The State Department is now in the process of determining whether the MEK should be removed from the list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations, a designation that was given to the MEK 17 years ago, when the department first began such designations. In the 1970s, the MEK aka MKO/PMOI assassinated three U.S. military officers and three American contractors
Mark Dankof and Mark Glenn discuss the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (MEK), its cultic character, its blood-stained history since the 1960’s, its present relationship to Israeli intelligence, its current trail of violent crimes in Iran, and the sordid money trail leading from the Israeli Lobby and the MEK to key figures in the American political establishment seeking to have the MEK delisted from the State Department list of terrorist organizations.
the MEK engaged in terrorism against Americans and that it has embraced a fiercely anti-Western ideology. Proponents of delisting the MEK, however, argue that the group has not engaged in terrorism against the United States or its interests for decades. The State Department may eventually be forced by the letter of the law to delist the MEK. That does not mean the group is entitled to any American support. The group’s culpability in recent terrorist attacks in Iran is murkier. ..
MEK’s supporters have included Andrew Card, Howard Dean, John Bolton, Rudy Giuliani, Bill Richardson, Wesley Clark, and many others. And the MEK has treated some of them very nicely. According to a March report by NBC’s Michael Isikoff, pro-MEK speakers can earn up to”$30,000 or more per talk and first-class flights to European capitals.”(The office of former Pennsylvannia Governor Ed Rendell, just one such speaker, told Isikoff that he’d earned $160,000 in 2011 ..
America has had a long-standing love affair with terrorists. Support for terrorist groups and governments has been part and parcel of American policy. According to William Odom, President Reagan’s former NSA Director, terrorism is a tactic with the having a long record of supporting terrorists. But what is unique and novel about romancing the MEK is the political elite’s brazen public display of support for the group[MKO/MEK/PMOI],..
Where does an organization based in an Iraqi refugee camp for the last 25 years get so much money? While MEK has organized rallies and campaigns to have it delisted as a terrorist group in the past, it has never, by all accounts, spent the amount of money it has over the past year.Currently, there are rumors that the Israeli secret service is paying MEK to carry out assassinations..Israel would not be the first government to pay for MEK’s military expertise
The MEK aka MKO/PMOI has forsaken its anti-Western and radical Islamist roots, and promotes itself as a secular, democratic government-in-waiting – to its Western backers. But at its base in a refugee camp in Iraq it enforces strict discipline – celibacy, limited sleep, no electronic communication, forced divorce for married members, and a personality cult surrounding its leader . Human Rights Watch has accused it of severe human rights violations.
in determining whether MEK belongs on the Terrorist list, what conceivable difference should it make whether MEK is cooperative in moving from Camp Ashraf as the U.S. Government wants? What does their cooperation or lack thereof have to do with whether they are a Terrorist organization? The answer, of course, is that the U.S. list of Terrorist organizations (like its list of state sponsors of Terrorism) has little or nothing to do with who are and are not actually Terrorists..
The State Department is asking a U.S. appeals court to deny a suit that would force Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to decide, within 30 days, whether to remove an Iranian opposition group from the U.S. list of foreign terror organizations.The group, the Mujahadin-e Khalq aka MEK/PMOI/MKO, was placed on the terror list in 1997 because of the deaths of Americans during attacks in the 1970s ..
there were no MEK signs or banners at the event, as one usually sees wherever the MEK is camped out. .. Congressional aides attended the event on Thursday in the hearing room both out of curiosity and hunger for free food. But multiple aides told The Cable the event was bizarre, even by Congressional standards.