying to prove that was an illicit cover-up for a cynical deal with Iran. He considered it “a betrayal of the country and his work”, according to his friend, Gustavo Perednik.

Nisman’s “criminal complaint” against Kirchner and Timerman claimed the government’s negotiations with Iran involved a “sophisticated criminal plan” to make a deal with one of the Iranians the prosecutor accused of the AMIA bombing, former cultural attaché Mohsen Rabbani. It asserted that Argentina promised Iran that it would lift the Interpol notices on the six Iranian in exchange for an “oil for grains” deal.

Nisman’s accusation was based on snippets of transcripts from 5,000 hours of wiretaps of conversations of allies of Kirchner government that have now been made public by a judge. One of the excerpts quotes Rabbani himself, in a conversation with an ally of Fernandez, as saying:

Iran was Argentina’s main buyer and now it’s buying almost nothing. That could change. Here [in Iran] there are some sectors of the government who’ve told me they are willing to sell oil to Argentina … and also to buy weapons.

The statement proves nothing, however, except that that Rabbani knew some Iranian officials who were interested in oil sales to Argentina. No evidence of Rabbani being involved in negotiating on behalf of Iran is suggested in the Nisman document, and the person at the other end of the line was not an Argentine official. So the conversation did not involve anyone who even had direct knowledge of the actual negotiations between the governments of Iran and Argentina.

The same thing applies to the other individuals who have been identified as speaking on the wiretaps in favour of such a deal. Those individuals are friendly with officials of the Kirchner government and friendly with Iran, but the actual negotiations were carried out by senior officials of the foreign ministries of Iran and Argentina, not by private individuals. The distinction between knowledge and hearsay is a fundamental principle in judicial processes for a very good reason.

The presentation of facts or allegations as proof of guilt, even though they proved nothing of the sort, was also a pattern that permeated Nisman’s 2006 “Request for Arrests” in the 1994 AMIA bombing. Contrary to the general reverence in the news media for his indictment of senior Iranian officials for their alleged responsibility for the bombing, his case was built on a massive accumulation of highly dubious and misleading claims, from the “irrefutable evidence” of Rabbani’s participation in planning to the identification of the alleged suicide car bomber. This writer’s investigation of the case over several months, which included interviews with US diplomats who had served in the Embassy in Buenos Aires in the years following the AMIA bombing as well as with the FBI official detailed to work on the case in 1996-97, concluded that the Argentine investigators never found any evidence of Iranian involvement.

Nisman asserted that the highest Iranian officials had decided to carry out the bombing at a meeting on 12 or 14 August, 1993, primarily on the testimony of four officials of the Mujahedeen E-Khalq (MEK), the Iranian exile terrorist group that was openly dedicated to the overthrow of the Iranian regime. The four MEK officials claimed to know the precise place, date and time and the three-point agenda of the meeting.

When US Ambassador, Anthony Wayne, meeting with Nisman in November 2006, asked him about Argentine press reports that had criticised the document for using the testimony of “unreliable witnesses,” Nisman responded, according to the Embassy reporting cable, that “several of the witnesses were “former senior Iraqi [sic] officials, e.g. Bani Sadr, with direct knowledge of events surrounding the conception of the attacks.”

Nisman’s suggestion that former Iranian president Abolhassen Banisadr had “direct knowledge” related to the AMIA bombings was a stunningly brazen falsehood. Banisadr had been impeached by the Iranian legislature in June 1981 and had fled to Paris the following month – thirteen years before the bombing.

Nisman also cited the testimony of Abolghassem Mesbahi, who called himself a “defector” from the Iranian intelligence service, that Iranian officials had made such a decision sometime in August 1993. But Mesbahi was known by US intelligence analysts as a “serial fabricator”, who had also told an obviously false story about Iranian involvement in the 9/11 attacks. Nisman failed to mention, moreover, that Mesbahi had given a secret 100-page deposition to Argentine investigators in 2000 in Mexico in which he had claimed the planning for the attack had begun in 1992.

Nisman’s was so convinced of Iran’s guilt that he was ready to see almost any fact as supporting evidence, even when there was an obvious reason for doubting its relevance. For example, he cited Rabbani’s shopping for a van “similar to the one that exploded in front of the AMIA building a few months later.” In fact, however, as I reported in 2008, the Argentine investigation files include the original intelligence report on the surveillance of Rabbani showing that Rabbani’s visit to the car dealer was not “a few months” before the bombing, but a full fifteen months earlier.

Despite the Argentine intelligence following Rabbani’s every move and tapping his telephones for all those months, Nisman cites nothing indicating that Rabbani did anything indicating his involvement in preparations for a terror bombing. The FBI official who assisted the investigation told me in a November 2007 interview that the use of phone metadata to suggest that Rabbani was in touch with an “operational group” nothing but “speculation”, and said that neither he nor officials in Washington had taken it seriously as evidence or Rabbani’s involvement.

The fact that Nisman’s two indictments related to Iran and AMIA were extremely tendentious obviously does not dispose of the question of who killed him. But whatever the reason for his being killed, it wasn’t because he had revealed irrefutable truths about AMIA and Argentine government policy.

Gareth Porter, an investigative historian and journalist specializing in U.S. national security policy, received the UK-based Gellhorn Prize for journalism for 2011 for articles on the U.S. war in Afghanistan. His new book is Manufactured Crisis: the Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare. He can be contacted at porter.gareth50@gmail.com.

The Middle East Eye by Gareth Porter,

February 8, 2015 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq Organization's Propaganda System

The Iranian Mojahedin-e Khalq and Its Media Strategy

The Iranian Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK) and Its Media Strategy: Methods of Information Manufacture

In his book Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare (Porter, 2014b), American journalist Gareth Porter identifies the role played by the Iranian Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK) organization in Israel’s decade-long attempts to prevent a negotiated settlement between Iran and the P5+1 (the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Russia, China, and Germany), on the former’s nuclear program. When the negotiations hit a difficult phase in Vienna in May 2014, Porter suggested in an article for Al Jazeera that “If the talks fail … it will be the result of the toxic combination of wilful U.S. self-deception and deliberate falsification of intelligence by the Israelis” (Porter, 2014a).

In this context, this overview seeks to demonstrate how and why, through a sophisticated and persistent media campaign, the MEK has created a place for itself on the Iranian political scene totally disproportionate to its capabilities and support base; and how from this aggrandized position the MEK has exerted a negative influence over Western opinion and policymaking toward the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) and Iraq, which began long before and reaches far wider than its role in Tehran’s nuclear dossier. Also, this review seeks to indicate that while this propaganda campaign has been highly successful for the MEK, it has been deliberately detrimental to the growth of a civil opposition movement in Iran as well as significantly affecting Western foreign policy toward the IRI in adverse ways.

The MEK stands out as perhaps a unique example of a belligerent entity that exploits to the maximum a range of propaganda methods and outlets in the West to project itself in the international community as a constructive, almost benign, force. Far from avoiding publicity, the MEK has done everything in its power to maximize what can be described as its virtual presence. In addition to its native Farsi, the group disseminates information about and projects an image of itself in English, French, German and Arabic, in print, in broadcast and on Internet media. But insofar as it has no popular support among indigenous or diaspora Iranians, its image as a popular resistance movement has been largely invented.

Historically the group’s leader, Massoud Rajavi, as the MEK’s spokesman, enjoyed a reputation as a charismatic speaker. As such, he was fully cognizant of the power of publicity in shaping a public image. After the MEK was forced into exile to Paris in 1981, Rajavi assumed sole leadership and appointed his wife, Maryam Rajavi, second-in-command. Since then, the MEK’s raison d’être has remained in its own words “the downfall of the mullahs’ regime in its entirety and the establishment of a democratic republic based on the separation of the church and the state” (Rajavi, 2014), under a Rajavi government. Rajavi understood that he would depend on both political and financial support from the West. He established public relations departments in MEK bases in the major Western capitals. With help from sympathizers, an increasingly sophisticated and expensive propaganda strategy was devised with multiple aims. Primarily, it was used to market the MEK as the “main opposition” and the “only alternative” to the IRI to attract sponsorship. But to ensure the MEK was the only group to garner this support, Rajavi also needed to eliminate all other exiled Iranian opposition groups. This was achieved in the 1980s through physical intimidation and character assassination. This ranged from ostracizing former Iranian president, Abolhassan Bani Sadr (Gessler, 2004), to gate crashing meetings of other groups such as the communist Fedayeen, and beating up attendees. It was also necessary over the years to continuously demonize the Islamic Republic to prevent any possibility of rapprochement. MEK propaganda sculpted Western perceptions of Iran as evil and incapable of reform or moderation.

In its quest to solicit Western support, the MEK morphed its public persona several times to appeal to various Western foreign policymakers and sponsors, but maintained as pivotal its claim to be the main opposition and only alternative. While helping Saddam Hussein’s war effort during the Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988), the glossy print magazine NLA Journal promoted the National Liberation Army; photographs of combatants and armaments projected an image of military might. After losing support during the First Gulf War, a replica of Iran’s Majlis populated by these same combatants posing in Western clothing was advertised as a parliament-in-exile in The Lion and The Sun magazine (print edition in Iran-Interlink archive) and distributed to parliaments and press in the 1990s. Over time, the MEK’s image building was upgraded through emailed PDF publications like Iran Liberation and Iran Liberty Association Newsletter, which reflect the current incarnation of the group. This PDF-manufactured reputation as a democratic opposition enabled the MEK to undertake information laundry for Israel as purveyors of nuclear intelligence on Iran (Nuclear Control Institute, 2014). By extension, this adaptive, mercenary role proved persuasive among American neoconservative regime change pundits who campaigned to remove the group from the U.S. terrorism list (Symonds, 2012). This in turn, after the 2013 election of President Rouhani introduced the possibility of a negotiated settlement of Iran’s nuclear status, allowed for the MEK to be promoted as human rights advocates (Iran News Update, 2014).

The MEK’s ability to maintain its public relations platforms through the vagaries it has suffered over three decades is based largely on one propitious factor: its target audience. Western power brokers have been sympathetic and arguably myopic. Western parliamentarians, if not governments, were looking for “evidence” that the IRI was dangerous and unpleasant—whether as a state sponsor of terrorism or later as a nuclear weaponized state. They were also looking for an opposition to promote as an antithesis to the Iranian government. The MEK, a listed terrorist group for much of this time, used its chameleon-like ability (Bahari, 2007) to adapt its image to mirror Western concerns. That it did this purely for its own survival does not detract from the fact that the MEK has provided a very palatable narrative for those wanting to depose and attack the IRI.

While the Iran-Iraq War was under way, Rajavi was expelled from France but was welcomed in Iraq by Saddam Hussein to help his war effort against Tehran. Saddam provided training for MEK members to form a National Liberation Army, an adjunct to the Iraqi army, and also a generous propaganda budget. Saddam’s purpose was to bolster support for his own war effort by having the MEK present itself as a military force capable of overthrowing the Iranian regime. This became the MEK’s unique selling point, singling it out from among the remaining Iranian opposition groups.

Rajavi micro-managed the MEK’s public relations from his headquarters in Baghdad. International media were monitored for coverage, and he ranked this activity according to how important he believed it was, with “A” bearing any mention of him, “B” if the MEK was mentioned, “C” for Iranian opposition and so on. In addition, the MEK gleaned news published inside Iran for information such as numbers of arrests and executions, which it would then claim to have gathered covertly through its own network of supporters. Although this information was publicly available, the MEK claimed to a non-Farsi-speaking audience to have informants inside the IRI system. In this way, it was able to build a reputation among Western reporters, which would finally draw them to the MEK’s press conference in 2002 to expose Iran’s secret nuclear enrichment site at Natanz (Nuclear Control Institute, 2014). Indeed, it was the group’s media and political contacts that made it an ideal conduit for intelligence originally garnered by the Israeli intelligence organization Mossad on Iran’s nuclear program, not its credibility as an opposition group. The revelation led the United States to push for a United Nations (UN) investigation and subsequent sanctions against Iran. After 2003, having lost Saddam Hussein’s patronage, the MEK abandoned any attempt to build popular support with Iranians and chose instead to work for Israeli and neoconservative interests. Alejo Vidal Quadras, a former member of the European Parliament, admitted that the Friends of a Free Iran group in the European Parliament had benefited from association with the MEK whose “ ‘lobbying activity’ performed for more than 20 years … has been fundamental” (Vidal Quadras, 2014) in promoting its agenda.

A media campaign-employed lobbyists such as the Iran Policy Committee, generously paid speakers (Wilkie, 2011), and took photographs with politicians to try to recast MEK history and present itself as a democratic alternative to an exclusively Western audience. Underpinning any understanding of the MEK’s media strategy is that, according to Steve Hassan’s BITE Model (Freedom of Mind, 2014), it operates as a cult and can therefore utilize an unpaid, dedicated labor force willing to spend every waking hour in pursuit of fulfilling its leader’s requirements. Far from alienating support, this aspect has been instrumental in the creation of an indispensable tool for regime-change pundits in the West. With this free labor, the MEK was able to inundate political and media circles with a continuous flood of literature, information, films, statements, and press releases. Currently, the group ensures a daily presence in PR Newswire and engages in “Google wars,” with its forces performing keystrokes to push MEK items up the search engine scale. It also maintains a physical presence in Western parliaments characterized as “extremely persistent and aggressive” by Eldar Mamedov (2014), who is in charge of the delegation for inter-parliamentary relations between the European Parliament and Iran.

A recent example of the MEK’s efforts to control the narrative of an event through its cyberspace presence came in 2013 with the tragic attack on 101 MEK members based in Camp Ashraf in Iraq (Sen, 2013). Within hours the MEK began to take control of the media narrative by sending real-time video of the attack filmed by the MEK themselves (YouTube, 2013), to newsrooms. On the ground, however, the MEK were uncooperative with UN and Iraqi government investigators. Crucially, 42 survivors who were moved to another MEK base (U.S. Department of State, 2013), were subsequently prevented from speaking to investigators (Khodabandeh, 2013), and the investigating process stalled. Instead, mirroring the agenda of MEK advocates in the European Parliament, the MEK blamed the Iraqi prime minister, Nouri al Maliki (NCRI Foreign Affairs Committee, 2013), for the attack. An Internet search of the event now throws up a variety of articles, resolutions, and statements published by the MEK, which variously attribute blame for the massacre to the Iraqi government of al Maliki, the Iraqi army, President Rouhani of Iran and Iranian special forces, which have taken on the aspect of factual reporting simply through repetition.

In the autumn of 2013 when the nuclear negotiations between Iran and the P5+1 got under way, the regime-change narrative shifted to attacks on Iran’s human rights record. Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen now specifically referred to Maryam Rajavi as a “human rights advocate” (Ros-Lehtinen, 2014). On May 8, 2014, the MEK paid for a quarter-page advertisement in the British print edition of The Guardian in which a smiling Maryam Rajavi accuses Iranian President Rouhani’s government of “massacring 56 Iranian opponents in Camps Ashraf & Liberty in Iraq” (print edition in Iran-Interlink archive).

The MEK’s media and cyberspace presence is manifest in both positive and negative terms. What is most remarkable is that this group’s narrative is so pervasive and persuasive. The MEK has been instrumental in the manufacture of a false but dominant narrative concerning Iran, but other exiled opposition groups and individuals depict Iran in a very different manner, which is arguably more nuanced and closer to reality. Iranian writer and activist Akbar Ganji, imprisoned in Tehran between 2000 and 2006, describes “How the West gets Iran wrong” (Ganji, 2014). Any indigenous Iranian opposition has two fronts to fight. Not only do they have to challenge the IRI on civil rights, religious freedom, human rights, etc., but will also have to distinguish themselves with a different identity and a different narrative from the MEK’s “regime change” discourse and persuade a skeptical West to listen to them. And while Iran certainly has problems with civil and political freedoms and with its economy, the country has made many advances in important fields, such as literacy, polio eradication, aids education, birth control, and prevention of drug trafficking, which rarely get reported by a skeptical Western media. The root of this hostility deserves greater examination and exposure to enable negotiators, foreign policymakers and the media to dismantle the “wilful US self-deception” (Porter, 2014b) and to approach dialogue and diplomacy with greater realism.

References

Bahari, Maziar. (2007). Cult of the chameleon.
Freedom of Mind. (2014). The BITE model.
Ganji, Akbar. (2014). How the West gets Iran wrong.
Gessler, Antoine. (2004). Autopsy of an ideological drift: Analysis and background of the People’s Mojahedin Organisation of Iran. Translated by Thomas Robert Forstenzer.
Iran News Update. (2014). Maryam Rajavi: At the UN in Geneva.
Khodabandeh, Massoud, (2013). Where are the 42 missing Mojahedin Khalq eye witnesses from Camp Ashraf?
Mamedov, Eldar. (2014). The MEK’s influence in EU Politics matters.
NCRI Foreign Affairs Committee. (2013). Iraq: Sham investigation to whitewash Maliki’s crimes in Camp Ashraf.
Nuclear Control Institute. (2014).
Porter, Gareth. (2014a). Demonising nuclear Iran.
Porter, Gareth. (2014b). Manufactured crisis: The untold story of the Iran nuclear scare. Charlottesville, VA: Just World Books.
Rajavi, Maryam. (2014). Hundreds of Iranian associations support Maryam Rajavi Ten-Point Plan for future Iran.
Ros-Lehtinen, Ileana. (2014) The security situation in Camps Ashraf and Liberty is getting worse every day; The Iraqi government and the UN must keep their promises and provide adequate security, says Ros-Lehtinen.
Sen, Ashish Kumar. (2013). 52 Iranian exiles killed at Iraq’s Camp Ashraf.
Symonds, Peter. (2012). US Removes Iranian MEK from terrorist list.
U.S. Department of State. (2013). Relocation of remaining individuals from Camp Ashraf to Camp Hurriya in Iraq.
Vidal Quadras, Alejo. (2014). Alejo Vidal-Quadras, el mejor amigo de los muyahidines.
Wilkie, Christina. (2011). Mujahideen-e Khalq: Former U.S. officials make millions advocating for terrorist organization.
YouTube.com. (2013). The bravest cameraman in 2013 Camp Ashraf.

First published on onlinelibrary.wiley

February 5, 2015 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

How To Stop Being Terrorists: A Guide For ISIS, Courtesy Of The MEK

An Iranian group shows that as long as you stop being violent, it’s possible to gain supporters in the U.S. government and get removed from the Foreign Terrorist Organizations list — especially if your end-game is to overthrow the current Iran regime and take over.

Transcript:

WASHINGTON — While the world’s eyes are focused on ISIS [the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria] and rising tensions in the Middle East, a former terrorist group from Iran is tromping through the halls of Congress, and garnering support from some of America’s most powerful and prominent politicians and officials.

Speaker: “Howard Dean, Ed Rendell, Patrick Kennedy, and many others.”

The group is the People’s Mujahedeen of Iran, or the MEK, in its Persian acronym. It was taken off of the State Department’s Foreign Terrorist Organizations list [in 2012] after demonstrating that it had not been engaged in terrorist activities for the last 10 years.

The group is led by Massoud Rajavi, who has been in hiding since 2003, when the United States and Britain invaded Iraq, and Maryam Rajavi, who acts as the president-elect of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, the group’s political wing.

According to the FBI, the MEK murdered American citizens in Iran during the 1970s, allied with the ayatollahs to help overthrow the Iranian government, participated in the American embassy hostage crisis in 1979, and teamed up with Saddam Hussein to fight their own countrymen during the Iran-Iraq War.

They are responsible for the deaths of thousands of Iranians and a campaign of bombings, assassinations, and military attacks, as well as collusion with Iraq.

The goal of the group now is to overthrow the current Iranian regime and take power for themselves.

So how does a group go from being one of the most dangerous terrorist organizations in the world to having an office on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., with backing from the likes of the former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton and former Director of Homeland Security Tom Ridge, among many others?

CNN: “There’s been a lot of pressure in the United States both from the group and from its supporters in Congress, and very high-paid former officials speaking on their behalf to delist the group.”

In 2011, groups around the country acting as front organizations for the MEK — including the Iranian American Community of Northern California — hired lobbyists to help remove the MEK from the Foreign Terrorist Organizations list.

They recruited the likes of Howard Dean, who is a former Democratic presidential candidate; Michael Hayden, the former CIA director; Newt Gingrich, who is the former Speaker of the House; and the lobbying firm Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, among many others. They [MEK] often paid five-figure speaker fees to individuals, and six figures to the firms lobbying on their behalf.

Jeremiah Goulka: “They’re just thorough PR jobs, that do a very good job of making lawyer-like arguments based on taking very nit-picky looks at wording.”

That’s Jeremiah Goulka, the author of “The Mujahedin-e Khalq in Iraq: A Policy Conundrum,” a report published by the Rand Corporation in 2009 that assesses the status of the MEK at a camp called Ashraf in Iraq.

Goulka: “I was asked to join the Rand Research Team. … Who are the MEK? Why are they there in Iraq? What should the detainee operations command do, if anything?”

However, following publication, the Rand report came under fire by the MEK and its paid lobbyists in Washington.

Lincoln P. Bloomfield: “Well, I’m a former policy official and one of my roles is as a consultant to a law firm in Washington. An American citizens group hired the law firm to help them advocate to remove the MEK from the terrorism list.”

That’s Ambassador Lincoln P. Bloomfield, the former deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs from 1992 to 1993. He wrote a book, entitled “The Mujahedin-e Khalq, MEK: Shackled by a Twisted History,” that posits that the MEK has been severely misunderstood over time.

Bloomfield: “I found out that there’s a gap between what everyone was saying about the MEK and what the information seemed to show, that there was a gap, something was amiss. So that really piqued my curiosity and I just kept digging for the next two years.”

Ambassador Bloomfield’s law firm, Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, was reportedly paid $620,000 dollars by a group supportive of the MEK during those two years, according to the Senate Office of Public Records.

But are his claims — which match those of the MEK — true?

Bloomfield: “As I began to examine what think tanks were saying, what the press was saying, a very consistent set of allegations arose: that they’d killed Americans in the 1970s in Iran, that they had helped with the embassy hostage takeover during the revolution in 1979, that they were a violent, left-wing, Marxist group that was speaking about democracy but didn’t really mean it, and that they’d engaged in a whole series of violent actions, and that they were also human rights abusers in their own midst.”

In June 1973, Lt. Col. Lewis Hawkins of the U.S. Army was the first American assassinated by the MEK, as he walked near his home in Tehran, according to The Associated Press.

Ambassador Bloomfield claims that Hawkins was murdered by a man named Vahid Afrakhteh, citing two Washington Post articles from 1976.

This is significant because the MEK narrative has attempted to gain credibility in the United States by separating itself from the killing of Americans.

Bloomfield: “Other activists who were impatient with the MEK took the Mujahedeen name and weren’t interested in Islam, and they wanted a secular Marxist, violent revolution, and they were the ones who killed the Americans. They were caught. I have put The Washington Post articles from those days in my report.”

The Washington Post articles are referenced as proof that a U.S. State Department report on the MEK is problematic — and possibly untrue — because it says Reza Rezai, not Afrakhteh, “was arrested and executed by the Shah’s government for the murder of Colonel Hawkins.”

The MEK and its supporters are trying to separate Rezai from the killing of Lt. Col.

Hawkins because even though he is dead, he is still idolized by the current MEK as a hero.

However, while it may be true that Afrakhteh committed the actual murder of Hawkins, two separate reports from The Associated Press in 1973, obtained by MintPress News, named Reza Rezai as the “man alleged to have planned the murder of… Lieutenant Colonel Lewis Hawkins” and as the leader of the group. One of the reports says, “The gunman who killed Hawkins still is at large.”

That person who was “still at large” very well could have been Afrakhteh, so the fact he is named as the actual gunman does not in any way absolve Rezai from responsibility for the murder, nor does it contradict the State Department report.

The MEK also claims, as does Ambassador Bloomfield, that it is separated from the murder of the seven Americans, including Lt. Col. Hawkins, because there was a schism in the group between a Marxist-leaning faction, and the Muslim faction led by Massoud Rajavi.

Bloomfield: “There was blood between the two factions. The one that wanted Islam is the one that we see today, and for their commitment to Islam a couple of people were gunned down by these leftist revolutionaries, who were using the name Mujahedin.”

However, that schism did not happen until 1975, according to Ervand Abrahamian, author of “The Iranian Mojahedin,” and one of the foremost scholars of the group. Therefore, in the words of Muhammad Sahimi, “Hawkins’ assassination, at least, was irrefutably the work of the original” MEK.

Another problem with the narrative of the MEK not being involved with the killings of Americans is that the group bragged about those murders in its very own newspaper called “Mojahed,” seen here.

The text states:

“It was the Mujahedin-e Khalq that killed with guns American Generals and also blew up nests of spies, like America’s information office… ”

[Mojahed – Number 77, Page 2]

The MEK and its supporters also claim that the group was not involved with the U.S. Embassy hostage crisis and that it did not support it in any way.

Bloomfield: “This one is very black and white, and misunderstood. And, frankly, allegations that the MEK were behind the embassy takeover, and were promoting keeping the Americans hostage only surfaced in detail a few years ago.”

The problem with this statement is that the MEK clearly promoted the 1979 embassy takeover in its newspaper.

The headline to the article in this issue of “Mojahed” says:

“We are happy that this time they targeted the real Shah, which is America’s imperialism; The nest of the spies has been seized!”

[Mojahed – Number 10, Front page, November 12, 1979]

Further, despite an intense campaign to expunge the MEK’s troubled history toward the safety and well-being of American citizens and the way it treats its own members, the State Department, the FBI, Human Rights Watch, and the Rand Corporation have not changed their stance on any of these issues.

So, what is the MEK? The aforementioned organizations claim that not only is it an opposition group to the current Iranian regime, but it is a kind of cult.

Goulka: “At the MEK camps, there’s a whole set of practices that are all textbook out of cult theory – sleep deprivation, make-work projects, which is one of the reasons why Camp Ashraf has all this — surprisingly, it’s pretty. I mean there’s all of these beautification projects there. There’s fountains and there’s gardens, and there are all of these statues and memorials to things. Make-work projects. Sometimes food limitation. But one of the big things I didn’t know about them, the stuff that gets at people, um: 1) forced celibacy; 2) forced divorce; 3) gender segregation. They will claim that the divorce was not forced. One of their representatives told me that, I don’t remember his exact words, but that in the desert, it just doesn’t support family life. And I’m sure that Iraqi families feel just the same way.”

Masoud Banisadr was an MEK member for 20 years and served as the group’s representative to the United Nations and the United States during that time. He now ardently denounces the group. His account of what it’s like on the inside supports Goulka’s claims.

Masoud Banisadr: “Not only me, all members were forced to divorce their spouses, and later they have to send their children abroad to Europe and United States to be adopted by supporters and other members. The final stage was self-divorce, which meant that you have to divorce your own personality, your own individuality. You had to prove to the group that your whole individuality and personality before you become member of the group were devilish and wrong and corrupt and so-on.”

The MEK and its supporters claim that the group is not a cult, though, and that former members have been coerced into saying that it is a cult by Iran’s intelligence services.

Goulka: “This is what’s important to remember: Even if there are Iranian efforts to paint the MEK as terrible, which there are — I mean, the Iranian regime is always trying to make the MEK look terrible. But, it’s easy to make the MEK look terrible because the MEK looks terrible.”

Part of Goulka’s job in Iraq when assessing the MEK camp was to interview members of the group.

Goulka: “I mean, I interviewed loads of people, and, I mean, were they all agents? I doubt it. Were they Iranian agents, were they sneaking into the locked-off refugee camp off of F.O.B. [Forward Operating Base] Grizzly, and planting information to somehow feed me when they did not know I was coming?”

In response to the MEK’s claims, Human Rights Watch even went back and re-assessed their reporting and re-interviewed the original people from their report.

The second time around, they made the same claims that the organization is a cult and that they [members of the group] were tortured and abused by MEK’s leaders.

Human Rights Watch found no evidence of influence by Iranian intelligence services.

Despite all the documented history behind the group’s nefarious claims, it still came off the [Foreign Terrorist Organizations] list. And that’s because the single most important thing it did was end all acts of violence. And on this point, both Goulka and Ambassador Bloomfield agree.

Bloomfield: “In September of 2012, when Secretary of State Clinton removed the MEK from the U.S. terrorism list, the announcement said that the MEK had conducted no acts of violence for at least 10 years.”

Goulka: “I was actually thinking they should come off the list. I don’t think the U.S. made the decision for the right reasons, but I think they made the right decision. I think they needed to come off the list because I think the list, as written — I mean, the statute as written — they no longer really satisfied. And I think it’s important that there be some kind of incentive to terrorist groups in the world to say, ‘You know, if you stop being violent, we will take you off the list.”

So now that the MEK is no longer officially considered a terrorist group, what is it? How are they any different from other Iranian opposition groups, such as the National Front, or supporters of the previous monarchy?

Banisadr: “This is the problem which they are facing. I mean, the kind of questions that they face from ordinary Iranians outside of Iran, or their supporters outside of Iran is: How do you want to go back to Iran? How do you want to overthrow this government? The only answer which they have is that, ‘We are lobbying the United States. We are lobbying Western countries to fight against the Iranian government. First to put sanctions, put hardship on Iranian government so they cannot solve the problems of [the] Iranian people. And this might create some resistance on the opposition within Iran, and create an environment of revolution, perhaps, inside of Iran. At the same time, we are inviting Western countries, especially [the] United States to attack Iran because of [the] nuclear issue, because of [the] Israeli issue, and so on. So, when [the] United States attacks Iran the only the only people that can govern the country are us. There is nobody else.’”

Goulka agrees with Banisadr’s assessment of the group. He echoed his remarks about the MEK trying to grab power in Iran through pressuring the American government, but from a perspective rooted in the shame behind the horrors of America’s invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Goulka: “We’re always trying to make it sound like Iran is so super powerful as a military force. And it’s nothing compared to Israel, which is nothing compared to us. Yet we’re going to get ourselves up into a lather where the only, the only end result of that, the only logical end result if you let it keep going, is that we get violent with Iran. And that doesn’t suit anybody’s interests, without even questioning the actual morality of it. I mean, do I support the Iranian regime? No. But when you look at what we did to Iraq, where now people in the media constantly talk about 100,000 civilians dying as if that’s something we should accept. And most evidence suggests that’s like one-tenth of the people that actually died. And that’s death — that’s not the number of people who are just displaced, or injured, or had their lives ruined. The millions of people who were displaced and had to leave the country, or just displaced in the country – I mean, we wrecked that country because some people here wanted to do it, and you had fools like Ahmed Chalabi saying that they could go in and take over the place, and our fools who followed it. And the number of deaths for our people, too, and the way we’ve ruined lives here, and the way we’ve, you know, the money we’ve spent on it. Why would we repeat that in Iran? I mean, it’s insane. But, of course, insanity is the whole notion, you know, thinking you can do it again right this time. And it’s just frightening to watch us go down that path if we keep listening to the MEK.”

For MintPress News in Washington, this is Sean Nevins.

Download How To Stop Being Terrorists

January 24, 2015 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq Organization as a terrorist group

Sydney hostage-taker was affiliated with Mojahedin Khalq

Australia’s best-selling newspaper, The Australian has published a report saying the Sydney cafe attacker Man Haron Monis was “linked” to the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK, a.k.a MKO).

The report adds that the revelation is contained in documents from an Iranian associate’s refugee claim in 2003, which collapsed after Monis refused to divulge significant details about his own past and then suddenly vanished.

“According to Refugee Review Tribunal documents obtained under Freedom of Information laws, Monis’s associate claimed he would face death if he were deported to Iran because of his close relationship with Monis, whom he believed had tried to abolish the Iranian regime.

The report continues that the asylum-seeker, whose name is not released, cited ¬reports Monis was affiliated with MKO.

“MKO members assassinated three US army officers and three American civilians in Iran in the 1970s, and were involved in the overthrow of the Shah in 1979,” the report adds. “In 1981, after falling out with the ruling Islamic Republican Party, the MKO bombed its Tehran headquarters killing 71 people. The US listed the MKO as a terrorist organisation in 1997, but it was delisted in 2012.”

The report goes on to say that the documents indicate the asylum-seeker and Monis “were friends in Iran in the 1990s and were reunited in Australia.”

The report concludes that Monis was contributing to preparing “the asylum-seeker’s application”, attending his refugee interview with the Immigration Department’s delegate in about 2003. But when the delegate asked him whether information relevant to his case could be disclosed to the applicant, Monis asked the delegate not to reveal a very significant aspect of his own claims to the applicant, and then he simply disappeared.

Habilian association reporting from The Australian, Sydney

January 22, 2015 0 comments

Iraqi Authorities' stance on the MEK

Al-Sarraj: America supports MKO in Iraq as leverage in negotiations

A member of the State of Law coalition and Head of the Iraqi Centre for Media Development, Adnan al-Sarraj, said that the United States is still giving political, intelligence and financial support to the Mojahedin Khalq Organization, and plays a role in coordinating them to carry out criminal acts against Iran.”

Sarraj told the reporter for Ashraf News, that “Washington also hopes that the MEK terrorist organization can be used as a bargaining chip in any future negotiations with Iran.”

With respect to the MKO terrorist group’s demand last Wednesday that the United States re-arm them in Camp Liberty, Adnan al-Sarraj said, “I do not find it surprising. This ridiculous request to get arms from the Americans is a tactic used by the US with the clear political agenda to add pressure in favour of America in the next upcoming negotiations, otherwise it is clear that in the current circumstances it is impossible for them to do this.”

Ashraf News, Baghdad, Translated by Iran Interlink

January 20, 2015 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Four ways the West got the Iran nuclear issue wrong

First denying Iran’s nuclear rights and then using suspect intelligence to build a false picture of its programme

For more than three decades, the United States and its European allies have committed one fundamental error after another in the process of creating a commonly held narrative that Iran was secretly pursuing a nuclear weapons programme. The story of how suspicions of the Iranian programme hardened into convictions is a cautionary tale of political and institutional interests systematically distorting the judgments of both policymakers and intelligence analysts.

Too many of these basic errors have been committed along the way to cover them all in a single article. But four major failures of policymaking and intelligence represent the broad outlines of this systematic problem.

1. Denial of Iranian rights, followed by denial of the truth

The first failure, which set in train all the others, involved the US trying to strangle the nuclear programme of the Islamic Republic in its cradle and then blithely acting as though it bore no responsibility for the resulting shift in Iranian nuclear policy. It all started with a decision by the Reagan administration early in the Iran-Iraq war in 1983 to put diplomatic pressure on its allies to stop all nuclear cooperation with Iran. France was pressed to forbid a French-based multilateral consortium from providing the nuclear fuel that Iran had counted on for its lone nuclear reactor at Bushehr.

The US State Department acknowledged at the time that it had no evidence that Iran was working on or even wanted nuclear weapons. That US effort to choke off any nuclear assistance to Iran thus represented an extremely serious violation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which guaranteed Iran’s right to peaceful nuclear technology.

Not surprisingly Iran responded to that US denial of its nuclear rights by defying US wishes and acquiring the technology to enrich uranium for nuclear fuel itself on the black market and later through negotiations with China and Russia. US aggressiveness toward Iran’s nuclear programme had backfired.

But instead of recognising that it had made a serious error, Washington compounded the original policy blunder by treating the Iranian response as prima facie evidence of nuclear weapons intent. In 1995 Secretary of State Warren Christopher, in the course of explaining an order by President Bill Clinton banning all US trade and investment in Iran, accused Iran of having an “organised structure dedicated to acquiring and developing nuclear weapons.” That was an obvious reference to the Iranian efforts to acquire centrifuge and other enrichment technology. The Clinton administration thus acted as though there was no relationship between Iran’s interest in obtaining gas centrifuge technology and the US denial policy that preceded it.

2. The intelligence goes wrong

The CIA and other Western intelligence agencies began to drift away from reality on the Iran nuclear issue in the early 1990s, when Western intelligence agencies were gleefully poring over intercepted telexes from Sharif University in Tehran seeking various “dual use” technologies – those that could be used either for a nuclear programme or for non-nuclear applications. They had found that the telex number on many of the messages was that of the Physics Research Centre, which was known to do research for the Iranian defence ministry. That was enough to convince them that Iran was pursuing a covert nuclear weapons programme.

The telexes ultimately turned out to be false positives, however. In late 2007 and early 2008, Iran turned over detailed documentation showing that every one of the “dual use” procurement items sought in those telexes had been requested by various faculties of Sharif University for faculty and student research. And the Physics Research Centre’s telex number was on the telexes because the former head of the organisation was teaching at the university and had been asked to help in the procurement of the items. The intelligence analysts had wrongly interpreted the inherently ambiguous “dual use” evidence as confirming pre-existing suspicions of Iran’s intentions.

That analytical failure was a template for a series of four intelligence assessments of the Iranian nuclear programme by the CIA’s Nonproliferation Center and later by the US intelligence community as a whole that falsely concluded that Iran had an active nuclear weapons development programme as of the time of the assessment. That string of false positives raises serious questions about the 2007 US national intelligence estimate by a team of analysts that had just repeated the same mistake in a draft estimate only a few months earlier.

3. Ignoring the Fatwa against chemical weapons

The belief of Western governments that Iran must have pursued nuclear weapons has been based on their ignorance of a pivotal historical episode that should have caused them to question that belief. During the eight-year Iran-Iraq war, Saddam’s troops attacked Iran with chemical weapons many times, killing 20,000 Iranians and severely injuring 100,000. Yet Iran never retaliated with its own chemical weapons, as Joost Hiltermann’s A Poisonous Affair, the authoritative source on chemical attacks in that war, has documented.

That fact poses a fundamental challenge to the Western narrative on the Iran nuclear issue, because there is no credible explanation for the Iranian failure to retaliate with chemical weapons other than the fact that supreme leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had forbidden the possession and use of all weapons of mass destruction as illicit in Islam. The Revolutionary Guards acted on their own to acquire the capability to produce mustard gas weapons, as the wartime Iranian Minister for military procurement has confirmed in a recent interview. But his account of his meetings with supreme leader Ayatollah Khomeini also confirms that Khomeini pronounced a fatwa against such weapons early in the war and repeated it in 1987.

The implications of that historical episode for an understanding of the politics of WMD policy in Iran are obviously far-reaching. It lends strong credibility to the Iranian claim that the current supreme leader’s fatwa against nuclear weapons is an absolute bar to Iran possessing such weapons. But the news media has continued to dismiss the problem by clinging to an old narrative, which was based on false information that Iran not only had possessed chemical weapons but also had used them.

4. Refusing to acknowledge the weaponisation evidence is tainted

For nearly a decade, the international politics of the Iran nuclear issue have revolved around intelligence documents and reports of Iran nuclear weapons work. A 1,000-page cache of documents that surfaced in 2004 showed the redesign of Iran’s Shahab-3 missile to accommodate a nuclear weapon and high explosives experiments that could only be used for nuclear weapons. More incriminating intelligence documents followed in 2008-09. The IAEA has now been investigating them for nine years.

But Western governments, abetted by compliant news media coverage, have chosen to ignore the considerable evidence that these documents were of very dubious origins. Contrary to the cover story that the documents were passed on to Western intelligence by a participant in a covert Iranian programme or by a German spy, a former senior German foreign office official has now revealed that the German intelligence agency, the Bundesnachrichtendienst, obtained them from a sometime source who was a member of the Iranian exile terrorist organisation Mujahedeen E-Khalq (MEK). The MEK was then serving Israel’s Mossad as a means of laundering alleged intelligence, so it is safe to assume that the documents came from Israel.

IAEA director general Mohamed El Baradei (1997-2009), who insisted that the documents had not been authenticated, recalled in his memoirs, “No-one knew if any of this was real.” Against the wishes of the Bush administration, he refused to use them as evidence against Iran.

Major contradictions between information in the papers and the independently verifiable timelines of Iran’s missile and nuclear programmes indicated that the authors were not Iranian specialists. The re-entry vehicle depicted in the studies, for example, was not the one that Iran was redesigning at the time and that was revealed to the world only after the documents were handed over.

El Baradei also revealed that a subsequent series of intelligence documents, which included the claim that Iran had installed a large cylinder at Parchin to test atomic weapons designs, had been passed on to the IAEA directly by Israel. That intelligence proved to be equally problematic: former IAEA nuclear weapons expert Robert Kelley found the Parchin cylinder claim technically implausible.

The US government and its Western allies have all closed their eyes, however, to the evidence that these documents were designed to justify US action by the United States against the Islamic republic. The political convenience of the accepted narrative of the Iran nuclear issue has continued to suppress any active interest in learning the truth.

– Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist and historian writing on US national security policy. His latest book, “Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare,” was published in February 2014.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

Middle East Eye

January 12, 2015 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Mujahedin Khalq Organization : US-Israel Sponsored Terrorist Entity directed against Iran

In their abortive effort to assassinate another Iranian nuclear scientist, Israeli officials only sustained desperation and disgrace in their dastardly elimination campaign against Iran which was apparently in sync with ISIL inhumane brutalities inside Iraq and Syria.

More alert than ever, security forces are diligently tasked with protecting the lives of the Iranian scientists wherever they are.

A top Iranian military official said on Saturday that in the last two years, “the Zionist entity has been making clandestine efforts to assassinate an Iranian nuclear scientist, but the timely presence of the IRGC security forces thwarted the terrorist operation.”

It is now common knowledge that Tel Aviv has been carrying out covert ops inside the Iranian soil for a couple of years, assassinating Iranian nuclear officials and scientists although Israel has constantly declined to admit to its unjustified iniquity against the Iranian nation.

Translating suspicion into conviction, a report carried by CBS News in March 2014 revealed that Obama has pressured Israeli espionage apparatuses to put an end to their assassinations inside Iran against the country’s nuclear scientists.

The terrorist Mujahedin Khalq Organization AKA MKO or MEK seems to be a ubiquitous agent any time there is an assassination in Iran. A shadowy cult with myriad of financial, military and intelligence connections to Tel Aviv and Washington, the MKO works in league with Kidon, the assassination unit within the Mossad. There are solid reports which indicate that the MKO members have received military and intelligence training both from the US forces as well as from the Mossad.

In 2012, Seymour M. Hersh revealed that at a secret site in Nevada, the US 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.” According to the report, the training ended sometime before President Obama took office. A retired four-star general says, “They got the standard training, in commo, crypto [cryptography], small-unit tactics, and weaponry—that went on for six months…. They were kept in little pods.”

Within the US government, the cult enjoys a rather immense support for their sabotage activities against the Islamic Republic. Among their shills are former top Bush officials and other Republicans (Michael Mukasey, Fran Townsend, Andy Card, Tom Ridge, Rudy Giuliani) as well as prominent Democrats (Howard Dean, Ed Rendell, Bill Richardson, Wesley Clark).

A revealing report by NBC News report by Richard Engel and Robert Windrem cites two anonymous senior US officials with two interesting claims: 1) that it was MEK which perpetrated the string of assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists and 2) the terrorist group “is financed, trained and armed by Israel’s secret service.” So the report testifies to the veracity of what Iranian officials have asserted about the involvement of MEK and Israel in murdering nuclear scientists on the Iranian soil.

Interestingly, a few weeks ago, I received a threatening email from Ali Safavi, the notorious MKO spokesman (through a western publisher of mine) in which he had pontificated about the virtues of the MKO terrorists and the so-called ‘vices’ of the Islamic Republic, accusing me of serving as a mouthpiece for the Islamic Republic. I strongly believe that revealing the murky realities of a terrorist group responsible for the deaths of 17000 innocent Iranians is only my ethical obligation. Besides, Ali Safavi and the likes

of him should come to their senses and realize that their efforts to whitewash their crimes will eventually prove pointless and that there is no way at all for them to lend a cloak of legitimacy to their unnamable crimes against the Iranian nation.

During the Iraq-Iran war, the MKO joined hands with Saddam Hussein, the tyrannical ruler of Iraq in attacking and killing Iranian combatants. However, a bloodier chapter in the history of the cult can be traced in their collusion with Saddam in crushing the popular uprisings in 1991. No doubt, their tanks took an inconceivable reprisal on thousands of innocent civilians. The callous command of Maryam Rajavi is still gnawing and tearing at the hearts and minds of the Iraqis: “Take the Kurds under your tanks, and save your bullets for the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.”

Unfortunately, the MKO, long considered a terrorist organization, was delisted thanks to the unflagging endeavors of former US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

In 2011, Mohamed Ali Lobnani, a Lebanese national, who was arrested on charges of spying for Mossad confessed that he had spied for Israel under the cover of a Shiite cleric in Lebanon.

In a court hearing session, Lobnani said he had phone contacts with Mohammad Alizadeh, an MKO ringleader, claiming that had no idea that the number was a Mossad contact number.

Asked about the link between MKO and Mossad, he noted, “As far as I know, the group (MKO) has been collaborating with Israel for several years and has massive interactions with Mossad.”

The MKO is the artifact of a corrupt ideology which is in many respects comparable to that of the ISIL cult. No wonder they are fighting shoulder to shoulder with the ISIL terrorists in Iraq and Syria.

The fact that these two curious cults are thriving rigorously, that the West caters – either publicly or secretly – to their cravings, that they are being bigheartedly financed by the puppet regional regimes and that they receive sophisticated military and intelligence training from Mossad and CIA evinces a believable bond between the two.

That the MKO and the ISIL cults are pursing the selfsame path of perversion is no coincidence at all. The reason is simple: they are cut from the same cloth. And that Mossad is dispatching assassins into Iran to liquidate Iranian scientists is only meant to strike fear and beyond that, to secretly make up for what the ISIL and MKO terrorists feel emasculated to do in Iran.

Dr. Ismail Salami,

January 10, 2015 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

And the Winner of the ‘War On Terror’ Financed Dream Home 2014 Giveaway Is…

Oceanfront views, 24-hour doorman, heated pool, and perhaps best of all, a “private tunnel to the beach.” This $3 million Palm Beach, Florida penthouse could be yours, but unfortunately it isn’t because this prize has already been claimed by a former high-level U.S. official who helped pave the way for the over decade-long “war on terror,”which has been a near complete catastrophe.

Iraq is aflame, the Islamic State is on the rampage, the situation in Afghanistan worsens by the day, and thousands of Americans—and many more Iraqis and Afghans—have died during the post-9/11 conflicts. Meanwhile, the combined cost of the “war on terror” comes to an estimated $1.6 trillion.

But if the American people got screwed on the deal, a lot of former senior government officials who played important roles in this debacle have done quite well for themselves. It’s New Year’s Eve and I need to write a final sendoff to 2014, so I thought I’d take a look at the fortunes (literally) of some of these figures: Former CIA director George Tenet and former FBI director Louis Freeh (I’ll cover former Department of Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge in a New Year’s post).

Consider Tenet. As head of the CIA, he missed multiple signs of a major Al Qadea attack directed against the United States, called the case against Saddam building Weapons of Mass Destruction a “slam dunk,” and approved the Bush administration’s torturing of terror suspects.

In any fair world Tenet would be tried for criminal incompetence. Instead, he got the Presidential Medal of Freedom and after resigning in 2004 (at which point his agency salary was south of $200,000), he received a $4 million advance to write a memoir. In it, he confessed to “a black, black time” a few months after 9/11 when he was sitting at home in his favorite Adirondack chair thinking about the tragedy that killed 3,000 Americans on his watch and asked, “Why me?”

Tenet has received millions more in his current role as managing director of a privately held New York investment bank and as a board director and advisor to intelligence and military contractors. Meanwhile, he collects fat speaking fees to talk about “current global threats to U.S. security and what the future holds for the U.S., our allies and interests around the globe.” (Top Secret: Here’s where he gets his best intelligence.)

Not bad for the son of Greek immigrants who before entering government service in 1982 (as legislative director to then-Senator H. John Heinz III) worked at the American Hellenic Institute and the Solar Energy Industries Association. When he headed the CIA, Tenet lived in a ranch house in Potomac, Maryland, which he bought in 1986 for $179,000. He currently splits his time between New York and the affluent D.C. suburb of Bethesda, where he reportedly lives in a neighborhood “known for its tree-lined streets, vintage brick homes, and atmosphere oozing with understated luxury.”

Then there’s Louis Freeh, Tenet’s counterpart at the FBI during the run-up to 9/11. (He resigned a few months before the attacks.) The former FBI director was seriously injured in a car wreck this August, but told police he had no idea what happened because he’d been asleep at the wheel, which is a perfect metaphor for his FBI stewardship. (And let me sincerely say I wish Freeh a speedy recovery, but the metaphor is precise.) Like Tenet, Freeh failed to act on a mountain of evidence pointing towards 9/11, i.e. an April 2001 memo sent to him by his assistant director that cited “significant and urgent” intelligence of “serious operational planning” for terrorism attacks by Islamic radicals linked to Osama bin Laden. He also botched cases involving Richard Jewell, Wen Ho Lee, and Robert Hanssen.

Freeh resigned from the FBI two months before 9/11. When he worked there he was making an annual salary of $145,000 and lived “in a heavily mortgaged house in Great Falls, a Virginia suburb,” according to an old and admiring New Yorker profile. He and his wife now own at least four lavish estates worth many millions of dollars, including a residence in Wilmington, Delaware, a six-bedroom summerhouse worth more than $3 million in Vermont, and a beachfront penthouse at 100 Worth Avenue in Palm Beach, Florida, which was bought for $1.4 million and now has an estimated value of $3 million.

How’d that happen? Well, Freeh is one of many former U.S. officials who got paid big speaking fees (reportedly up to $50,000 a pop) by a creepy Iranian group called the People’s Mujahedin, also known as Mojahedin-e-Khalq, or MEK, to successfully advocate for its removal from the State Department’s list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations. He also opened up a consulting firm whose clients have included Saudi Arabia’s Prince Bandar, who the U.S. Department of Justice accused of taking massive bribes from a British defense contractor. That’s right, Freeh represented a prince from America’s old pal Saudi Arabia, home to fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers, and whose export of Wahhabism is credited with giving rising to the Islamic State.

Freeh is also hired to conduct investigations, like the controversial report he produced about Penn State’s football program. Nasser Kazeminy, a Minnesota businessman who in 2008 was accused of bribing former Senator Norm Coleman, also hired Freeh to conduct a “thorough investigation” of the allegations against him in the hopes of clearing his name.

In 2011, Freeh issued a public statement saying that his investigation had “completely vindicated” both Kazeminy and Coleman. Sure, Kazeminy had bought Coleman $100,000 worth of presents, but, Freeh said at a press conference, “There was no quid pro quo in the gifts. There was no wrongdoing.” Freeh also met with the Justice Department – which was investigating the bribery charges but declined to bring a case—on Kazeminy’s behalf.

Oh yeah, about Freeh’s Palm Beach penthouse. As I discovered through Florida property records, Freeh’s wife co-owns it with Kazeminy, which kind of makes you wonder about just how thorough and impartial his investigation was. The quit claim deed giving Freeh’s wife one-half ownership of the penthouse was signed nine days after Freeh’s vindication of Kazeminy.

Freeh declined to comment for this story.

Ken Silverstein, The Intercept

Photo: Sotheby’s

Email the author: kensilverstein@firstlook.org

January 3, 2015 0 comments

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