The Third View on Mujahedin Khalq

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

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

How the Iran-Nuke Crisis Was Hyped

A prized weapon in the U.S. geopolitical arsenal is “information warfare,” the ability to promote false or misleading information to heighten the pressure on an adversary, often using supposedly neutral UN agencies as a front, as may have happened on Iran’s nuclear program, reports Gareth Porter.

In a critique of the handling of the Iran file by the International Atomic Energy Agency, former IAEA Director General Han Blix has called for greater skepticism about the intelligence documents and reports alleging Iranian nuclear weapons work and warned that they may be used to put diplomatic pressure on Tehran.

In an interview with this writer in his Stockholm apartment late last month, Blix, who headed the IAEA from 1981 to 1997, also criticized the language repeated by the IAEA under its current director general, Yukiya Amano, suggesting that Iran is still under suspicion of undeclared nuclear activity.

Blix, who clashed with U.S. officials when he was head of the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq from 2000 to 2003, said he has long been skeptical of intelligence that has been used to accuse Iraq and Iran of having active nuclear-weapons programs.

“I’ve often said you have as much disinformation as information” on alleged weaponization efforts in those countries, Blix said.

Referring to the allegations of past Iranian nuclear weapons research that have been published in IAEA reports, Blix said, “Something that worries me is that these accusations that come from foreign intelligence agencies can be utilized by states to keep Iran under suspicion.”

Such allegations, according to Blix, “can be employed as a tactic to keep the state in a suspect light — to keep Iran on the run.” The IAEA, he said, “should be cautious and not allow itself to be drawn into such a tactic.”

Blix warned that compromising the independence of the IAEA by pushing it to embrace unverified intelligence was not in the true interests of those providing the intelligence.

The IAEA Member States providing the intelligence papers to the IAEA “have a long-term interest in an international service that seeks to be independent,” said Blix. “In the Security Council they can pursue their own interest, but the [IAEA] dossier has to be as objective as possible.”

In 2005, the George W. Bush administration gave the IAEA a large cache of documents purporting to derive from a covert Iranian nuclear weapons research and development program from 2001 to 2003. Israel provided a series of documents and intelligence reports on alleged Iranian nuclear weapons work in 2008 and 2009.

Blix’s successor as IAEA director general, Mohamed ElBaradei, recalled in his 2011 memoirs having doubts about the authenticity of both sets of intelligence documents. ElBaradei resisted pressure from the United States and its European allies in 2009 to publish an “annex” to a regular IAEA report based on those unverified documents.

But Amano agreed to do so, and the annex on “possible military dimensions” of the Iranian nuclear program was published in November 2011. During the current negotiations with Iran, the P5+1 (U.S., UK, Russia, China, France plus Germany) has taken the position that Iran must explain the intelligence documents and reports described in the annex.

The provenance of the largest part of the intelligence documents — the so-called “laptop documents” — was an unresolved question for years after they were first reported in 2004 and 2005. But former senior German foreign office official Karsten Voigt confirmed in 2013 that the Iranian exile opposition group, the Mujahedeen E-Khalq (MEK), gave the original set of documents to the German intelligence service (BND) in 2004.

The MEK has been reported by Seymour Hersh, Connie Bruck, and a popular history of the Mossad’s covert operations to have been a client of Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, the Mossad, serving to “launder” intelligence that Mossad did not want to have attributed to Israel.

Blix has been joined by two other former senior IAEA officials in criticizing the agency for its uncritical presentation of the intelligence documents cited in the November 2011 annex. Robert Kelley, the head of the Iraq team under both Blix and ElBaradei, and Tariq Rauf, the former head of the Agency’s Verification and Security Policy Coordination Office, have written that the annex employed “exaggeration, innuendo and careful choice of words” in presenting intelligence information from an unidentified Member State of the IAEA on the alleged cylinder at the Parchin military facility.

Blix said he is “critical” of the IAEA for the boilerplate language used in its reports on Iran that the Agency is “not in a position to provide credible assurances about the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities….”

Blix added that it is “erroneous” to suggest that the IAEA would be able to provide such assurances if Iran or any other state were more cooperative. As head of UNMOVIC, Blix recalled, “I was always clear that there could always be small things in a big geographical area that can be hidden, and you can never guarantee completely that there are no undeclared activities.”

“In Iraq we didn’t maintain there was nothing,” he said. “We said we had made 700 inspections at 500 sites and we had not seen anything.”

Blix emphasized that he was not questioning the importance of maximizing inspections, or of Iran’s ratification of the Additional Protocol. “I think the more inspections you can perform the smaller the residue of uncertainty,” he said.

Consortium News,

Gareth Porter, an investigative journalist and historian specializing in U.S. “national security” policy and was the recipient of the Gellhorn Prize for journalism in 2012. His latest book is Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare. [This article first appeared at LobeLog.]

December 24, 2014 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Guess who credits the Mossad with producing the ‘laptop documents?’

Evidence mounts pointing to the Mossad as the source of dubious claims about Iran’s uranium enrichment program contained in the ‘laptop documents’

In the United States and Europe, it is unchallenged in political and media circles that intelligence documents purporting to be from a covert Iranian nuclear weapons program for which the IAEA long demanded an Iranian explanation are genuine.

Photo: Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli Minister Rafi Eitan (2nd L), who was a member of the Mossad team that captured Adolf Eichmann in Argentina in 1960, look at objects displayed at an exhibition at the Knesset in Jerusalem on 12 December, 2011(AFP)

But evidence has continued to accumulate that the documents – sometimes called the “laptop documents” because they were said to have been on a laptop computer belonging to one of the participants in the program – were fabricated by Israel’s foreign intelligence agency (Mossad). We now know that the documents did not come from an Iranian participant in the alleged project, as the media were led to believe for years; they were turned over to German intelligence by the anti-regime Iranian terrorist organisation, Mujahedeen E Khalq, (MEK). I first reported this in 2008 and have now confirmed from an authoritative German source in my book on the Iran nuclear issue. The MEK was well known to have been a client of the Mossad, serving to launder Israeli intelligence claims that the Israelis did not want attributed to themselves.

Although it has never been mentioned in news media, former International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director General, Mohamed El Baradei recalled in his memoirs that he was doubtful of the authenticity of the documents. “No one knew if any of this was real,” he wrote in reference to the laptop documents. Another former senior IAEA official told me, “It just really didn’t add up. It made more sense that this information originated in another country.” And as I have detailed in articles and in my book, key documents in the collection bear clear indications of fabrication.

Support for that virtually unknown part of the Iran nuclear story has come from a surprising source: a popular Israeli account, celebrating the successes of the Mossad’s covert operations. “Mossad: The Greatest Missions of the Israeli Secret Service,” first published in Hebrew in 2010, and then published in English in 2012, was Israel’s best-selling book for months in 2010. But not only does it acknowledge that it was indeed the MEK that delivered the documents, it also suggests that at least some of the documents came from the Mossad.

The co-authors of the book are far from critics of Israel’s policy toward Iran; One of the co-authors, Michael Bar-Zohar, is a well-connected former member of the Israeli Knesset and former paratrooper, who had previously written an authorised biography of Shimon Peres, as well as the biography of Isser Harel, the Mossad chief who presided over the kidnapping of Adolph Eichmann in Argentina.

Much of what Bar-Zohar chronicled in the book had already been reported earlier by Israeli journalists – especially Ronen Bergman of the daily Yedioth Ahronoth. In fact, Bergman accused Bar-Zohar of plagiarising his articles for much of the book, while changing only a few words.

But one thing that Bar-Zohar and co-author Nisham Mishal did not get from other Israeli journalists, was the role of the Mossad in regard to the laptop documents.

Although they do not flatly state that the Mossad was the source of the documents, they certainly lead the reader to that conclusion. They begin by establishing the fact that the MEK was fronting for the Mossad in its revelation in August 2002 of Iran’s first enrichment facility at Natanz. The CIA, they write, “appeared to believe that the Mossad and the British MI6 were feeding MEK intelligence they had obtained, using the Iranian opposition as a hopefully credible source”. And they explicitly confirm CIA’s suspicions. “According to Israeli sources,” they write, “It was, in fact, a watchful Mossad officer who had discovered the mammoth centrifuge installation at Natanz.”

Other sources, including Seymour Hersh and Connie Bruck have reported that the MEK got the intelligence on Natanz from the Israelis, but theirs is the first explicit acknowledgement attributed to an Israeli source that the MEK had revealed Natanz on the basis of Mossad intelligence. What the Israeli co-authors do not say is that the Mossad was simply guessing at the purpose of Natanz, which the MEK mistakenly called a “fuel fabrication” facility, rather than a centrifuge enrichment facility.

Turning to the laptop documents, they make it clear that western intelligence had indeed obtained the documents from the MEK and suggest that the MEK got them from somewhere else. “The dissidents wouldn’t say how they had gotten hold of the laptop,” they write. They again frame the question of the origins of those documents in terms of CIA suspicions. “[T]he skeptical Americans suspected that the documents had been only recently scanned into the computer,” they write. “They accused the Mossad of having slipped in some information obtained from our own sources – and passing it to the MEK leaders for delivery to the West."

Bar-Zohar and Mishal steer clear of any suggestion that the Mossad fabricated any documents, but their account leaves little doubt that they are convinced that the Mossad should be credited for the appearance of the documents. Their approach of referring to US suspicions, rather than stating it directly, appears to be a way of avoiding problems with Israeli military censors, who often clamp down on local reporting on sensitive issues while allowing references to foreign reports.

The authors further suggest that the Mossad was behind information later released by the MEK on Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the Iranian physics professor said to be shown in the laptop documents as the man in charge of that purported Iranian nuclear weapons research program. The MEK disclosed such personal details as Fakhrizadeh’s passport number and his home telephone number. But the Mossad chroniclers write: “This abundance of detail and means of transmission leads one to believe that, again, “a certain secret service” ever suspected by the West of pursuing its own agenda, painstakingly collected these facts and figures about the Iranian scientists and passed them to the Iranian resistance.”

I asked Bar-Zohar’s research assistant, Nilly Ovnat, whether he had Israeli sources for those statements relating to the MEK and the laptop documents. She responded by e-mail: “Professor Bar Zohar had other sources for most of the material concerning MEK and Natanz [and the] laptop, yet they could not be mentioned and cannot be discussed.”

Bar-Zohar and Mishal are little concerned with whether the Mossad’s laptop caper involved fraud or not. They obviously view the Israeli intelligence agency’s use of an Iranian exile group to get out documents that had been central to the international sanctions regime against Iran as a great triumph. But whatever their reasons, their book adds another layer to the growing body of evidence showing that the Bush administration and its allies hoodwinked the rest of the world with those documents.

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

December 20, 2014 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Wrong prism to view Iran

During the last two years a number of opinion pieces have appeared in The Hill against Iran. These articles serve the interests and are written by the members and affiliates of a terrorist group known as the Mujahedeen-Khalq Organization (MEK). This group goes by various other names such as PMOI and NCRI and has an elaborate set of front groups and astroturf operations designed to allow them to operate in the U.S. while they were designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the U.S. Department of State and to create the illusion that they are part of some larger network of groups who are loyal to them.

These articles contain too many falsehoods and fabrications to address in one response, however, they are aimed at tarnishing the image of Iran and attacking the ongoing efforts to reach a final status agreement regarding the nuclear issue. The prospect of peaceful diplomatic conflict resolution frustrates those like the MEK who thrive on global volatility and need conflict in order to convince countries and interests to consider them needed and look past who they are. These articles also seek to create the impression that they are popular inside Iran. Many have refuted this and the State Department called them a “repressive cult despised by most Iranians and Iraqis.”

This group’s decades’ long history of terrorism against Iranian civilians is well documented by many including government institutions like the State Department and media outlets around the world. This group conspired with Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War even as Saddam was using Chemical weapons against Iranians and Kurds. They then became Saddam’s private militia and participated in the brutal suppression of the Kurds in the early1990s.

When the Washington Times recently wrote an article on them, the experts that the Times approached were unwilling to speak on the record. One told them that “it was unthinkable to speak openly against the NCRI because doing so would result in ‘death threats from this group.’”

Additionally, human rights groups have catalogues their cultic totalitarian disposition noting practices such as mandatory divorce so members can dedicate more time to the cause and their vast extrajudicial compound prison system.

This group only recently managed to have themselves removed from the U.S. list of foreign terrorist organizations after a multi-million dollar lobbying campaign, which the Rand Corporation characterized as “cultic practices” and “deceptive recruitment”; an effort that they continue today in The Hill. We understand that positions expressed in opinion articles published by The Hill do not necessarily represent those of the publishers, but we are confounded as to why your publication would make its coveted platform so routinely available to the propaganda of a terrorist cult or its bought off the rack series of front groups and shills.

The concept that this group would be capable of some sort of positive contribution to Iran’s future or U.S. policy towards Iran is greatly offensive to the Iranian people and the group’s many victims and their families.

Hamid Babaei,

Babaei is counselor and head of the Press Office for the Mission of the Islamic Republic of Iran to the UN.

December 15, 2014 0 comments

The cult of Rajavi

Dear Washington: Kick Out This Iranian Militant Cult

In the war of words on Iran’s domestic issues and controversial nuclear program, the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK) always is front and center to condemn the country. The MEK is known by many monikers: the People’s Mojahedin of Iran (PMOI), Mojahedin-e Khalq Organization (MKO), but is best known by the multifaceted National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI). Through social media, the group spams most Iran-related hashtags with their propaganda, bankroll prominent U.S. officials to advocate on their behalf as the “democratic alternative” to the Islamic Republic of Iran, and even re-opened an office a block from the White House where they hired former Senator Robert Torricelli (D-N.J.) as their legal representative.

None of these points would be problematic if it weren’t for the fact that the European Union and United States formerly designated the Iraq-based MEK as a terrorist organization for its past activities. What makes this realization peculiar is the very people in Congress that cozy up to the group’s leader, Maryam Rajavi, by calling for staunch sanctions–sometimes even war–on Iran due to its nuclear program and particularly human rights violations, seem to turn a blind eye to the activities of the totalitarian cult of Marxist-Islamist Iranian dissidents we know today as the MEK.

The amount of misinformation circulated by their public relations is disturbing and it’s time to expose their true nature.

Not A Champion of Iranian Women

To this day, the followers of the Mojahedin-e Khalq and its apologists dismiss it is a cult and continue to refer to their group as a “deeply democratic organization whose guiding principle on all issues is referendum and discussion until a consensus is reached.” Despite denials, its conduct tells otherwise as cited by a RAND report: deceptive recruitment, emotional isolation, extreme degrading peer pressure, forced labor, imprisonment, lack of exit options, sexual control, sleep deprivation, and physical abuse.

Maryam Rajavi’s marriage to one of the original founders of the MEK symbolized the transformation from an organization to a “cult of personality.” With the money provided by Iraqi President Saddam Hussein–they formed an alliance due to a deep disdain for the Iranian regime–to “construct self-sufficient camps” which included: medical clinics, prisons (also known as “reeducation centers”), schools, and training centers, in order for the population not to engage with outside society. Additionally, prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, members of the Mojahedin carried cyanide tablets around their neck to avoid capture. Self-immolation and suicide reportedly are a popular form of political protest amongst members.

With knowledge of this publically available, it is difficult to take them serious. But what is truly an affront to women is when Rajavi and her supporters claim they offer a better alternative to the current women’s rights situation in in Iran.

In a recent op-ed for The Hill, Soona Samsami a representative of the NCRI expresses:

“Rajavi has outlined a Ten Point Plan for Future Iran, which says, ‘We believe in complete gender equality in political, social and economic arenas. We are also committed to equal participation of women in political leadership. Any form of discrimination against women will be abolished. They will enjoy the right to freely choose their clothing.’”

Even though the group promotes leadership positions for women, in order to impose “military” regulations on its members, the MEK forces them not only to move into gender-segregated compounds, but also cut ties with family and friends–both inside and outside of the commune. They even require members to divorce their spouses and to live a life of celibacy. It is presumed that love for family and significant others would be replaced with love for the Rajavis.

Last but not least, when it came to attire for women, journalist Elizabeth Rubin notes:

“Everywhere I saw women dressed exactly alike, in khaki uniforms and mud-colored head scarves, driving back and forth in white pickup trucks, staring ahead in a daze as if they were working at a factory in Maoist China.”

Iran’s women rights record is problematic, but this is not and should never be considered the alternative, even momentarily.

Listen To Iranians

While Samsami says “Young women in Iran find true inspiration in the main opposition” that is Maryam Rajavi, the group has not won an audience with the Iranian people at home in Tehran.

Not only has the Mojahedin-e Khalq lost its support because of its alliance with Saddam during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s–an insult to the Iranian people’s nationalism–but also for its position against Iran’s nuclear program, something the average Iranian sees as their legitimate right. Many Iranians convey the group is “worse than the mullahs” or along the lines of what some Iranian democracy activists claim that “if it had had the chance, [the MEK] could have become the Khmer Rouge of Iran.”

With that in mind, there is no chance the MEK could win over the Iranian people if a potential regime change took place–something various legislators in the United States need to recognize.

It’s time the MEK’s blind proponents see them for what they really are: a sham.

Holly Dagres,

December 14, 2014 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq Organization's Propaganda System

Rajavi’s Cyber Army: The MEK’s Twitter Legions

When confronting the Mujahedeen/Mojahedin Khalq, or MEK, MKO, etc, a crucial aspect of it which has been repeatedly overlooked, is its online activities. While there is an abundance of information and readily available studies revealing the cultic nature of the group (which the neocons consistently ignore) and the “limited exit options” (to put it mildly) it offers the members once entering the organisation, few have stopped to point out another aspect of this bizarre organisation – maybe because the knee-jerk reaction of many expat members is to brand them an “agent of the mullahs”.

The public face of the faux-dissident group is, of course, the charismatic, beaming face of Maryam Rajavi. She is an impressive orator, conversant not only in her native Persian, but also in fluent French and English, and supremely confidant, an impressive saleswoman for any group. Her ostensible support for democracy, coupled with these factors, makes supporting her and her organisation more than tempting for many western politicians, who simply see the enemy of their enemy as an immediate friend.

Online, Mrs Rajavi would appear to be just as vibrantly abuzz with followers and interest as she tries to portray herself to be offline. She has several Twitter accounts which ceaselessly promote her statements and messages, which are posted on several different websites (just in case you didn’t see the first few million posts emphasising them) on the MEK’s official website (which is of course, mojahedin.org), on the website for the unofficial MEK political wing (the ‘National Council of Resistance’), and on her own personal website. Translations are in English, French, Farsi and Arabic.

For someone who hasn’t exactly won Hassan Rouhani’s seat yet (although her and her husband have had a damn good try), her website gives the impression that, far from leading an organisation widely hated by Iranians, she’s halfway there – a multitude of tabs are devoted to her views, works and statements, photographs of crowds of supporters bearing the images of herself and her husband appear, she is shown in videos sitting and giving statements, you name it. Her branch of the “resistance”, in reality, has more presence among the diaspora than within Iran.

It’s when you start looking at her most basic of platforms, namely her English language Twitter profile, that something first strikes you as amiss. Some tweets are clearly posted by Maryam Herself, others possibly posted by her staff. Not that there’s anything wrong with that of course.

But take a look at those retweeting her, and those who very occasionally reply; those who can reply and challenge her views without being blocked after a period of time, that is. 90% of those retweeting her are accounts with nearly identical features.

Of course, when on the internet, like-minded people, especially those who strongly support parties or causes, will naturally act in a like-minded way; changing their pictures to similar ones, using similar backgrounds and slogans, etc.

But these accounts are literally identical in almost every respect. Similar pictures, similar slogans, similar lack of any personal touch whatsoever, and all devoted to either retweeting or paraphrasing Mrs Rajavi’s every word.

Don’t believe me? Check this one, ‘royaraha’, for example. This account has no description, a bland background of flowers with the avatar of a horse, 86 followers and devotes all its time to retweeting; the vast majority of its retweets are retweeting… Other accounts, also automaton-like. Then there’s another, Nakba Nejati, with an avatar of a killed MEK member, exactly 86 followers, no description, and devotes all its time to retweeting Maryam and other like-minded accounts; many, again, also automated. Here’s another, with the bland stock image of a bird, which is exactly the same as the previous two. Here’s another… and another… and another. There are literally hundreds, if not thousands of these accounts; some bearing pictures of Maryam Rajavi in abundance, some not. Some with descriptions praising the Rajavis and the MEK/NCRI, some without, yet with avatars depicting the two, and acting in exactly the same manner.

Long story short; Maryam isn’t retweeted by hundreds of adoring fans, but by hundreds (if not thousands) of seemingly automated accounts (“bots”, to internet-savvy types) save for the occasional account which may or may not be operated by the person they claim to be – like-minded activists, neocons and right-wing types who seem to genuinely want to believe in the group, etc. It was well known that the MEK has a very limited following within Iran, but I didn’t imagine that it was so irrelevant to the Iranian political climate that even the tweets of the leaders would need propping up with more falsehood and lies.

A shot of one of the automated accounts, frantically/automatically dedicated to retweeting Maryam.

To make matters worse, many of the MEK accounts are using the names, images, and personas of MEK members killed by the Iraqi and Iranian regimes. In other words, not only has the MEK thoroughly milked them for their ‘blood and breath’ (MEK members have to swear to give their breath to Massoud Rajavi, and blood to Maryam Rajavi) during their lives, but it continues to use them to further an agenda when they’re dead, too. Avatars of many of the accounts depict dead members, with one even seemingly using a screenshot from a ‘martyrdom’ video! One was also ostensibly ‘in memory’ of a fallen activist… Only to spend all its time retweeting Maryam & frantically retweeting ‘friends’ and fellow ‘martyrs’.

Here’s yet another account…

A possible source of these various cloned accounts becomes obvious when some wider reading is done. According to Iran Interlink, former MEK fighters resettled by the MEK in Albania and other nations continued to be harassed by the group into doing its bidding, and had to once again attempt to escape them, even though they had long since left the prison camp of Ashraf (named after Rajavi’s deceased wife). They were asked to ceaselessly post online propaganda for the group, despite no longer being members:

According to Iran interlink, Several Iranian residents in Europe who have contact with their friends in Tirana are now reporting that the MKO agents are exerting huge pressure on the disaffected members, who have been moved to another building block, to sign a petition against these fifty nine people and denounce them as “agents of the regime”. The MKO agents make efforts to buy the recently defected individuals in Albania back to the cult. Except for a few who have money from their families the rest must rely either on $200 per month from the UNHCR or alternatively the MEK will give them $500 per month on condition they work on the internet (to promote the MEK) and not work against them in any way. They threaten the refugees to death if they do not cooperate with them.

Thus, it seems like yet another vile twist has been added – that the MEK forces its mistreated members, which have ostensibly been freed from its grasp, to blindly retweet and comment ceaselessly online, from countries where they should be at last living in freedom and dignity, in support of the group which held them captive for so long.

It may not surprise those familiar with the MEK at all. Its policy of renting/coercing supporters into staging public acts of fealty (to the point of instructing members to set themselves alight in the streets should their beloved leaders come to any harm) comes in a variety of forms. To ensure that Maryam Rajavi’s annual mass “all for freedom” gathering doesn’t turn out to be a sparsely-populated washout, the MEK offers to bus willing students, activists, and anyone it can cajole into coming along – by offering them a “free” holiday to Paris, with all expenses paid, on condition that they come to the gathering to make its size seem impressive. The testimony of Alina Alymkulova, a Kyrgyz student, contains an overview of their methods. Here’s an outtake:

I arrived at a bus station in Prague along with a friend, a fellow student from Kyrgyzstan. Just as the trip organizer said last night, there were eight buses waiting to take us to Paris.

Most of the “protesters” were young and obviously students like me. I met many Russians, Ukrainians, Czechs, and students from Asian countries who were all recruited via the Internet.

More than an hour later we were still at the bus station. People kept coming. It was cold and rainy, and some people began to drink alcohol to keep warm. Some others started to chant slogans: “Freedom to Iranian parrots!” and “Organizers should bring beer!”

I approached two Russian girls to see if they might have a better idea about the purpose of our trip. “To defend the rights of Iranian women,” said one of the girls. “To meet handsome Frenchmen,” said the other. “Who cares about Iranian women?“

As we can see, the MEK offers “limited exit options” not only to its own imprisoned members in Camp Liberty, but also to anyone attending its large “gathering” (drawn more from foreigners than Iranians) in the free world too.

1:16 p.m.: The buses took us to some strange place not far from Charles de Gaulle Airport. We were given papers explaining where to go and what to do. Cameras were not allowed. As we exited the bus, I resigned myself to the idea that running away was not an option — people were guarding the area.

In another instances, for demonstrations around Europe and America, the MEK has paid an array of people – from miscellaneous citizens to beggars – to go to their demonstrations and don disconcerting t-shirts showing pictures of the would-be Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu, in order to beef up the size of their demonstrations.

An African-American beggar, part of the MEK’s rented crowd at a demonstration in front of the UN headquarters in New York. When asked about why she was there, she claimed that she was offered “20 dollars and a meal”.

It isn’t just the demonstrators who are often hired to go to these events either. Speakers are paid tens of thousands of dollars to speak on behalf of the group for as little as a few minutes. The MEK’s speakers in the past have even included figures such as former New York Mayor Rudi Guliani, former house speaker Newt Gingrich, and Vermont Governor Howard Dean. In other words, neocons who see the enemy of their enemy (the Iranian regime) as a firm friend. According to CSM, their methods of hiring speakers are as follows:

“‘Your speech agent calls, and says you get $20,000 to speak for 20 minutes. They will send a private jet, you get $25,000 more when you are done, and they will send a team to brief you on what to say.’ . . . The contracts can range up to $100,000 and include several appearances.”

Such big money seems to have been crucial in the de-listing of the group as a terrorist organisation (it was backlisted in 1997) in September 2012 by Hilary Clinton, then Secretary of State.

An Iranian flag, thrown in the bin by someone at Rajavi’s “gathering”. Presumably by one of the hired “demonstrators”.

Former Pennsylvania governor Rendel, among others put under investigation for receiving money from the MEK prior to delisting, may have received up to $150,000 for around eight appearances. True to form, the bottomless pockets of the MEK were not only filled by the diaspora, but largely from of payments dished out by the then-genocidal war chest of Saddam Hussein. Israel too, has used the MEK as mercenaries, in exchange for MEK assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists. Funding has also come from the UAE and Saudi Arabia, which previously used the MEK as auxiliaries with which they hoped to carve up Iran, should the MEK’S charge of the Rajavi brigade have been successful in 1998.

In short, as long as the MEK continues to have no traction within Iran, no amount of bots will save it from the murderous irrelevance that it increasingly finds itself plunged into.

Ben Allinson-Davies, Unfettered Freedom For All!

December 4, 2014 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

The Islamic State (ISIS) is “America’s Dream Rebel Army”

US policy paper reveals desire for construction of full-scale extraterritorial army to invade Syria. Such an army is being built in Iraq and Turkey and it’s called “ISIS.”

The corporate-financier funded and directed policy think tank, the Brookings Institution, has served as one of several prominent forums documenting and disseminating US foreign policy. It would host in part the architects of the so-called “surge” during the nearly decade-spanning US occupation of Iraq, as well as battle plans for waging a covert war against Iran now well under way.

Part of this covert war against Iran involved the arming and backing of listed terrorist groups, and in particular, the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (MEK) which has killed US servicemen, American civilians, as well as countless innocent Iranians over the decades. Among those signing their name to this plan found within Brookings’ “Which Path to Persia?” report, was Kenneth Pollack. Now, in efforts to overthrow the government of Syria, also a stated and integral part of undermining, isolating, and destroying Iran, Pollack has revealed another element of the plan – to create a full-scale proxy military force outside of Syria, then subsequently invading and occupying Syria with it.

In the report titled, “Building a Better Syrian Opposition Army: How and Why,” Pollack cites the so-called “Islamic State” or “ISIS” as the ultimate impetus for expanded US intervention. However, upon looking at Pollack’s proposal, it merely looks as if the US is using ISIS as a pretext to more overtly intervene in order to overthrow the government of Syria – not in fact neutralize ISIS.

After a considerable preamble assuring readers that the aim of creating a “better Syrian opposition army” would exclude sectarian extremists and result in the same “success” the US had in training the Iraqi army, the document explains:

…building a new Syrian army is best not done in Syria itself. At least not at first. The program would need the time and sanctuary to perform the necessary training, reorganization, sorting and socialization into a new Syrian army without the distractions and pressures of Syria itself. The Saudi offer to provide facilities to train 10,000 Syrian opposition fighters is one of reasonable possibility, although one of Syria’s neighbors would probably be preferable. Jordan already serves as training ground for America’s current training program and it would be an ideal locale to build a real Syrian army. However, Turkey could also conceivably serve that purpose if the Turks were willing.

Clearly, not only is this already being done as admitted by Pollack himself, it is being done on a scale already eclipsing Pollack’s alleged plan – the only difference is it is being done through the use of sectarian extremists – not the imaginary, nonexistent secular professionals Pollack uses as a marketing gimmick to sell this scheme.

More tellingly, Pollack’s plan continues by stating (emphasis added):

In addition to being armed, trained and officered like a conventional military, a new Syrian army would also have to be equipped like one. That would mean not just small arms and crew-served weapons, such as the United States and its allies are already providing, but heavy weapons and logistical support. Like the Croats and Bosniaks, a new Syrian army will need the wherewithal to defeat both the regime and the Islamist extremists. That will require tanks, armored personnel carriers, artillery, surface-to-air missiles and the like to match the regime’s own heavy weapons—and so eliminate the firepower imbalance that the regime’s forces have employed to such advantage so far.

Surely, Pollack’s plan will never materialize in any practical dimension – however it may be possible to use such a marketing ploy to pour more resources into both the ongoing proxy war against Syria and Iran in general, and more specifically into the terrorist battalions already being armed, funded, trained, equipped, and sent off from Jordan and Turkey into Syrian territory. Handing advanced weapon systems into the hands of front groups consisting of intentionally ineffectual, immensely corrupt, incompetent US proxies is as good as handing the weapons directly to ISIS – and of course – this is precisely how the US is building its actual “new opposition army” – namely, in the form of ISIS itself.

Removing Pollack’s rhetoric about secular professionals, and inserting “ISIS” reveals Pollack’s paper as the actual already ongoing plan to overrun not only Syria, but pro-Iranian factions in Iraq, and perhaps even Iran itself. ISIS is a massive mercenary army trained and funded abroad by the US with its support laundered via Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan, and Turkey, staged along Syria’s borders in both Jordan and Turkey, and acquiring an impressive arsenal just as what is required in Pollack’s plan to enter into and overthrow the government of Syria – minus eradicating extremists of course.

Even a cursory look at ISIS’ holdings across the region reveal ratlines leading into NATO-member Turkey’s territory and all along the Turkish-Syrian border where news outlets like the New York Times and Washington Post have reported for years the CIA had been operating – unloading billions in aid, gear, weapons, and even vehicles to militants fighting within Syria.

Headlines over the past 3-4 years including, “C.I.A. Said to Aid in Steering Arms to Syrian Opposition,” “First Syria rebels armed and trained by CIA ‘on way to battlefield’,” “Arms Airlift to Syria Rebels Expands, With Aid From C.I.A.,” and “Official says CIA-funded weapons have begun to reach Syrian rebels; rebels deny receipt,” reveal precisely how ISIS acquired its vast resources.

ISIS is organized on a professional level precisely as described by Pollack, most likely the result of US military advisers and their counterparts in Saudi and Qatari special operations. ISIS is also heavily armed precisely as was required by Pollack’s plan. They now possess an impressive and ever growing arsenal of weapons including tanks, missiles of all kinds, artillery, and even a small collection of aircraft including Russian warplanes and American helicopters.

The New York Times, after years of reporting on the CIA’s delivery of weapon systems to “moderate” militants, now laments of ISIS’ possession of advanced anti-air missiles. In its article, “Missiles of ISIS May Pose Peril for Aircrews in Iraq,” it reports:

Syrian rebels have amassed multiple Manpad models since 2012, and the Islamic State has generally had little trouble acquiring any weapon used by Syrian rebels either through purchase or capture, military analysts say.

Iraqi troops – the result of what Pollack claims as an American “success” – have also augmented ISIS with precisely the weapons needed for Pollack’s dream “opposition army.” No less than 30 M1 Abrams main battle tanks have fallen into ISIS’ hands.

Prolific Neo-Conservative propagandist Michael Weiss in the Wall Street Journal attempts to downplay the implications of such weapons falling into ISIS’ hands by stating in his op-ed titled, “Exploiting the ISIS Vulnerabilities in Iraq – The terrorists’ heavy military equipment is hard to maintain, easy to target from the air,” that:

Today, we estimate that ISIS has less than a total of 30 working M1 Abrams tanks and howitzers that are either self-propelled or towed behind trucks (based on our knowledge of how the Iraqi army is equipped and what divisions were in the north). These are the weapons that gave the Islamic State the advantage over the Peshmerga in recent firefights. Yet ISIS does not have the highly trained maintenance crews that are necessary to keep these weapons in good working order. The same problem exists for its armored Humvees and Mine Resistant Ambush Protected personnel carriers. Without maintenance, these captured U.S. vehicles and weapons will break down.

Only, ISIS’ Saudi, Qatari, and Jordanian sponsors most definitely do possess the highly trained maintenance crews necessary to keep these weapons in good working order – since these despotic regimes each in turn possess a large number of exactly these weapon systems purchased from the United States itself. If the Saudis in particular, can fund, train, and arm ISIS with small arms and missiles, how difficult would it be to supply them with spare parts and properly trained maintenance crews? Turkey also maintains a number of US weapon systems, and possesses the ability to maintain modern battle tanks if not the M1 specifically – and is already harboring, supplying, and backing ISIS – another inconvenient truth challenging Weiss’ attempts to mislead readers.

In fact, Pollack’s “proposal” appears more like an after-action report. ISIS is the “better Syrian opposition army” the West has sought all along. That is probably why attempts by the US to “fight” ISIS appear half-hearted and why those the US is supposedly “saving” from ISIS see Western intervention as more of a threat than ISIS itself believing it is designed simply to prolong ISIS’ existence in the face of growing and increasingly more formidable indigenous opposition.

Any provisions to build Pollack’s “army” will undoubtedly end up only bolstering ISIS and its affiliates – just as military aid policymakers like Pollack at Brookings advocated for the arming of “moderates” resulted in the creation of ISIS in the first place. While the US desperately attempts to disown responsibility for ISIS’ creation and perpetuation through an unconvincing propaganda campaign, false flag terror strikes against the “homeland,” and a series of increasingly ludicrous, orchestrated strawman victories in Iraq and Syria – Damascus, Baghdad, and Tehran are leading the real fight against ISIS.

The US apparently plans on protecting ISIS for as long as possible under the guise of being the sole force “fighting it,” while ISIS consolidates and moves on Western designated targets. In the process of “fighting” ISIS, the US is managing to destroy Syrian infrastructure and defenses. The US, however, has failed in attempts to exclude Syrian, Iraqi, and Iranian forces from countering the ISIS threat and now the region is witnessing a race between ISIS’ inevitable destruction and America’s attempts to topple Damascus before ISIS vanishes from its geopolitical toolbox.

Tony Cartalucci, Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

globalresearch.ca

November 13, 2014 0 comments

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