USA

Should Washington”UNLEASH”Rajavi cult in Iraq?

According to a report by Telegraph, is secretly funding militant ethnic separatist groups in in an attempt to pile pressure on the Islamic Republic to give up its nuclear program.

In the past year there has been a wave of unrest in ethnic minority border areas of , with bombing and assassination campaigns against soldiers and government officials.

Such incidents have been carried out by the Kurds in the west, the Azeris in the northwest, the Ahwazi Arabs in the southwest, and the Baluchis in the southeast. Most Baluchis live over the border in .

Although Washington officially denies involvement in such activity, Teheran has long said to detect the hand of both and in attacks by guerrilla groups on its internal security forces. Last Monday, publicly hanged a man, Nasrollah Shanbe Zehi, for his involvement in a bomb attack that killed 11 Revolutionary Guards in the city of Zahedan in Sistan-Baluchistan.

An unnamed local official told the semi-official Fars news agency that weapons used in the attack were British and U.S.-made. John Pike, the head of the influential Global Security think tank in Washington , said: "The activities of the ethnic groups have hotted up over the last two years and it would be a scandal if that was not at least in part the result of CIA activity."

The Baluchistan-based Brigade of God group, which last year kidnapped and killed eight Iranian soldiers, is a volatile Sunni organization that many fear could easily turn against Washington after taking its money.

A row has also broken out in Washington over whether to "unleash" the military wing of the Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK), an Iraq-based Iranian opposition group with a long and bloody history of armed opposition to the Iranian government.

The group is currently listed by the U.S. State Department as terrorist organization, but Mr. Pike said: "A faction in the Defense Department wants to unleash them. They could never overthrow the current Iranian government but they might cause a lot of damage."

Telegraph, February 25, 2007

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/02/25/wiran25.xml

March 1, 2007 0 comment

USA

Armed mercenaries; Warmongers’ Last Resort

There’s no doubt that recent unrest and terrorist activities in the eastern and western borders of Iran have been done with foreign backing. This has been admitted by Americans themselves. By allocating budgets against Iran and forming offices for espionage and recruiting spies against Iran, they try to expand their interferences.

Movements of CIA and Pentagon to create unrest and covert violent activities are acts documented during the past decades.

That we occasionally hear the name of terrorist MKO and Pentagon’s use of this organization doesn’t mean that they only rely on this terrorist group to destabilize the country. In fact, it means that Pentagon and Neocons, as pioneers of warmongering against Iran, use all possible means, including the gang of Rigi, Pezhak and criminal cult of Rajavi.

Sunday Telegraph has pointed to the ties between Pentagon and terrorist group of MKO. Recent comments of Dick Cheney also show that warmongers are determined to harm Iranians and inflict considerable damages.

In part of its article, Sunday Telegraph writes:

"A row has also broken out in Washington over whether to "unleash" the military wing of the Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK), an Iraq-based Iranian opposition group with a long and bloody history of armed opposition to the Iranian regime.

The group is currently listed by the US state department as terrorist organization, but Mr Pike said: "A faction in the Defense Department wants to unleash them. They could never overthrow the current Iranian regime but they might cause a lot of damage."

At present, none of the opposition groups are much more than irritants to Teheran, but US analysts believe that they could become emboldened if the regime was attacked by America or Israel.

It’s notable that despite all its efforts to be known as an alternative, the MKO is not considered a proper choice even in the eyes of those who support the idea of using them, but they’re considered as armed mercenaries who can create chaos and unrest".

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Sunday Telegraph, "US funds terror groups to sow chaos in Iran", Feb. 25, 2007

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Iran didban, February 27, 2007

March 1, 2007 0 comment

USA

Scooter Libby and World War III

How the Libby trial could impact US foreign policy

Cowed into funding a war neither they nor the majority of Americans believe in, congressional Democrats are taking the line that what’s needed are some "benchmarks" “ well-defined criteria by which to assess whether our efforts are paying off. The idea is to make continued U.S. support contingent on the Iraqis measuring up to these benchmarks. Hillary Clinton even says we should withdraw aid providing for the security of elected Iraqi political leaders if they fail to make the grade. Now that’s a way to kill someone off without leaving any fingerprints! (And a good lesson to any other would-be U.S. sock puppets who think they can take the money and run.)

The big problem with this approach, however, is that it fails to understand the dynamics of our continued presence in Iraq. In testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee given on Feb. 1, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the hawkish former national security adviser to Jimmy Carter, made a statement that should have set off alarm bells and sent everyone rushing for the lifeboats:

"If the United States continues to be bogged down in a protracted bloody involvement in Iraq, the final destination on this downhill track is likely to be a head-on conflict with Iran and with much of the world of Islam at large. A plausible scenario for a military collision with Iran involves Iraqi failure to meet the benchmarks; followed by accusations of Iranian responsibility for the failure; then by some provocation in Iraq or a terrorist act in the U.S. blamed on Iran; culminating in a ‘defensive’ U.S. military action against Iran that plunges a lonely America into a spreading and deepening quagmire eventually ranging across Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan."

Every moment we stay in Iraq increases the likelihood of war with Iran “ that, in my view, is the most powerful argument, aside from this one, for a rapid withdrawal. No sooner had Brzezinski uttered these words than the administration began a concerted campaign to blame the Iranians for U.S. failure in Iraq, and accused Tehran of having a direct hand in the killing of American troops.

We hear much about these accusations on the front pages of American newspapers, but what we don’t hear about are acts of terrorism directed at both civilian and military targets by Iranian "dissidents," who are reportedly receiving covert U.S. assistance. These groups include the Jundallah organization in Baluchistan, said to be affiliated with al-Qaeda, and the sinister, cult-like Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK), a shadowy Marxoid group that was supported by Saddam Hussein and still maintains a presence at Camp Ashraf [.pdf] in Iraq, as well as enjoying a wide array of bipartisan support in Congress.

Jundallah recently struck southeastern Iran, in Sistan-Baluchistan, with a series of attacks, including a car bomb in the provincial capital of Zahedan. The Iranians claim that the Jundallah militants are trained in Pakistan, and Iran has displayed samples of alleged captured armaments with "Made in USA" stamped all over them. The leader of Jundallah reportedly announced the attacks on MKO-TV, the satellite television station run out of Great Britain by the MEK, a few minutes before they started.

In an interview with the Telegraph, a Jundallah guerrilla fighter sounded very much like he was advertising his services to U.S. policymakers:

"Asked whether the satellite telephone he was holding might not lead to his being located, he allowed himself a smile. ‘We are not fighting against America,’ he said. Support for Jundallah was growing, he said. ‘There are hundreds of others who are desperate to sign in, but we ask them to wait because we do not have enough weapons or camps.’"

That was last year: surely by this time the Jundallah "freedom fighters" have more than enough weapons and camps, courtesy of Uncle Sam. Scott Ritter, in his book Target Iran: The Truth About the White House’s Plans for Regime Change, has described CIA-MEK cross-border operations, in which the Americans “ and the Israelis “ are conducting provocations that could lead to an open conflict with Iran. The focus of these efforts, he says, is on Baluchistan and Khuzestan.

With strong bipartisan support, Congress recently appropriated millions of dollars in aid to Iranian "resistance" groups, with practically no oversight as to how that money is being used “ and the scramble for American gold is on. The American front group for the MEK, the National Council of Resistance, has plenty of high-level contacts in Washington, just as Ahmed Chalabi did in the run-up to war with Iraq. The MEK and other Iranian exile groups are busily lobbying for a similar gig as the administration escalates its plans for "regime change" in Tehran.

The Iraqi government has recently reiterated its position that the MEK is a terrorist organization, an opinion shared by the European Union and the U.S. Department of State. However, not everyone in the U.S. administration agrees. And what are we to make of the near-total redaction of a mysterious document that came to light in the Libby trial “ a memo to Libby from John Hannah detailing "views of MEK leaders on continuing role in Iraq"? That’s all we’re allowed to know: aside from a reference to MEK briefing slides, the rest is blanked out.

The Office of the Vice President (OVP), which sponsored Chalabi, is just as intimately connected to the campaign to gin up a war with Iran as it was with the effort to lie us into war with Iraq. It is reasonable to assume the OVP is just as supportive of the MEK, and may even be directing its activities in collusion with its allies in the Pentagon.

Given that U.S. foreign policy is, to a large degree, driven by domestic politics, the motive on the part of the administration to escalate provocative covert actions inside Iran has never been greater. With Scooter Libby likely to be convicted and Fitzgerald’s sights increasingly turned on Cheney, the War Party, cornered, has every reason to lash out in one last desperate bid to save its political skin.

Fitzgerald, by all indications, is coming for Cheney. After the trial but before the sentencing, Fitz will make a strenuous effort to "flip" Scooter and use his testimony to target the vice president. Murray Waas reports in the National Journal that Cheney wasn’t taken in with Libby’s Tim Russert fabrication for a moment:

"At the time that Libby offered his explanation to Cheney, the vice president already had reason to know that Libby’s account to him was untrue, according to sources familiar with still-secret grand jury testimony and evidence in the CIA leak probe."

The Fitzgerald probe is a dagger pointed at the dark heart of the administration, the OVP, and the climactic moment of this epic battle is fast approaching. In the early days of the investigation, left-liberal bloggers were exulting in the possibility that they would see Karl Rove frog-marched out of the White House, but the trial has shown that Rove and Libby were antagonists rather than allies. Before it’s all over we may yet see the vice president frog-marched out of the White House “ at least metaphorically, in the form of an indictment with Dick Cheney’s name on it.

What better way to distract attention away from this coming political bombshell than by dropping some real bombs on Iran?

In the midst of the regional conflagration feared by Brzezinski, prosecuting the Vice President for obstruction of justice and/or perjury would be problematic, at best. In any case, the widening of the war would drive the story off the front pages “ think of this as a grand-scale version of Clinton’s bombing of the Sudanese pharmaceutical factory just as the Monica Lewinsky was returning to the grand jury.

U.S. war plans against Iran have apparently been in the making for quite some time, but the ratcheting-up of both the rhetoric and the actual war preparations indicates a new level of seriousness on the part of this administration. While most reports reassure us that the decision to go to war has not yet been made, one wonders what turn of events would push the key decision-makers, Bush and Cheney, over the line. A direct threat to one “ or both “ of them coming out of the Libby trial may be all the impetus they need. A cornered rat is dangerous.

by Justin Raimondo – February 21, 2007

February 26, 2007 0 comment

USA

US sponsored terrorism? Let’s hope not!

I think people should be very concerned about the following:

"A car loaded with explosives blew up near a bus carrying members of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards in southeastern Iran, killing 18 of them, the state-run news agency reported today.

The car stopped in front of the bus near Zahedan, the capital of Sistan-Baluchestan Province, the official Islamic Republic News Agency reported.

It called the attack a terrorist operation and said the car’s occupants fled on motorbikes seconds before the car exploded.

"This blind terrorist operation led to the martyrdom of 18 citizens of Zahedan," IRNA quoted a Guards commander, Qasem Rezaei, as saying.

State-run television said the bus had been taking them to work when the attack took place. There was no immediate claim of responsibility but Rezaei blamed "insurgents and elements of insecurity" for the attack. Hossein Ali Shahriyari, a deputy representing Zahedan, told an open session of the parliament today that "insurgents and drug traffickers" were behind the attack.

Shahriyari called lawless regions in southwestern Pakistan a safe haven for Iranian insurgents and drug traffickers, and called on the government to take up the issue with Islamabad."

Why should we be concerned?

"The Pentagon is bypassing official US intelligence channels and turning to a dangerous and unruly cast of characters in order to create strife in Iran in preparation for any possible attack, former and current intelligence officials say.

One of the operational assets being used by the Defense Department is a right-wing terrorist organization known as Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK), which is being "run" in two southern regional areas of Iran. They are Baluchistan, a Sunni stronghold, and Khuzestan, a Shia region where a series of recent attacks has left many dead and hundreds injured in the last three months.

One former counterintelligence official, who wished to remain anonymous due to the sensitivity of the information, describes the Pentagon as pushing MEK shortly after the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The drive to use the insurgent group was said to have been advanced by the Pentagon under the influence of the Vice President’s office and opposed by the State Department, National Security Council and then-National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice.

-snip-

According to all three intelligence sources, military and

intelligence officials alike were alarmed that instead of securing a

known terrorist organization, which has been responsible for acts of

terror against Iranian targets and individuals all over the world –

including US civilian and military casualties

– Rumsfeld under instructions from Cheney, began using the group on

special ops missions into Iran to pave the way for a potential Iran

strike.

They are doing whatever they want, no oversight at all," one intelligence source said."

and the below is just one example of a policy to support terrorists for use as proxy groups:

"Bomb blasts struck Iranian government buildings in the capital of an oil-rich border province, followed within hours by two other bombs in central Tehran, killing nine people, days before presidential elections."

I believed that the attacks by MEK had been halted in March of last year. If this attack is shown to be tied to MEK terrorists or any other "group" we are funding, arming, and training in the region, then the US will be implicated – even if we had nothing to do with the bombing directly.

Let’s use Al Qaeda and the US as an example to illustrate how the MEK-US relationship might look to Iranians:

Imagine that this morning you woke up to find that 18 US national guardsmen were assassinated on US soil via a car bomb on their way to a work facility. Now imagine that it was determined that Al Qaeda was behind the attack and that Syrian government officials were behind the funding, training, and harboring of this Al Qaeda cell. How would you react? Would you not see this as a declaration of war against our country? How then would this look to Iranian citizens if it turns out MEK or any other organization being run by Israel and the US is behind this attack?

We can only hope that the US backed groups had nothing to do with this bombing, but I fear given what we already know, the case against us is looking very strong.

Larisa Alexandrovna, February 16, 2007

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/larisa-alexandrovna/us-sponsored-terrorism-l_b_41191.html

February 19, 2007 0 comment

USA

On Cheney, Rumsfeld order

On Cheney, Rumsfeld order, US outsourcing special ops, intelligence to Iraq terror group, intelligence officials say

The Pentagon is bypassing official US intelligence channels and turning to a dangerous and unruly cast of characters in order to create strife in Iran in preparation for any possible attack, former and current intelligence officials say.

One of the operational assets being used by the Defense Department is a right-wing terrorist organization known as Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK), which is being “run” in two southern regional areas of Iran. They are Baluchistan, a Sunni stronghold, and Khuzestan, a Shia region where a series of recent attacks has left many dead and hundreds injured in the last three months.

“The MEK is run by a husband and wife team who were given bases in northern Baghdad by Saddam,” the intelligence official told RAW STORY. “The US army secured a key MEK facility 60 miles northwest of Baghdad shortly after the 2003 invasion, but they did not secure the MEK and let them basically be because [then Deputy Defense Secretary Paul] Wolfowitz was thinking ahead to Iran.”

Another former intelligence official added that the US military had detained as many as 3,500 members of MEK at Iraq’s Camp Ashraf since the start of the war, including the highest level ranking MEK leaders. Ashraf is about 60 miles west of the Iranian border.

This intelligence official, wishing to remain anonymous, confirmed the policy tensions and also described them as most departments on one side and the Pentegon on the other.

“We disarmed [the MEK] of major weapons but not small arms. [Secretary of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld was pushing to use them as a military special ops team, but policy infighting between their camp and Condi, but she was able to fight them off for a while,” said the intelligence official. According to still another intelligence source, the policy infighting ended last year when Donald Rumsfeld, under pressure from Vice President Cheney, came up with a plan to “convert” the MEK by having them simply quit their organization.

“These guys are nuts,” this intelligence source said. “Cambone and those guys made MEK members swear an oath to Democracy and resign from the MEK and then our guys incorporated them into their unit and trained them.”

Stephen Cambone is the Undersecretary of Defense Intelligence. His office did not return calls for comment.

According to all three intelligence sources, military and intelligence officials alike were alarmed that instead of securing a known terrorist organization, which has been responsible for acts of terror against Iranian targets and individuals all over the world – including US civilian and military casualties – Rumsfeld under instructions from Cheney, began using the group on special ops missions into Iran to pave the way for a potential Iran strike.

“They are doing whatever they want, no oversight at all,” one intelligence source said.

Indeed, Saddam Hussein himself had used the MEK for acts of terror against non-Sunni Muslims and had assigned domestic security detail to the MEK as a way of policing dissent among his own people. It was under the guidance of MEK ‘policing’ that Iraqi citizens who were not Sunni were routinely tortured, attacked and arrested.

Although the specifics of what the MEK is being used for remain unclear, a UN official close to the Security Council explained that the newly renamed MEK soldiers are being run instead of military advance teams, committing acts of violence in hopes of staging an insurgency of the Iranian Sunni population.

“We are already at war,” the UN official told RAW STORY.

Asked how long the MEK agents have been active in the region under the guidance of the US military civilian leadership, the UN official explained that the clandestine war had been going on for roughly a year and included unmanned drones run jointly by several agencies.

In a stunning repeat of pre-war Iraq activities, the Bush administration continues to publicly call for action and pursue diplomatic solutions to allegations that Iran is bomb-ready. Behind the scenes, however, the administration is already well underway and engaged in ground operations in Iran.

The British, however, are less enthused about a strike in Iran. British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw has called an American strike on Iran “inconceivable,” while Prime Minister Tony Blair has said he’s keeping all his options open. Asked about the MEK, a senior British intelligence official said that the Brits are not yet sure of what the situation on Iran’s southern border is, but vehemently condemned any joint activity with the terrorist organization.

“We don’t know who precisely is carrying out those attacks in the south but we believe it is MEK,” the British official said.

When asked if the US military is running the MEK, the source was careful to indicate that while there is a US unit in Iran gathering information, it’s difficult to say if they are in any way involved with MEK.

“The people who are inside Iran are from a US Special mission unit,” the source explained. “They are called by codenames, but would not be involved in the bomb blasts. They want to get in, get the intelligence and go out with anyone knowing they have been there. But the bomb blasts might be diversions away from the operations by this US special mission unit. The British are definitely not involved in any of this.”

Moreover, the British official expressed that any operations with MEK would violate their own military code and would absolutely not be tolerated.

“We have very strict rules and can’t go consorting with terrorists," the official added. "We did it in Northern Ireland. No more.”

April 13, 2006

February 19, 2007 0 comment

USA

How Not to Handle the Facts

How Not to Handle the Facts: Max Boot’s Pretzel Logic on Iran

Editor’s note: Los Angeles Times columnist Max Boot argued in an Oct. 25 column, “How to Handle Iran,” that America should aim to topple the Iranian government with cash infusions to guerrilla groups and, perhaps, with American military force. Boot is considered by many to be the “respectable” face of neo-conservatism. A senior fellow for national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and former editorial editor for The Wall Street Journal, he nimbly straddles the mainstream and neocon universes.

There are so many things wrong with Max Boot’s Los Angeles Times column, “How to Handle Iran,” one hardly knows where to begin.

But these “soft” measures aren’t the real deal anyway as far as Boot is concerned, as his column eventually makes clear. Washington needs to consider the option, he writes, “of going beyond peaceful measures to foment change.” Though ruling out an outright invasion, he advocates doing “to Iran what the Iranians are doing to us in Iraq,” that is, “funneling weapons and money to militias that are killing our soldiers.” Among the militias to which he advocates funneling weapons and money is the Mujahedin Khalq (MEK), an outfit Boot himself calls a “leftist political cult.” “Leftist” is euphemistic: The MEK is in fact a Stalinist political cult.

Boot mentions that the MEK “mounted attacks on Iran in the 1980s and 1990s from bases in Iraq,” but conveniently fails to mention that it was funded, supported and given cover throughout that period by Saddam Hussein himself. He also fails to mention that this group is on the State Department’s official list of terrorist organizations. (Several of Boot’s fellow neoconservatives have been campaigning for the MEK to be removed from that list, thus far unsuccessfully.)

It appears not to have occurred to Boot, or to the Mujahedin Khalq’s other conservative supporters, to find out what Iran’s human rights activists and democratic dissidents think of this “cult.” Not surprisingly, the MEK is held in near-universal disdain by those dissidents, precisely because it is a cult, a terrorist body and Stalinist in ideology—that is, undemocratic to the core. Either this contradiction hasn’t occurred to Boot or, worse, it simply doesn’t matter to him.

Likewise with what Boot calls “the only serious option left” when all is said and done: airstrikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities. What does Boot make of the fact that, without exception, every human rights activist and democratic dissident in Iran is categorically opposed to U.S. airstrikes on their country? Does this “inconvenient” fact simply not factor into Boot’s equation, or is it something that must be pushed aside in his calculus?

Whichever the case, Boot can’t have it both ways. Either he fancies himself a supporter of Iran’s democratic dissidents, in which case he has to confront the gaping discrepancies between his positions and theirs (on military strikes, on the MEK, on U.S. funding and on other issues), or he should drop the pretense of representing the views of Iran’s dissidents and frame his position in more honest terms.

As it turns out, Iran’s democratic dissidents have already solved this question for us, by making it clear that they want nothing to do with Boot’s neoconservative agenda. Boot and his fellow travelers would be well served to think through the implications of that fact.

Oct 31, 2006 – Truthdig -By Danny Postel and Nader Hashemi

[Danny Postel is senior editor of openDemocracy (http://www.opendemocracy.net/home/index.jsp) and the author of the forthcoming “Reading ‘Legitimation Crisis’ in Tehran: Iran and the Future of Liberalism” (Prickly Paradigm Press, December). Nader Hashemi is an Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellow in the department of political science at Northwestern University and the author of a forthcoming book on Iran and democracy.]

February 14, 2007 0 comment

USA

MKO and Iranian Chalabis

Spiegel Magazine has published an article, "The Second Iraq", in which discusses the issue of US’s support for Iranian opposition group, the MKO, to confront the Islamic Republic.

Rockefeller, the head of Senate’s Intelligence Committee, has recently expressed concern over the possibility of US’s action against Iran and the repetition of Iraqi story.

Pointing to Bush’s order to US forces in Iraq to shoot Iranian and Syrian agents in Iraq, Pentagon’s emphasis that Iranian agents were behind the deaths of 5 US forces in Karbala and the departure of second US aircraft carrier to the region, Spiegel writes that despite all these, the White House denies any effort to overthrow the rule of Mullahs.

Spiegel also points to Iran’s denial of interference in Iraq and that the US has delayed presentation of documents on Iranian involvement in Iraqis unrest, which were to be presented on last Thursday.

According to Spiegel, what’s more alarming here is the presence of a group of Iranian opposition in the State Department, the White House and Pentagon’s Iran office. This group claims to have documents on Iran’s nuclear activities in Arak.

Other claims of the group includes having documents on the role of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps in Najaf, secret documents from a group of physicists showing Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s efforts to acquire nuclear bomb and …

The group also claims to have a list of 30000 Iraqi politicians, army and police working for Iran.

Iranian Chalabis are Coming!

Iranian Chalabis are a source of intelligence whose accuracy is not known. This group includes people like Amir Abbas Fakhravar. He introduces himself as a leader of Student’s Independent Movement who has been tortured in prison.

Spiegel refers to his visit to the US senate and his meeting with James Woosely, the former head of CIA, and a number of senior Pentagon officials.

Although Fakhravar doesn’t like to be compared to Chalabi, Spiegel says they have both a common friend: Richard Perle, well-known conservative and one of Iraq war planners.

Spiegel also writes about the budget the Bush administration has allocated to regime change in Iran. In Dubail, London and Frankfurt, US experts on Iran are looking for revolutionary people like Fakhravar.

"It seems that Bush administration has also another plan: that if it can’t stop the production of nuclear bomb by Tehran, it should be careful not to allow the Mullahs get it," Spiegel writes.

Prominent political figures like James Baker and Henry Kissinger have warned the Bush administration that it should stop such supports because working on people like Fakhravar prevents making deal with Iran.

"Meanwhile, who’s this smart guy (Fakhravar)?" Spiegel asks.

The rumors in Washington indicate that he was an ordinary wrongdoer who accidentally met the students in Evin prison. Mr. Vali Nasr, Professor of Political Sciences and a prominent Iranian expert, says comments of Fakhravar are "sheer lies" and that nobody knows him.

However, Fakhravar is not the only reservist of the US, Alireza Jafarzadeh is another one.

According to Spiegel, Jafarzadeh is busy holding interview with Fox News Channel and has recently published his book "the threat of Iran".

During a controversial press conference in August 2002, Jafarzadeh revealed the uranium enrichment facilities in Natanz.

On the issue of MKO to which Jafarzadeh belongs, Spiegel refers to thousands of its members living in Camp Ashraf near Baghdad after US invasion and that they are ready to help US forces.

Terrorist Allies in the War on Terror?

In response to this question, Jafarzadeh laughs and says they enjoy unimaginable level of support.

They have also provided many details about Iranian agents’ interferences in Iraq.

In a press conference, Jafarzadeh claimed that Revolutionary Guards Corps distributes millions of dollars among Shiite paramilitaries in the border region of Shalamcheh.

They have also claimed that Iran uses the trucks, carrying materials for reconstruction of holy cities of Iraq, to transfer weapons; however, this has not been confirmed by any other sources.

"US’s bitter experience in Iraq should prevent American people from being convinced of the necessity of another war. However, in this issue, the US is influenced by MKO," the Spiegel writes.

Also citing an article in Congressional Quarterly, Spiegel says that Pentagon uses MKO members in Camp Ashraf for setting air targets in Iran.

It’s been said that these people are given new identities so that Washington can claim easily that they have never been terrorists.

According to Spiegel, there’s big difference between current time and when Iraq was attacked: unlike the previous time during which the American media showed sympathy with occupying Iraq, this time there’s no agreement.

Last Thursday, NY Times wrote that Bush can go to another war if he’s not careful and that he could bring a disaster to his country if the Congress doesn’t stop him.

Radio Farda – 2007/02/07

February 8, 2007 0 comment

USA

US Using Iran’s Opposition Group in Iraq

TEHRAN (Fars News Agency)- Camp Ashraf which is occupied by the Iraq-based Iranian opposition group the Mujahedine Khalq Organization (MKO) is sited more than 260km north of Baghdad.

This group resettled in Iraq in 1987 during the rule of Saddam Hussain. After Saddam was ousted in 2003, the US army gave protection to this camp which remains today.

The Iraqi coalition government headed by Shiite Ebrahim Al Jaafari and Nouri Al Maliki decided to expel MKO members from Iraq and close Camp Ashraf. However, none of these decisions have been implemented.

In this camp and in other Iraqi cities, there are between 4,000 and 5,000 MKO members and their families, with identities issued by the United Nations and the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) to facilitate their mobility inside Iraq.

Jalal Al Din Al Sagheer, a prominent figure in the Shiite coalition, has accused MKO members of supporting terrorist groups affiliated to the former regime.

He told Gulf News, "There is an Iraqi constitution which prohibits using the Iraqi territory to launch a series of cross-border attacks against neighboring countries and we are committed to this position."

Lubaid Abbawi, the undersecretary of the Iraqi Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said, "The MKO file must move fully to the responsibility of the Iraqi government and must not be a political agenda used by different politicians or parties."

In the light of American-Iranian conflict in Iraq and in the region it is unlikely that the American forces will submit Camp Ashraf to Al Maliki.

According to some leaks from Baghdad, Americans have begun to form special groups comprising MKO members to assist them to track Iranians in Iraqi cities, as well as to provide the US intelligence with a huge amount of information from inside Iran, especially with the escalation of the Iranian nuclear file. These measures came just after the launch of the new US strategy set by President George W Bush, which included reducing the Iranian influence in Iraq.

Hadi Al Ameri, leader of the Badr Organization of the Shiite Supreme Council, has accused the MKO of training terrorist elements and working to destabilize Iraq. Al Ameri affirmed the coming period will witness the exile of this Iranian opposition group from Iraqi territories.

The MKO group in Iraq has established political relations with prominent Shiite religious leaders who oppose the political process, the Mahmoud Al Hasani group in Karbala and the Jawad Al Khalisi group in Kadhimiya city, Baghdad.

February 5, 2007 0 comment

USA

The danger of Bush’s anti-Iran fatwa

The president’s decision to use force against Iranian "agents" inside Iraq could snare innocent pilgrims, and raises the risk of open warfare.

Jan. 30, 2007 | George W. Bush last week announced that American troops in Iraq were henceforth authorized to "kill or capture" any Iranian intelligence agents they discovered in Iraq. The announcement came on the heels of his pledge in the State of the Union address to bring another aircraft carrier into the Persian Gulf, a move that clearly targeted Iran. A prominent Iranian parliamentarian responded to Bush’s threat by saying, "Such an order is a clear terrorist act and against all internationally acknowledged norms." Iraq’s deputy prime minister, meanwhile, put a pox on both Iran and the U.S. for conducting their geopolitical battle on Iraqi soil.

The danger of Bush’s approach may be realized in short order. Tuesday, Jan. 30, marks the 10th day of Muharram, and is the Islamic holy day known as Ashura. Iraq is the Shiite holy land, the site of the passion and martyrdom of revered figures such as Ali, the son-in-law of the Prophet Mohammed, and al-Husayn, the Prophet’s grandson. Thousands of Iranians come on pilgrimage to the Shiite shrine cities of Najaf and Karbala in Iraq every year, and the flow of pilgrims peaks at Ashura, which commemorates the martyrdom of al-Husayn. Ashura is an especially important holiday to Shiites, drawing up to 1 million pilgrims to Karbala, 60 miles southwest of Baghdad. In 2004 Sunni insurgents exploited the presence of so many Shiite pilgrims by setting off massive explosions that killed more than 100 people.

Given Bush’s new directive, how will U.S. troops distinguish between innocent Iranian devotees and spies? What if U.S. troops kill pilgrims in a mistaken belief that they are covert operatives? Leaving aside whether U.S. law authorizes such a broad, vague use of deadly force against foreign nationals, which is unclear, Shiite religious sensibilities would be inflamed in both Iraq and Iran, furthering the potential for a widening conflict.

Or maybe the spark for a wider conflict is just what the increasingly desperate President Bush seeks. His fixation on Iranian activities in Iraq cannot be explained by his cover story, which is that Tehran is supplying weapons to forces that kill U.S. troops. To date, no hard evidence that the Iranian government is sending high-powered weaponry into Iraq has been made public, and no credible proof may be forthcoming. In general, one should take such claims with a large grain of salt, much like the skepticism with which one should greet the official U.S. story about the firefight in Najaf on the weekend that supposedly claimed the lives of 250 insurgents.

To begin with, some 99 percent of all attacks on U.S. troops occur in Sunni Arab areas and are carried out by Baathist or Sunni fundamentalist (Salafi) guerrilla groups. Most of the outside help these groups get comes from the Sunni Arab public in countries allied with the United States, notably Saudi Arabia and other Gulf monarchies. Washington has yet to denounce Saudi aid to the Sunni insurgents who are killing U.S. troops.

Meanwhile, the most virulent terror network in Iraq, which styles itself "al-Qaida in Mesopotamia," has openly announced that its policy is to kill as many Shiites as possible. That the ayatollahs of Shiite Iran are passing sophisticated weapons to these, their sworn enemies, is not plausible.

If Iran is providing materiel to anyone, it is to U.S. allies. Tehran may be helping the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and its Badr Corps paramilitary, but the U.S. is not fighting that group. By sale or barter, some weaponry originally given to the Badr Corps might be finding its way to other groups, such as the Mahdi Army of nationalist Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, that do sometimes come into conflict with the U.S. That problem, however, must be a relatively small one, and cannot explain Bush’s hyperbolic rhetoric about Iran.

Some of the reports of "thousands" of Iranian agents in Iraq come from the Mojahedin-e Khalq terrorist group, which is made up of Iranian expatriates who display a cultlike devotion to their leader, Maryam Rajavi. An enemy of Tehran, responsible for numerous bombings inside Iranian borders, the MEK was given a terrorist base, "Camp Ashraf," in eastern Iraq by Saddam Hussein. When the U.S. invaded Iraq, some Pentagon figures wanted to use the MEK against Tehran in the same way Saddam had, and the MEK fighters have not been expelled from the country. They now supply disinformation about Iran to the U.S. in order to foment conflict, much as Ahmad Chalabi lied in order to sell the Americans on invading Iraq.

That the U.S. is in search of a rationale for a wider conflict is supported by the fact that it has arrested Iranian officials inside Iraq on two occasions in the past six weeks. In December, U.S. troops raided the compound of Shiite cleric Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the leader of the largest bloc in parliament, made up of fundamentalist Shiites, and discovered several visiting Iranians there. Some were briefly detained and then allowed to leave the country. Two others were delivered to Iraqi government custody and accused of being high-ranking intelligence officers of the Quds Force unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Force. Baghdad at length let them go, as well.

Al-Hakim, as well as Iraqi President and Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani, indignantly insisted that they had invited the Iranians to the country, protests that seem strange if the Iranian visitors were harming Iraqi interests. Press reports on the documents the U.S. captured in the raid were contradictory. American newspapers said that they indicated Iranian arms smuggling and included plans for ethnic cleansing of Sunnis in Baghdad. British intelligence officials told the BBC, in contrast, that the documents did not mention arms but indicated that the Iranians had come to consult about the cabinet shuffle planned by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, head of the fundamentalist Shiite al-Dawa party, the largest bloc in the legislature.

The U.S. then launched a raid in the far northern Kurdish city of Irbil on an incipient Iranian consulate, there by the invitation of the Kurdistan Regional Government. Troops captured five Iranians, which the U.S. accused of being intelligence operatives. Again, the Iraqi Kurdish officials expressed annoyance and affirmed that the paperwork had been submitted for the establishment of the consulate.

There are very few U.S. troops in the northern Kurdish regions, and the Iraqi Kurds are close allies of the United States. How Iranian activities in Irbil could possibly pose a threat to American troops is completely mysterious. Why Washington would order arrests of persons designated as guests by Iraqi government officials is also obscure.

Maybe what is really going on is that the Bush administration finds itself competing with Iran for influence with erstwhile allies in Iraq and losing. Abdul Aziz al-Hakim was feted at the White House on Dec. 4 of last year and said he wanted U.S. troops to remain in the country. His contacts with Iranian officials, whether intelligence operatives or not, pose no military threat to the U.S., since he is a Bush ally. They might, however, pose a political threat insofar as al-Hakim’s Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq can act with more independence from Washington if it receives aid from Tehran. At the invitation of the Iraqi government, Iran has now offered to expand its economic presence in Iraq.

As Washington grows weaker in Iraq, it is concerned that Iran not pick up the pieces and establish hegemony over its smaller neighbor. The Bush administration may also be casting about for some issue that will galvanize the American public and give it a pretext to expand its presence in Iraq despite how badly the war has gone. Any leaders of a failing war effort are always tempted by a strategy of escalation. Announcing open hunting season on all Iranian visitors to Iraq is like playing Frisbee with nitroglycerin. Bush has gone looking for trouble and is likely to find it.

By Juan Cole, January 30, 2007

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2007/01/30/iran_ashura/?source=rss

February 3, 2007 0 comment

USA

US using opposition group to track Iranian influence networks in Iraq

Camp Ashraf which is occupied by the Iraq-based Iranian opposition group the Mujahedine Khalq Organisation (MKO) is sited more than 260km north of Baghdad.

This group resettled in Iraq in 1987 during the rule of Saddam Hussain. After Saddam was ousted in 2003, the US army gave protection to this camp which remains today.

Jalal Al Din Al Sagheer, a prominent figure in the Shiite coalition, has accused MKO members of supporting terrorist groups affiliated to the former regime.

Prohibits

He told Gulf News: "There is an Iraqi constitution which prohibits using the Iraqi territory to launch a series of cross-border attacks against neighbouring countries and we are committed to this position."

Leaders of Camp Ashraf move with heavy US forces’ protection inside Baghdad and other Iraqi cities. During visits of Iraqi officials to Tehran and their Iranian counterparts to Baghdad, the MKO group file was at the top of bilateral talks. It was said that Iran wants a settlement with Iraqis to end the MKO file in return for full security cooperation that guarantees stopping the infiltration of terrorist elements into Iraq from the Iranian borders.

Lubaid Abbawi, the undersecretary of the Iraqi Ministry of Foreign Affairs, told Gulf News: "The MKO file must move fully to the responsibility of the Iraqi government and must not be a political agenda used by different politicians or parties."

In the light of American-Iranian conflict in Iraq and in the region it is unlikely that the American forces will submit Camp Ashraf to Al Maliki.

According to some leaks from Baghdad, Americans have begun to form special groups comprising MKO members to assist them to track Iranian intelligence networks in Iraqi cities, as well as to provide the US intelligence with a huge amount of information from inside Iran, especially with the escalation of the Iranian nuclear file. These measures came just after the launch of the new US strategy set by President George W Bush, which included reducing the Iranian influence in Iraq.

A MKO report published recently in Germany referred by name to more than 31,000 Iraqi agents working for the Iranian intelligence. This indicates that the next phase will witness greater convergence between the MKO and the American forces in Iraq.

Hadi Al Ameri, leader of the Badr Organisation of the Shiite Supreme Council, has accused the MKO of training terrorist elements and working to destabilise Iraq. Al Ameri affirmed the coming period will witness the exile of this Iranian opposition group from Iraqi territories.

The Al Maliki government works to exclude Iraq from any Iranian-American influence conflict and to ensure Iraq does not turn into an arena for settling accounts between the two countries.

Basil Adas, gulfnews – January 31, 2007

February 1, 2007 0 comment

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