New English Review <http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm/frm/90615/sec_id/90615>
State Department Documents Expose Iranian Terror Group by Kenneth R. Timmerman (June 2011) An Iranian group that has attracted high-level support from former White House and senior national security officials, was dealt a body blow last week in its effort get off the terrorism list, when the State Department released a series of documents the group had sought under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). According to the documents the group, known as the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK, or MKO), supported the takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran in November 1979 - not a position to endear itself to U.S. diplomats - before its "gradual elimination from the ruling coalition" by Ayatollah Khomeini less than two years later. The new documents describe the MEK terror campaign against the Islamic regime during the 1980s and 1990s, and the group's alliance with Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. According to hundreds of Iranians interviewed by State Department "Iran watchers" in Dubai, Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Germany, the ties to Saddam were the most damning. "Ordinary Iranians were almost uniformly dismissive of the MEK, reacting with either disdain or apathy," a recent cable <http://iran.org/news/2010_05_25-10MEKdocs-DOC10.pdf> from the U.S. Consulate in Dubai states. "The MEK are detested among the young and old in Iran, although many young Iranians don't know much about them," the cable quotes one Iranian as having told U.S. diplomats. "They are hated among Iranians, since their hands are stained with the blood of their fellow countrymen," another Iranian is quoted as saying in the just-released cable. A host of former senior U.S. officials have come out in public in support of the group, including, most recently, President Obama's former National Security Advisor, Gen. Jim Jones. At pro-MEK event in Brussels on May 25, former White House Chief of Staff Andy Card, former NATO commander Gen. Wesley Clark, former State Department counter-terrorism coordinator Ambassador Dell Dailey, and others, argued that the MEK should be treated as a legitimate Iranian opposition group. As the U.S. and the European Union continued to ratchet up sanctions on the Islamic Republic of Iran this week, many members of Congress are pressing the State Department to remove the MEK from the terrorism list, as the European Parliament has recently done. Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), former New York Mayor Rudy Guiliani, and former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton have also staked out positions in favor of the group. All three are potential Republican presidential candidates in 2012. But the newly declassified State Department cables paint a much darker picture of the group, starting with the victimization of its own members if they strayed from the party line or tried to leave the organization. Several recent cables from the U.S. embassy in Baghdad detail interviews with MEK members who managed to escape from Camp Ashraf, a military base northeast of Baghdad that was assigned to the group by Saddam Hussein in the late 1980s. (READ MORE) <http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm/frm/90615/sec_id/90615> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------------------ -------------------------- Want to discuss this topic? Head on over to our discussion list, discuss-os...@yahoogroups.com. -------------------------- Brooks Isoldi, editor biso...@intellnet.org http://www.intellnet.org Post message: osint@yahoogroups.com Subscribe: osint-subscr...@yahoogroups.com Unsubscribe: osint-unsubscr...@yahoogroups.com *** FAIR USE NOTICE. 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