Nejat blogger, August 28 2013: … In April 2012, the investigative journalist, Seymour Hersh published his famous article,” our Men in Iran” in which he revealed that American Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) conducted training cources for members of the MKO in Nevada. The MKO agents received training in “commo, crypto, small unit tactics, and weaponry”, a retired US general …
(Rajavi from Saddam to AIPAC)
(Mehdi Abrishamchi and Massoud Rajavi taking orders from Saddam’s head of secret services)
Link to the source
Sixty years after the 1953 coup, the US bugs Iran using the MKO
The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officially admits it was behind the coup against Iranian democratically elected Prime Minister Dr. Mohammad Mosaddeq in August 1953. However, the release of such a document doesn’t mean that the United States has stopped taking actions to destabilize Iranian government. The Mujahedin Khalq Organization with its dark history of treason and bloodshed against the Iranian nation is now being backed by the US.
The 1953 coup had a severe impact on the aspirations of the Iranian people for democracy and freedom. It severely suppressed the Iranian pro-democracy movement that eventually turned into the Islamic revolution in 1979. Foreign Policy website that first published the news of the CIA’s document on TPAjax operation (the coup was codenamed as Ajax) suggest,” the event’s reverberations have haunted its orchestrators over the years, contributing to the anti Americanism that accompanied the Shah’s ouster in early 1979,and even influencing the Iranians who seized the US Embassy in Tehran later that year.”[1]
Regarding the Iranian people, the newly published document has nothing new because as the Iranian American historian Ervand Ebrahamian tells the Guardian,” The basic facts are widely known to every school child in Iran”. He adds, “Suppressing the details only distorts the history and feeds into myth-making on all sides.”[2]
Actually the United State has never ceased its covert attacks against Iran. Meteor Blades of the Daily KOS lists US hostile acts after the 1953 coup for “curtailing” Iran, “while controversial war, the bomb-bomb-bomb Iran approach has been so far avoided because that still remains a last resort of the bipartisan consensus ,other attacks on Iran have continued ,including by means of Stuxnet, the cyber-weapon built by the National Security Agency together with CIA and Israeli Intelligence and used to temporary cripple the Uranium enrichment operations in Natanz, Iran.” At the end, he notices the role of the MKO in the US-Israeli backed operations against Iranians,” There are, in addition, assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists by the Iranian terrorist organization Mojahedin-e-Khalq assisted with funding and training assistance of America’s ally Israel.”[3]
In April 2012, the investigative journalist, Seymour Hersh published his famous article,” our Men in Iran” in which he revealed that American Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) conducted training cources for members of the MKO in Nevada. The MKO agents received training in “commo, crypto, small unit tactics, and weaponry”, a retired US general told Hersh. [4]
Seymour Hersh also cites of a former senior intelligence official that the operations to destabilize IR including the killing of five Iranian nuclear scientists are “primarily being done by the MEK through liaison with the Israelis, but the United States is now providing the Intelligence”. Hersh asserts that the links between the US and the MKO activities against Iran has been long-standing. [5]
In August 1953, the US and British governments toppled one of the most efficient Iranian Prime Ministers because “he tried to nationalize Iranian oil wealth from Britain.” [6] The Guardian puts,” in recent years Iranian politicians have sought to compare the dispute over the country’s nuclear activities to that of the oil nationalization under Mosaddeq.”[7]
While the US spying and terrorist activities by the aid of the MKO continues to irritate Iranians, the American soldier Bradley Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison because of leaking intelligence to Wikileaks website. Professors and legal experts and civil rights groups called the sentence “outrageous” and “unprecedented” reported Tom McCarthy of the Guardian. It’s “seriously wrong” for a soldier who shared information with the public to be punished “far more harshly that others who tortured prisoners and killed civilians”, the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) told McCarthy. [8] In addition to the case of Manning, we’ve got Julian Assange, the editor- in-chief and founder of Wikileaks and Edward Snowden former CIA agent who is behind his significant revelations on US surveillance program that “destroyed privacy and basic liberties”. Both men were forced to live in exile for fear of being imprisoned in their homeland. They are considered as traitors by the US government.
Therefore, the American advocates of the Mujahedin Khalq might be able to understand how the Iranian people and authorities feel about the MKO. The group was sheltered, funded and trained by Saddam Hussein and fought on his side against his own country-men. It was then funded, trained and used by the US and Israel to commit acts of violence and spying on Iranian nuclear activities.
Regarding the recent confessions on 1953 coup and facts on its advocacy for the MKO, the United States should not expect the Iranian public to have a positive view on his alleged green lights for negotiation.
By Mazda Parsi
Sources:
[1] Byrne, Malcolm, CIA admits it was behind Iran’s coup, Foreign Policy, August 19, 2013
[2] Kamali Dehghan.Saeed,Norton Taylor,Richard,CIA admits role in 1953 Iranian coup, The Guardian, August 19,2013
[3] Blades, Meteor, An unhappy 60 birthday” The CIA coup of 1953 still resonates in Iran. Operation Ajax remembered, Daily KOS, August 18,2013
[4] Hersh,Seymour,Our Men in Iran ,the New Yorker Magazine, April6,2012
[5]ibid
[6] AlJazeera,CIA admits organizing 1953 Iran coup, August 20,2013
[7] Kamali Dehghan.Saeed,Norton Taylor,Richard,CIA admits role in 1953 Iranian coup, The Guardian, August 19,2013
[8] McCarthy,Tom, Bradley Manning tells lawyer after sentencing: I’m going to be ok- as it happened, The Guardian, August 21,2013
Also read:
http://iran-interlink.org/wordpress/?p=2488
Mojahedin Khalq (MKO, MEK, Rajavi cult) Our Men in Iran? (Seymour M. Hersh, The New Yorker, April 2012)
… Five Iranian nuclear scientists have been assassinated since 2007. M.E.K. spokesmen have denied any involvement in the killings, but early last month NBC News quoted two senior Obama Administration officials as confirming that the attacks were carried out by M.E.K. units that were financed and trained by Mossad, the Israeli secret service. NBC further quoted the Administration officials as denying any American involvement in the M.E.K. activities. The former senior intelligence official I spoke with seconded the NBC report that the Israelis were working with the M.E.K., adding …
(Rajavi cult or MKO aslo known as Saddam’s Private Army)
Seymour M. Hersh, The New Yorker, April 6 2012
http://www.newyorker.com/online/
blogs/newsdesk/2012/04/mek.html
From the air, the terrain of the Department of Energy’s Nevada National Security Site, with its arid high plains and remote mountain peaks, has the look of northwest Iran. The site, some sixty-five miles northwest of Las Vegas, was once used for nuclear testing, and now includes a counterintelligence training facility and a private airport capable of handling Boeing 737 aircraft. It’s a restricted area, and inhospitable—in certain sections, the curious are warned that the site’s security personnel are authorized to use deadly force, if necessary, against intruders.
It was here that the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) conducted training, beginning in 2005, for members of the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, a dissident Iranian opposition group known in the West as the M.E.K. The M.E.K. had its beginnings as a Marxist-Islamist student-led group and, in the nineteen-seventies, it was linked to the assassination of six American citizens. It was initially part of the broad-based revolution that led to the 1979 overthrow of the Shah of Iran. But, within a few years, the group was waging a bloody internal war with the ruling clerics, and, in 1997, it was listed as a foreign terrorist organization by the State Department. In 2002, the M.E.K. earned some international credibility by publicly revealing—accurately—that Iran had begun enriching uranium at a secret underground location. Mohamed ElBaradei, who at the time was the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations’ nuclear monitoring agency, told me later that he had been informed that the information was supplied by the Mossad. The M.E.K.’s ties with Western intelligence deepened after the fall of the Iraqi regime in 2003, and JSOC began operating inside Iran in an effort to substantiate the Bush Administration’s fears that Iran was building the bomb at one or more secret underground locations. Funds were covertly passed to a number of dissident organizations, for intelligence collection and, ultimately, for anti-regime terrorist activities. Directly, or indirectly, the M.E.K. ended up with resources like arms and intelligence. Some American-supported covert operations continue in Iran today, according to past and present intelligence officials and military consultants.
Despite the growing ties, and a much-intensified lobbying effort organized by its advocates, M.E.K. has remained on the State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations—which meant that secrecy was essential in the Nevada training. “We did train them here, and washed them through the Energy Department because the D.O.E. owns all this land in southern Nevada,” a former senior American intelligence official told me. “We were deploying them over long distances in the desert and mountains, and building their capacity in communications—coördinating commo is a big deal.” (A spokesman for J.S.O.C. said that “U.S. Special Operations Forces were neither aware of nor involved in the training of M.E.K. members.”)
The training ended sometime before President Obama took office, the former official said. In a separate interview, a retired four-star general, who has advised the Bush and Obama Administrations on national-security issues, said that he had been privately briefed in 2005 about the training of Iranians associated with the M.E.K. in Nevada by an American involved in the program. They got “the standard training,” he said, “in commo, crypto [cryptography], small-unit tactics, and weaponry—that went on for six months,” the retired general said. “They were kept in little pods.” He also was told, he said, that the men doing the training were from JSOC, which, by 2005, had become a major instrument in the Bush Administration’s global war on terror. “The JSOC trainers were not front-line guys who had been in the field, but second- and third-tier guys—trainers and the like—and they started going off the reservation. ‘If we’re going to teach you tactics, let me show you some really sexy stuff…’ ”
It was the ad-hoc training that provoked the worried telephone calls to him, the former general said. “I told one of the guys who called me that they were all in over their heads, and all of them could end up trouble unless they got something in writing. The Iranians are very, very good at counterintelligence, and stuff like this is just too hard to contain.” The site in Nevada was being utilized at the same time, he said, for advanced training of élite Iraqi combat units. (The retired general said he only knew of the one M.E.K.-affiliated group that went though the training course; the former senior intelligence official said that he was aware of training that went on through 2007.)
Allan Gerson, a Washington attorney for the M.E.K., notes that the M.E.K. has publicly and repeatedly renounced terror. Gerson said he would not comment on the alleged training in Nevada. But such training, if true, he said, would be “especially incongruent with the State Department’s decision to continue to maintain the M.E.K. on the terrorist list. How can the U.S. train those on State’s foreign terrorist list, when others face criminal penalties for providing a nickel to the same organization?”
Robert Baer, a retired C.I.A. agent who is fluent in Arabic and had worked under cover in Kurdistan and throughout the Middle East in his career, initially had told me in early 2004 of being recruited by a private American company—working, so he believed, on behalf of the Bush Administration—to return to Iraq. “They wanted me to help the M.E.K. collect intelligence on Iran’s nuclear program,” Baer recalled. “They thought I knew Farsi, which I did not. I said I’d get back to them, but never did.” Baer, now living in California, recalled that it was made clear to him at the time that the operation was “a long-term thing—not just a one-shot deal.”
Massoud Khodabandeh, an I.T. expert now living in England who consults for the Iraqi government, was an official with the M.E.K. before defecting in 1996. In a telephone interview, he acknowledged that he is an avowed enemy of the M.E.K., and has advocated against the group. Khodabandeh said that he had been with the group since before the fall of the Shah and, as a computer expert, was deeply involved in intelligence activities as well as providing security for the M.E.K. leadership. For the past decade, he and his English wife have run a support program for other defectors. Khodabandeh told me that he had heard from more recent defectors about the training in Nevada. He was told that the communications training in Nevada involved more than teaching how to keep in contact during attacks—it also involved communication intercepts. The United States, he said, at one point found a way to penetrate some major Iranian communications systems. At the time, he said, the U.S. provided M.E.K. operatives with the ability to intercept telephone calls and text messages inside Iran—which M.E.K. operatives translated and shared with American signals intelligence experts. He does not know whether this activity is ongoing.
Five Iranian nuclear scientists have been assassinated since 2007. M.E.K. spokesmen have denied any involvement in the killings, but early last month NBC News quoted two senior Obama Administration officials as confirming that the attacks were carried out by M.E.K. units that were financed and trained by Mossad, the Israeli secret service. NBC further quoted the Administration officials as denying any American involvement in the M.E.K. activities. The former senior intelligence official I spoke with seconded the NBC report that the Israelis were working with the M.E.K., adding that the operations benefitted from American intelligence. He said that the targets were not “Einsteins”; “The goal is to affect Iranian psychology and morale,” he said, and to “demoralize the whole system—nuclear delivery vehicles, nuclear enrichment facilities, power plants.” Attacks have also been carried out on pipelines. He added that the operations are “primarily being done by M.E.K. through liaison with the Israelis, but the United States is now providing the intelligence.” An adviser to the special-operations community told me that the links between the United States and M.E.K. activities inside Iran had been long-standing. “Everything being done inside Iran now is being done with surrogates,” he said.
The sources I spoke to were unable to say whether the people trained in Nevada were now involved in operations in Iran or elsewhere. But they pointed to the general benefit of American support. “The M.E.K. was a total joke,” the senior Pentagon consultant said, “and now it’s a real network inside Iran. How did the M.E.K. get so much more efficient?” he asked rhetorically. “Part of it is the training in Nevada. Part of it is logistical support in Kurdistan, and part of it is inside Iran. M.E.K. now has a capacity for efficient operations than it never had before.”
In mid-January, a few days after an assassination by car bomb of an Iranian nuclear scientist in Tehran, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, at a town-hall meeting of soldiers at Fort Bliss, Texas, acknowledged that the U.S. government has “some ideas as to who might be involved, but we don’t know exactly who was involved.” He added, “But I can tell you one thing: the United States was not involved in that kind of effort. That’s not what the United States does.”
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Also
http://iran-interlink.org/?mod=view&id=12028
MEK Pays US Officials, But Where Do The Iranian Exiles Get Their Money?
(aka; Mojahedin Khalq, MKO, Rajavi cult)
.
… Currently, there are rumors that the Israeli secret service is paying MEK to carry out assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists. Three unnamed U.S. government officials told NBC news last month that Mossad had trained and paid MEK militants to conduct a spate of car bombings against targets like Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, a university chemistry professor who doubled as a director of Iran’s Natanz uranium-enrichment facility, who was killed in Tehran in January after two assailants on a motorcycle attached a magnetic bomb to his Peugeot 405 …
(Rajavi from Saddam to AIPAC)
Daniel Tovrov, IB Times, March 31 2012
http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/321488/
20120329/mek-iran-israel-ed-rendell-iraq-money.htm
Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Treasury opened investigations into former government officials who have been paid speaking fees by the Mojahedin-e-Khalq, or MEK, an Iranian resistance group officially listed as a terrorist organization.
The subpoenaing of former Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell, ex-FBI Director Louis Freeh and retired Gen. Hugh Shelton has cast an harsh light on other U.S. officials, including former New York City Mayor Rudi Giuliani and former Vermont Governor Howard Dean, as well as the organization they publicly support.
“They (MEK) are still on the terrorist list. The laws still apply. It is illegal in every sense of the word to finance them right now,” said Trita Parsi, founder of the National Iranian American Council, a non-partisan community organization based in Washington.
The actual sum being paid to these officials is vague, but judging by the fees handed to certain individuals, the total could be in the millions. For example, Rendell was allegedly paid $150,000 for “seven or eight speeches,” according to reports. Giuliani, who spoke in at a conference in Paris, France on behalf of Iranian resistance figures alongside 18 other international guests, has been known to charge up to $100,000 for a single appearance and sometimes demands private jets to charter him to appearances.
Other former U.S. officials told the New York Times that the American supporters of MEK received between $15,000 and $30,000 per speech, yet others said they made appearances for free.
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 of Iranian nuclear scientists. Three unnamed U.S. government officials told NBC news last month that Mossad had trained and paid MEK militants to conduct a spate of car bombings against targets like Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, a university chemistry professor who doubled as a director of Iran’s Natanz uranium-enrichment facility, who was killed in Tehran in January after two assailants on a motorcycle attached a magnetic bomb to his Peugeot 405.
MEK called the allegations “outright false,” but Israel has neither denied nor confirmed its own involvement in the attack.
If the NBC report is true, Israel would not be the first government to pay for MEK’s military expertise; from 1980 until the invasion of Iraq in 2003, MEK was funded by Saddam Hussein. Following the adage “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” MEK joined Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War and fought viciously against the Ayatollah’s forces. MEK made Camp Ashraf, which is about 55 miles north of Baghdad, its permanent headquarters in 1986.
Some estimate that Hussein was paying as much as $30 million a month for at least 10 months — some of it allegedly run-off from the UN’s failed Oil-for-Food program — for MEK’s services, which included strikes against Kurdish and Shia rebels in Iraq.
Additionally, during the Iran-Iraq War, MEK leader Masoud Rajavi — whose wife Maryam Rajavi currently runs the National Council of Resistance of Iran, or NCRI, MEK’s political arm — allegedly took control of all of his members’ assets, possessions and even their passports so they couldn’t leave Camp Ashraf.
“Between 1978, when I became MEK’s supporter, till 1996 when I escaped, through use of different techniques of mind manipulation I was forced to give them whatever they asked me,” explained Masoud Banisadr, MEK’s former U.S. spokesperson and the second cousin of Abolhassan Banisadr, the first president of the Islamic Republic.
“First any capital or material things we had; then any love, attachments or relation we had with our country, our family and friends in Iran; then when they asked all members to divorce their spouses, I lost the love of my life, my dear wife and could not see my children for almost six years; I lost part of my health, and many times were on the edge of dying for them.”
In 2003, before the European Union took MEK off of its terror watch list, Maryam Rajavi and some 160 other Mujahedin were arrested by counter-terrorism police in a small town outside Paris. Authorities confiscated around $8 million in cash, which Trita Parsi believes was some of the last remaining funds of Saddam Hussein. All of the suspects were quickly released and the case was eventually dropped.
Follow the Money
MEK was put on the State Department’s list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations in 1997. MEK supporters suggest this was a failed political move by the Clinton administration to soften relations with Tehran. Regardless, the organization says it is now a peaceful and democratic resistance movement, one allied with the U.S in its distrust of the current Iranian regime and Iran’s nuclear program. A slew of American officials, including Freeh, FBI Director at the time the terror list designation was made, and a number of military officers of the highest rank, have come to the support of MEK and lobbied for its removal from the terrorist list.
A 2004 FBI investigation uncovered a glut of shady fund-raising operations. According to the report, the voracity of which has been called into question, money raised by the Los Angeles and Washington D.C. “cells” was “transferred overseas through a complex international money laundering operation that uses accounts in Turkey, Germany, France, Belgium, Norway, Sweden, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates.”
At one point, MEK was also operating charities called the Committee for Human Rights and Iran Aid, which claimed to raise money for Iranian refugees persecuted by the Islamic regime, but was later revealed to be a front for MEK’s military arm, the National Liberation Army.
All of this could account for some of MEK’s resources but would be unlikely to cover the exorbitant speaker fees recently doled out.
Moreover, MEK supporters would claim that if true, these practices were done during a previous incarnation of the group, the middle ground between being a fully-militant organization and a refugee group under U.S. military protection in Iraq.
Almost all of the former U.S. officials who support delisting were not actually paid by MEK, but by Iranian-American cultural organizations like the Iranian American Community of North Texas and the Iranian American Cultural Association of Missouri. This network of non-profits could be the best way to track MEK’s funding. According to experts, money from benefactors and pledge drives in Europe is sent to individuals in the United States, then onto front groups and finally given to American politicians. It’s complicated, but according to federal law, it’s still illegal.
“It’s much easier to move around money in Europe because MEK is no longer on the watch list,” said Parsi.
None of this may matter soon. MEK has filed a federal suit that would force the State Department, which says it continually evaluates the terrorist organization list anyway, to officially review the organization’s status within 30 days.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also said that a successful transfer from Camp Ashraf to former U.S. military base Camp Liberty, which is currently underway, will help speed up any potential delisting. If that happens, former politicians like Giuliani, ex-Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge and former U.N. ambassador John Bolton will continue to advocate for the MEK despite criticism and possible legal ramifications.
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Also
http://iran-interlink.org/?mod=view&id=11992
Working With the MEK is Bad Policy
(aka; Mojahedin Khalq, MKO, Rajavi cult)
.
… Iranians living under the regime’s yoke hate the MEK. That is not regime propaganda; it is fact, one to which any honest analyst who has ever visited Iran can testify. Ordinary Iranians deeply resent the MEK’s terrorism, which has targeted not only regime officials, but also led to the deaths of scores of civilians. During the Iran-Iraq War—a conflict that decimated cities and led to tens of thousands of civilian deaths—the MEK sided with Saddam Hussein. No Iranian will ever forgive that treason. Iranians see the MEK in the same manner that Americans view American Taliban John Walker Lindh …
Michael Rubin, Commentary Magazine, March 23 2012
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2012/03/22/working-with-the-mek-is-bad-policy/
Alana Goodman is correct to highlight the current battle between Attorney-General Eric Holder and a bipartisan array of prominent former U.S. officials who have accepted hefty honoraria from Mujahedin al-Khalq (MEK) front groups, even though the State Department lists the MEK as a terrorist group. While cultivating prominent endorsers is one front in the group’s public relations battle, the largest war – and the reason the MEK has spent millions on former American officials – is for their support in its battle to be delisted as a terrorist entity.
There is no doubt that in the past, 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. Still, it would be a mistake to boil the MEK issue—and the question of U.S. support—down to the terrorism listing, however. Working with the MEK is simply bad policy.
Military action against Iran would delay the program only by a few years. True, the same estimate was made before Israel’s strike on the Iraqi nuclear reactor and Saddam Hussein never managed to rebuild his program, but it would be foolish to assume the same would occur. After all, the Iranians will not be stupid enough to invade Kuwait.
The problem in Iran today is not simply the regime’s nuclear ambitions, but rather the regime itself. To use the military to delay Iran’s nuclear program—effectively kicking the can down the road—would be an irresponsible use of the military unless there is a policy in place to take advantage of the time won in any strike.
The problem with those who would embrace the MEK is that it would undercut the chance for regime collapse. To ally the United States with the MEK would be as shameful as President Obama’s moral inaction during the 2009 protests.
Iranians living under the regime’s yoke hate the MEK. That is not regime propaganda; it is fact, one to which any honest analyst who has ever visited Iran can testify. Ordinary Iranians deeply resent the MEK’s terrorism, which has targeted not only regime officials, but also led to the deaths of scores of civilians. During the Iran-Iraq War—a conflict that decimated cities and led to tens of thousands of civilian deaths—the MEK sided with Saddam Hussein. No Iranian will ever forgive that treason. Iranians see the MEK in the same manner that Americans view American Taliban John Walker Lindh.
If the MEK is delisted, let the MEK celebrate. But whether listed as a terrorist group or not, it would be wrong and counterproductive to embrace the group unless, of course, the goal of those for officials on the group’s payroll is simply to aid the current regime in its efforts to rally its subjugated masses around the flag.
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Also
http://iran-interlink.org/?mod=view&id=11657
Deeper into Terrorism
Assassinations Joint work of Israel and Mojahedin Khalq
(aka;MKO, MEK, Rajavi cult)
.
… Anyone in Israel, the United States, or anywhere else hoping for a salubrious regime change in Iran would be foolish to have anything to do with the MEK. Even more important than what is foolish is what is immoral. Terrorism denies the high ground to anyone who uses it, including the use of it in disagreements with Iran. It also hastens the slide through mutually reinforcing hostility into what may be a far more destructive form of violence (i.e., a war). Although the United States has not been involved in the assassinations, the nature of its relationship with Israel, both real and perceived means that Israel’s actions suck the United States farther down the slide …
The Life of Camp Ashraf,
Mojahedin-e Khalq Victims of Many Masters
Paul Pillar, The National Interest, Feb 09 2012
http://nationalinterest.org/blog/paul-pillar/deeper-terrorism-6491#.TzbLTzVIc50.facebook
Although the assassinations of Iranian scientists have until now been followed by no indication of responsibility other than smug comments of satisfaction from officials of the most likely foreign state perpetrator, now NBC offers something more specific. According to a report by Richard Engel and Robert Windrem, the assassinations have been the joint work of Israel and the Iranian cult-cum-terrorist group Mujahedin-e Khalq. According to the report, the partnership has involved Israel providing financing, training and arms to the MEK to accomplish the hits, as well as to commit other acts of violent sabotage inside Iran. The story tracks with accusations from officials of the Iranian government, who say they base most of what they know on interrogations and captured materials from a failed assassination attempt in 2010. Such accusations by themselves would be easy to dismiss, of course, as more of the regime’s propaganda. But the NBC story cites two senior U.S. officials, speaking anonymously, as confirming the story. A third official said “it hasn’t been clearly confirmed yet,” although like the others he denied any U.S. involvement. The Israeli foreign ministry declined comment; the MEK denied the story.
With or without confirmation of details of this story, the assassinations are terrorism. (The official U.S. government definition of terrorism for reporting and statistic-keeping purposes is “premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against non-combatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents.”) The extra twist in this new report is the use by Israel—already widely believed to have been responsible for the murders—of the MEK, a group with a long track record of terrorism that has included American victims. Other parts of that record, including the MEK having been an arm of Saddam Hussein’s security forces, have meant the group has almost no popular support within Iran. Anyone in Israel, the United States, or anywhere else hoping for a salubrious regime change in Iran would be foolish to have anything to do with the MEK.
Even more important than what is foolish is what is immoral. Terrorism denies the high ground to anyone who uses it, including the use of it in disagreements with Iran. It also hastens the slide through mutually reinforcing hostility into what may be a far more destructive form of violence (i.e., a war). Although the United States has not been involved in the assassinations, the nature of its relationship with Israel, both real and perceived (President Obama commented the other day about staying in “lockstep” with Israel on Iran), means that Israel’s actions suck the United States farther down the slide.
Amid all the reasons for dismay and outrage over this, there is also an irony. One of the oft-repeated rationales for the conventional wisdom that an Iranian nuclear weapon would be unacceptable is that it would somehow turn Iran into a regional marauder that would recklessly throw its weight around the Middle East in damaging ways. Well, there is an example of a Middle Eastern state that behaves in such a way, but it isn’t Iran. This state invades neighboring countries, ruthlessly inflicting destruction on civilian populations, and seizes and colonizes territory through military force. It also uses terrorist group proxies as well as its own agents to conduct assassinations in other countries in the region.
Besides terrorism, there also is, as with any prototypical rogue state, a nuclear weapons angle. This state, unlike Iran, has never signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty or admitted an international inspector to any of its nuclear facilities. Even though it has had a sizable arsenal of nuclear weapons for decades, it has kept its nuclear weapons program completely out of reach of any international scrutiny or arms control regime and does not even acknowledge the program’s existence. It also is so intent on maintaining its regional nuclear weapons monopoly that it is using terrorism to strike at the nuclear program of a country that doesn’t even have one nuclear weapon and probably hasn’t made a decision to make one.
One could almost argue that this record of behavior supports that conventional wisdom about what an Iranian nuke would do to Iran’s behavior. But actually it doesn’t. The behavior of the state in question is made possible not by nuclear weapons but instead by its conventional military superiority over its neighbors and by the cover provided by a subservient, protective great power whose policies it is able to manipulate.
The United States needs to distance itself as much as possible from this ugliness, for the sake of adhering to its own principles as well as trying to avoid sliding any further toward catastrophe. It was good that Secretary of State Clinton quickly disavowed the most recent assassination, but distancing requires something more. Forget the lockstep business. Israel is out of step with American policy because it evidently is out of step with American values and American interests. Washington needs to proclaim loudly and repeatedly that the sort of terrorism that the NBC report describes is the antithesis of how differences with Iran ought to be settled, and that those differences need to be settled through diplomacy. Then negotiate like we really mean it. Two distinguished retired U.S. diplomats, William Luers and Thomas Pickering, have recently provided some excellent instruction on how to do that.
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Also
http://iran-interlink.org/?mod=view&id=11779
The Group That’s Been Assassinating Iranian Scientists Wants To Be Removed From US Terror List
(Mojahedin Khalq, MKO, MEK, Rajavi cult)
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… Sources confirm that the Mujahedin-e-Khalq organization, which also is referred to as MEK or MKO, was involved with Israel in the current round of assassinations of two Iranian nuclear scientists and Iran’s top missile designer. To date, some five Iranian nuclear scientists have been targeted.Separately, the British Daily Mail reports that U.S. officials have confirmed that Israel has been funding and training Iranian dissidents to assassinate nuclear scientists involved in Iran’s nuclear program. U.S. officials also confirmed similar information to NBC News but quickly added that the United States isn’t involved in the assassinations …
F. Michael Maloof, Business Insider, February 27, 2012
http://articles.businessinsider.com/2012-02-24/news/31094054
_1_iranian-nuclear-scientists-people-s-mujahedin-assassination-attempt
A virulently anti-Iranian terrorist group has been credited by U.S. intelligence sources for the recent killings of Iranian nuclear scientists and Iran’s major missile developer, even while the organization is promoting a public relations effort – with the support of prominent Americans – to be removed from the U.S. State Department’s terrorist list.
Sources confirm that the Mujahedin-e-Khalq organization, which also is referred to as MEK or MKO, was involved with Israel in the current round of assassinations of two Iranian nuclear scientists and Iran’s top missile designer. To date, some five Iranian nuclear scientists have been targeted.
Separately, the British Daily Mail reports that U.S. officials have confirmed that Israel has been funding and training Iranian dissidents to assassinate nuclear scientists involved in Iran’s nuclear program.
U.S. officials also confirmed similar information to NBC News but quickly added that the United States isn’t involved in the assassinations of the Iranian nuclear scientists, although it apparently is aware of the alleged connection between the Israeli intelligence service Mossad and the MEK.
The assassinations also have resulted in what G2Bulletin has reported is a tit-for-tat by Iran, which reportedly assassinated a chemical scientist in Israel in reprisal for the killings of the Iranian scientists. Sources say this development constitutes a proxy war between Israel and Iran.
U.S. sources confirm the close relationship between Israel’s Mossad and the MEK. The association hasn’t gone unnoticed by Iranian officials.
“The relation is very intricate and close,” according to Mohammad Javad Larijani, who is a senior aide to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s current supreme leader. “They (Israelis) are paying the mujahedin. Some of their (MEK) agents are providing Israel with information. And they recruit and also manage logistical support.
“Israel does not have direct access to our society,” Larijani added. “Mujahedin, being Iranian and being part of Iranian society, they have a good number of places to get in touch with people. So, I think they are working hand-to-hand very close. And we do have very concrete documents.”
Larijani apparently was referring to an interrogation of an MEK member in a failed assassination attempt in 2010 in which such documentation reportedly was found on him. Despite confirmation by U.S. intelligence sources of MEK involvement in continued assassinations, the MEK seeks to be removed from the U.S. terrorism list – a goal which has the backing from notable Americans, several members of Congress and a prominent Washington-based law firm.
The effort to delist the MEK is led by groups on both the left and right of the American political spectrum because of its anti-Iranian position and opposition to the Muslim clerics which lead the Islamic republic.
Yet, the MEK, also referred to as the People’s Mujahedin of Iran, or PMOI, has a history of having killed American citizens, was allied with the Iraqi regime of President Saddam Hussein and has been closely associated with the Afghan Taliban and al-Qaida.
In August 1998, for example, the MEK received assistance from the Afghan Taliban and al-Qaida to assassinate 11 Iranian diplomats, journalists and innocent civilians in an attack on Shi’a Muslims in Afghanistan.
The MEK was first established in the 1960s by the college-educated children of many Iranian merchants who sought to counter what they viewed as excessive Western influence with the regime of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, a closed U.S. ally who reigned from 1941 to 1979 when the Islamic Revolution took place installing the clerics under the leadership of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
In events leading up to the overthrow of the shah, the MEK staged numerous terrorist attacks inside Iran and killed a number of U.S. military personnel and civilians working on defense projects in Tehran.
The MEK also backed the takeover in 1979 of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and for a time backed the clerics led by Ayatollah Khomeini against nationalists and moderates within the revolution.
However, a power struggle occurred in late 1980 and by mid-1981 the MEK was engaged in street battles against the Islamic Revolutionary Guard.
The MEK sided with the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. The group actually received refuge from Hussein and conducted attacks on Iran from within Iraqi territory.
U.S. intelligence sources tell G2Bulletin that the MEK was involved in the movement of al-Qaida members into eastern Iran after the October 2001 invasion of Afghanistan to escape U.S. detection. The eastern portion of Iran is regarded as a lawless Sunni haven of tribes loyal to al-Qaida. The region borders the Baluchistan province in neighboring Pakistan where many members of al-Qaida reside, along with other Sunni Islamist militants.
Iraq’s Hussein provided financial and logistical assistance to the MEK as a counter-balance to Shi’a Tehran.
Yet, the MEK in 2006 claimed that it had renounced violence in 2001 as it was seeking to have funds unfrozen by the European Union, which ultimately occurred.
With deep financial pockets, however, the MEK today has begun a major public relations campaign in the United States to be removed, or “delisted,” from the State Department’s U.S. terrorist list, formally known as the Foreign Terrorist Organization, list.
The MEK has enlisted the help of former U.S. cabinet members and other former American officials from both the left and right of the political spectrum. It also has legal representation for its delisting activities from a highly expensive Washington-based law firm, Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP.
The campaign to get delisted began in earnest last year with a kickoff event at the swanky Williard Hotel in Washington, D.C.
Notable Washington insiders who have been tapped to speak on MEK’s behalf include Louis Freeh, former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation; former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Hugh Shelton; former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean; John Bolton, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations; Gen. Wesley Clark, retired former NATO supreme allied commander; Ed Rendell, former Democratic governor of Pennsylvania; Rudolph Giulani, former mayor of New York City; Porter Goss, former director of Central Intelligence; Lee Hamilton, former co-chairman of the 9/11 Commission; retired Gen. Michael Hayden, former director of Central Intelligence; and Bill Richardson, former governor of New Mexico, among others.
In all, some 33 high-ranking former U.S. officials were listed as “prominent speakers at MEK-related Meetings and Conferences from December 2010-July 2011,” based on a list compiled by the Huffington Post.
In addition to Washington, events for MEK’s delisting efforts have featured these and other prominent speakers in Berlin, Brussels, London and Paris.
Because the MEK still is on the State Department’s Foreign Terrorist Organization list, these speakers cannot be paid directly. While MEK reportedly is spending millions of dollars to obtain these speakers, they are paid indirectly through numerous private Iranian-American booking agents who, in turn, pay the prominent American speakers from $20,000 to $40,000 for just an eight to 10 minute speech on MEK’s behalf.
In that way, the speakers technically aren’t accepting money directly from a terrorist organization, even though in presenting their speeches on behalf of the MEK they know the source of the money.
Now, the MEK is blanketing U.S. television with advertisements nationwide calling for the group’s delisting.
A State Department spokesman refused to comment on ongoing deliberations to consider the MEK’s request to be delisted, a process which formally has been under way for more than a year. However, the State Department has yet to make a decision.
(Rajavi cult or MKO aslo known as Saddam’s Private Army)
(Maryam Rajavi directly ordered the massacre of Kurdish people)
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