This is a continuation of my series which began here and continued here.
In part 2, I focused on the Baloch terrorist group Jondallah operating in southeastern Iran (which the vaunted Washington Post has only now started covering). Since I wrote part 2, there have been extremely important developments.
On Friday (Feb 15), there was a second bombing in Zahedan but no one was killed. Iranian security forces arrested a number of people and now they are making a startling revelation that there is proof that the United States was behind the attack:
Explosive devices and arsenals used in a terrorist attack in the southeastern Iranian city of Zahedan on Wednesday came from the United States, the semi-official Fars news agency reported on Saturday.
Relevant documents, photographs and film footage, which show that the explosives and arsenals used in the attack were American, would soon be made public, an “informed source” was quoted as saying.
While that is being sorted out and we are waiting for the proof to be shown to the public, let’s focus on third and most sinister of the anti-Iranian terrorist organizations that the American government supports. What makes support for all of these groups so ominous is that they are all officially listed as terrorist organizations by the American government (as well as the EU and Iran itself).
The first was the PJAK, a Kurdish organization that now stages out of northern Iraq thanks to protection from the American-allied peshmerga. The second is Jondollah which is part of the Baloch resistance movement that is becoming radicalized due to American policies in the Baloch homelands in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The focus of this article is the Mujaheedin-e-Khalq (MEK).
The MEK is part of a cluster of anti-Iranian government groups that are compromised or supported primarily by people of Iranian origin. The MEK is the “armed wing” of the Mujahedin-e Khalq Organization (MKO). They in turn are members of the People’s Mujahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI) which is in turn a subset of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI).
The NCRI is the box in which all the other organizations are a subset. The NCRI also has included (and may continue to include) Kurdish anti-Iranian government organizations. The MEK however is composed of non-Kurd Iranian peoples.
During the 1970’s, when the MEK was formed, the Iranian government was run by the dictator Shah and was completely allied with the United States. The MEK began by targeting American military advisers and American citizens, killing several of them in Tehran.
In 1979, Iran underwent a revolution which the MEK originally supported. However by 1981, the MEK were opposed to the new Tehran government. In 1981, the MEK killed 70 Iranian officials including the chief justice and the President of Iran.
As Saddam’s war against Iran (1980-1988) began to become a losing proposition, Saddam welcomed the MEK into Iraq and allowed them to set up training camps and bases in order to launch terrorist raids in Iran. After the war was over, the Saddam-financed MEK attacked 13 Iranian embassies and government facilities overseas in the year 1992 alone. By 1999, the MEK was still conducting terrorist activities in Iran and killed the deputy chief of Iran’s armed forces. These attacks continued right up until the 2003 invasion of Iraq by the United States.
Originally, the United States put a halt to the MEK’s activity in Iraq during and subsequent to the invasion. Approximately 4,000 MEK fighters were locked up in a concentration camp (Camp Ashraf) and had all their weapons confiscated (although there is some disagreement about whether this happened). This was supposed to be the “end” of the MEK.
What actually happened was that Rumsfeld and Cheney came up with a plan. Since the MEK was fiercely anti-Iranian but members of a banned terrorist organization, the “solution” was have the MEK members “swear an oath” they renounced their membership in the MEK and then were allowed to keep their weapons and resume activity in Iran against the government. For all of the known evidence of this American-supported MEK terrorist activity in Iran after 2003, see here.
The MEK has had a number of supporters in the American Congress and government precisely because of the concept that the “enemy of my enemy is my friend”. One of their biggest supporters was John Ashcroft:
Only two years ago [in the year 2000], these arguments won sympathy from Ashcroft–and more than 200 other members of Congress. When the National Council of Resistance staged a September 2000 rally outside the United Nations to protest a speech by Iranian President Mohammed Khatami, Missouri’s two Republican senators–Ashcroft and Chris Bond–issued a joint statement of solidarity that was read aloud to a cheering crowd.
Other people including Tom Tancredo and the anti-Castro nut Ileana Ros-Lehtinen have been equally supportive of the MEK.
The PMOI, of which the MEK is but a subset, have been granted the right (by the American government) to operate prison camps inside Iraq. And of course you can guess these camps featured regular human rights abuses, including torture.
Despite all of this, in 2005 the Bush administration continued to rely on the MEK to prop up his propaganda against the Iranian government:
Despite the group’s notoriety, Bush himself cited purported intelligence gathered by MEK as evidence of the Iranian regime’s rapidly accelerating nuclear ambitions. At a March 16 press conference, Bush said Iran’s hidden nuclear program had been discovered not because of international inspections but “because a dissident group pointed it out to the world.” White House aides acknowledged later that the dissident group cited by the president is the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), one of the MEK front groups added to the State Department list two years ago.
The MEK’s political group (NCRI) is one of the leading trumpeters of the story that Iran is trying to build a nuclear weapon. The NCRI has also claimed that they “discovered” two Iranian nuclear (energy) facilities at Natanz and Arak. The claim that NCRI discovered this has been proven false. What happened is that the NCRI was the first to make this information known to the public and the American government more or less let them take the credit for it. Bush flat out lied when he gave credit to the NCRI for this discovery.
Now why would the U.S. government do that if not in order to bolster the NCRI’s credibility? There were actually two facilities there and it is true they have been used in nuclear (energy) research and enrichment. What is not true is that anyone needed the NCRI to point it out (neither the US intel community or the IAEA).
Here is more NCRI material from a 2002 press conference about Iranian weapons in general. Here is the NCRI’s timeline of all the times they’ve been warning the world about Iran’s capabilities. I note with much trepidation this:
August 2003: Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and an Israeli general brief President Bush on Iran’s nuclear program, arguing that U.S. intelligence services are underestimating how quickly Iran could develop a nuclear weapon.
The term “U.S. intelligence services” is code for the CIA, which provided accurate but unpleasant information on Iraq’s total lack of WMD and is now providing accurate but unpleasant information that Iran is at least 10 years away from manufacturing a single bomb.
On April 21, 2006, Representative Dennis Kucinich wrote an open letter to Bush asking of his administration was supporting the MEK and PJAK and whether or not American troops were clandestinely operating inside of Iran. So far he has received no answer. And sadly, he is the only member of Congress that I am aware of that is even asking.
The NCRI operates its own website in several languages, including English.
Pax
