Have you heard of the Mujahideen-e Khalq? Possibly not, but they’re a Marxist Islamist terrorist organization whose goal has been to seize power in Iran since the time of the Shah. They were involved in the 1979 revolution, and by involved I mean that they bombed civilian targets to seed unrest and instigated the hostage-taking at the US embassy. After failing to win power in the aftermath, they eventually relocated to Iraq where they joined the payroll of Saddam Hussein, working for him to target civilians inside Iran to aid Hussein’s war effort, and later to help Hussein suppress the Shi’a and Kurdish uprisings. Their presence in northern Iraq was even used before the Iraq war as evidence of Hussein’s support for terrorism.
Where are they now? According to the State Department’s 2004 list of terror organizations, they’re mostly in Iraq, under US protection.
“… Over 3,000 MEK members are currently confined to Camp Ashraf, the MEK’s main compound north of Baghdad, where they remain under the Geneva Convention’s “protected person” status and Coalition control. …”
See below for more:
More from the State Department report, emphasis and additional links mine:
The MEK philosophy mixes Marxism and Islam. … The MEK advocates the overthrow of the Iranian regime and its replacement with the group’s own leadership. [Ed. — Note that they were active during the reign of the Shah, and that they would likely oppose any government in Iran that didn’t include them. You can go here to read a more comprehensive State Department history, detailing their activities both before and during the 1979 revolution.]
… The group’s worldwide campaign against the Iranian Government stresses propaganda and occasionally uses terrorism. During the 1970s, the MEK killed US military personnel and US civilians working on defense projects in Tehran and supported the takeover in 1979 of the US Embassy in Tehran. In 1981, the MEK detonated bombs in the head office of the Islamic Republic Party and the Premier’s office, killing some 70 high-ranking Iranian officials, … Near the end of the 1980-1988 war with Iran, Baghdad armed the MEK with military equipment and sent it into action against Iranian forces. In 1991, the MEK assisted the Government of Iraq in suppressing the Shia and Kurdish uprisings in southern Iraq and the Kurdish uprisings in the north. In April 1992, the MEK conducted near-simultaneous attacks on Iranian embassies and intallations in 13 countries, demonstrating the group’s ability to mount large-scale operations overseas. [Ed. — Here, the report lists several additional incidents from a stepped up offensive against the Iranian government from 1999-2001, including assasinations of Iranian military and law enforcement personnel, as well as mortar and bombing attacks on government buildings.] … After Coalition aircraft bombed MEK bases at the outset of Operation Iraqi Freedom, the MEK leadership ordered its members not to resist Coalition forces, and a formal cease-fire arrangement was reached in May 2003.
… Over 3,000 MEK members are currently confined to Camp Ashraf, the MEK’s main compound north of Baghdad, where they remain under the Geneva Convention’s “protected person” status and Coalition control. … A significant number of MEK personnel have “defected” from the Ashraf group, and several dozen of them have been voluntarily repatriated to Iran.
… Before Operation Iraqi Freedom, the group received all of its military assistance, and most of its financial support, from the former Iraqi regime. The MEK also has used front organizations to solicit contributions from expatriate Iranian communities.
Yes, you read that right. A group listed as a terrorist organization by the US State Department was given Geneva Convention protections that weren’t extended to Iraqi civilians or thousands of other US detainees, many of whom had never been proven to have any terrorist ties at all. And not just any terrorist group, but one supported for many years by Saddam Hussein.
Guess how popular the MEK is inside Iran? Guess how popular they are inside the US Congress? Though there are both Democrats and a few Republicans who condemn the MEK, they do have their supporters. From a Democrat this May:
… The twelve-term Democrat from New York [Congressman Ed Towns, (D-NY)] said, “Human Rights Watch should view the MEK as its partner in defense of human rights in Iran not perpetrators. I firmly believe HRW report on MEK published on May 18th will only advance Tehran’s agenda to derail the fight for democracy and human rights in Iran, calling on the group “to retract the report and provide a more factual account of rights violations in Iran”. …
From a Republican in 2003, emphasis mine:
… “This group loves the United States. They’re assisting us in the war on terrorism; they’re pro-U.S.,” said Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.) in an interview with The Hill.
…Last week, State Department spokesman Greg Sullivan told The Hill the MEK is considered “a combatant” and U.S. officials believe its soldiers “are undertaking some of the action in the south [of Iraq] where enemy combatants have disguised themselves as civilians.”
Ros-Lehtinen vehemently disputed State’s assertion to The Washington Times, calling the spokesman a “weasel” and a “gutless bureaucrat who won’t come out of his cave.” Sullivan did not respond to a request for further comment.
… “In no meeting or briefing I have ever attended has anyone called this group an anti-U.S., terrorist organization,” she continued, adding that the group has provided useful intelligence to the U.S. government on Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
Ros-Lehtinen further said that there is “wide support” in Congress for the MEK and that it will be “one of the leading groups in establishing secular government in Iran.”
… Elahe Hicks of Human Rights Watch said that “many, many Iranians resent” the MEK. “Because this group is so extremely resented inside Iran, the Iranian government actually benefits from having an opposition group like this,” she said. James Phillips of the Heritage Foundation agreed. “When they sided with Iraq against Iran in the [1980-88] war, that was the kiss of death for their political future. Even Iranians who might have sympathized with them were enraged that they became the junior partner of their longstanding rival,” he said. …
Well, I guess Marxism is about as secular as you can get, but maybe the congresswoman missed the word that comes after that. If the world made any sense, you wouldn’t end up with a rabid neotheocon like Ros-Lehtinen supporting Marxist Islamic terrorists. But if Marxist Islamic terrorists are your only inroad to a country whose government you want to topple … well, maybe you put up with alarming bedfellows, emphasis mine:
… The MEK insists that it should lead a US-backed effort to bring what it has termed democratic rule to Iran. Last month it organized a rally, attended by several powerful Republican lawmakers and billed as the “2005 National Convention for a Democratic, Secular Republic in Iran”, at Washington’s historic Constitution Hall.
Since the March 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, where the MEK had been based since 1986, the group has tried to persuade Washington that it holds the key to overthrowing the Islamic republic next door. It has been backed in this quest by right-wing lawmakers, a group of hardline neo-conservatives and retired military officers called the Iran Policy Committee, and some US officials – particularly in the Pentagon – who believe the MEK could be used to help destabilize the Iranian regime, if not eventually overthrow it in conjunction with US military strikes against selected targets.
While the group’s supporters in the Pentagon so far have succeeded in protecting the several thousand MEK militants based at Camp Ashraf near the Iranian border from being dispersed or deported, they have failed to persuade the US State Department to take the group off its terrorist list, to which it was added in 1997 based on its attacks during the 1970s against US military contractors and its participation in the 1979 seizure of the US Embassy in Teheran. The European Union also cites the MEK as a terrorist organization.
After a year-long tug-of-war between the two US agencies, a truce between the State Department and the Pentagon was apparently worked out. MEK members at Camp Ashraf were designated “protected persons” under the Geneva Conventions. Since then, the Pentagon has recruited individual members of the MEK to infiltrate Iran as part of an effort to locate secret nuclear installations, according to recent articles published in The New Yorker and Newsweek magazines. …
When the first reports came in on the coordinated bombings in Iran, the Iranian government’s first response was to blame Hussein loyalists acting out of Iraq. But they also accused the MEK, aka the People’s Mujahideen, of helping. Following another bombing on the Wednesday before the election, Iranian government “Officials have accused the Iraq-based People’s Mujahidin, which is Iran’s main armed opposition group, and Baathist supporters of deposed Iraqi president Saddam Hussein as well as “foreign agents”.”
And has the Bush administration condemned these terrorist bombings, which all killed and injured civilians? Last I heard, they had not.
As Scott Ritter, the Cassandra of the Iraq war, points out, this is all falling into a familiar pattern, emphasis mine:
On 16 October 2002, President Bush told the American people that “I have not ordered the use of force. I hope that the use of force will not become necessary.”
We know now that this statement was itself a lie, that the president, by late August 2002, had, in fact, signed off on the ‘execute’ orders authorising the US military to begin active military operations inside Iraq, and that these orders were being implemented as early as September 2002, when the US Air Force, assisted by the British Royal Air Force, began expanding its bombardment of targets inside and outside the so-called no-fly zone in Iraq.
These operations were designed to degrade Iraqi air defence and command and control capabilities. They also paved the way for the insertion of US Special Operations units, who were conducting strategic reconnaissance, and later direct action, operations against specific targets inside Iraq, prior to the 19 March 2003 commencement of hostilities.
… The fact is that the Iraq war had begun by the beginning of summer 2002, if not earlier.
… The reality is that the US war with Iran has already begun. As we speak, American over flights of Iranian soil are taking place, using pilotless drones and other, more sophisticated, capabilities.
The violation of a sovereign nation’s airspace is an act of war in and of itself. But the war with Iran has gone far beyond the intelligence-gathering phase.
President Bush has taken advantage of the sweeping powers granted to him in the aftermath of 11 September 2001, to wage a global war against terror and to initiate several covert offensive operations inside Iran.
The most visible of these is the CIA-backed actions recently undertaken by the Mujahadeen el-Khalq, or MEK, an Iranian opposition group, once run by Saddam Hussein’s dreaded intelligence services, but now working exclusively for the CIA’s Directorate of Operations.
It is bitter irony that the CIA is using a group still labelled as a terrorist organisation, a group trained in the art of explosive assassination by the same intelligence units of the former regime of Saddam Hussein, who are slaughtering American soldiers in Iraq today, to carry out remote bombings in Iran of the sort that the Bush administration condemns on a daily basis inside Iraq.
…To the north, in neighbouring Azerbaijan, the US military is preparing a base of operations for a massive military presence that will foretell a major land-based campaign designed to capture Tehran. …
Is Ritter right again? I sure the hell hope not. But if he is, a crowd of nitwits will be sitting around a couple years after the invasion of Iran, and about six months after it comes out that we put the regime’s prisons under new management, saying that Stalin and Hirohito clearly invaded far more countries on false pretexts than we have, and that our torture procedures have become more humane than during the early years of the Iraq war.
But even if we don’t invade Iran, even if everything comes to naught, the truth remains: The United States, through its dealings with the MEK, is looking an awful lot like a state sponsor of terror. It shouldn’t matter that the objects of that terror are brown people we’re having an argument with.