Syrian Conflict: The Price Of Defying The West

Tony Cartalucci writes:

An article published  by Haaretz reveals that the Syrian conflict is a punitive operation resulting from Assad defying the West and obstructing US-Israeli attack on Iran.

The article is titled, “Assad’s Israeli friend,” appears at first to be a ham-handed attempt to portray Syrian President Bashar Al Assad as somehow allied with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Instead, it actually reveals that Israel had attempted to execute verbatim, the strategies prescribed in the Brookings Institution’s “Which Path to Persia?” report, where Israel was to lure Syria away from Iran ahead of a US-Israeli strike and subsequent war with Tehran.Syria obviously did not fall into the trap, and as a result, has been plunged into a destructive, spiteful war of proxy aggression by the US, Israel, Saudi Arabia and their regional allies.

The Haaretz piece states specifically:

In moving closer to Assad, Netanyahu had a number of motives. First, he wanted to put some space between Syria and Iran, in the hope that Damascus would stand aside in the event of an Israeli strike against Iranian nuclear facilities in Natanz and Fordow.

Second, Israel’s loss of its alliances with Turkey and later with Egypt, compounded by apprehension about a deteriorating security situation in the south, pushed Jerusalem into buying quiet on its northern borders.

The third motive was to weaken Hezbollah, while the fourth was to address concerns that the Syrian rebels were in fact Al-Qaida operatives and that the fall of Assad’s regime would turn Syria into a hostile Islamic state.

In Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh’s 2007 New Yorker article,  “The Redirection: Is the Administration’s new policy benefiting our enemies in the war on terrorism?” Israel was implicated directly in an insidious conspiracy to funnel aid and arms to sectarian extremists in a bid to topple Iran and its regional allies:

In the past year, the Saudis, the Israelis, and the Bush Administration have developed a series of informal understandings about their new strategic direction. At least four main elements were involved, the U.S. government consultant told me. First, Israel would be assured that its security was paramount and that Washington and Saudi Arabia and other Sunni states shared its concern about Iran.

Second, the Saudis would urge Hamas, the Islamist Palestinian party that has received support from Iran, to curtail its anti-Israeli aggression and to begin serious talks about sharing leadership with Fatah, the more secular Palestinian group. (In February, the Saudis brokered a deal at Mecca between the two factions. However, Israel and the U.S. have expressed dissatisfaction with the terms.)

The third component was that the Bush Administration would work directly with Sunni nations to counteract Shiite ascendance in the region.

Fourth, the Saudi government, with Washington’s approval, would provide funds and logistical aid to weaken the government of President Bashir Assad, of Syria. The Israelis believe that putting such pressure on the Assad government will make it more conciliatory and open to negotiations. Syria is a major conduit of arms to Hezbollah. The Saudi government is also at odds with the Syrians over the assassination of Rafik Hariri, the former Lebanese Prime Minister, in Beirut in 2005, for which it believes the Assad government was responsible. Hariri, a billionaire Sunni, was closely associated with the Saudi regime and with Prince Bandar. (A U.N. inquiry strongly suggested that the Syrians were involved, but offered no direct evidence; there are plans for another investigation, by an international tribunal.)

The Israeli belief that pressuring Syria would make it more “conciliatory and open to negotiations,” as well as the “motivations” cited by the recent Haaretz piece, are torn straight from Brooking Institution’s 2009 “Which Path to Persia?” report. The report stated specifically:

“…the Israelis may want to hold off [on striking Iran] until they have a peace deal with Syria in hand (assuming that Jerusalem believes that one is within reach), which would help them mitigate blowback from Hizballah and potentially Hamas. Consequently, they might want Washington to push hard in mediating between Jerusalem and Damascus.” -page 109 (.pdf)

Clearly Syria refused the disingenuous “peace deal” with Israel, unlike its regional neighbors Turkey, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar who are now all working in lock step with US-Israeli interests. While these neighbors were spared the sedition and carnage visited upon other Arab nations during the US State Department orchestrated “Arab Spring,” Syria has been hit hardest and longest. The resilience of Syria may have delayed or even shelved Western designs aimed at reasserting hegemony across the Middle East, including delaying indefinitely war with Iran.

Israel’s disingenuous attempts to reproach Syria are only one of several prescribed strategies Brookings called for in their 2009 report that have already come to pass. Another was Brookings’ suggestion to deslist and arm the bizarre terrorist cult, Mujahedeen e-Khalq (MEK). MEK had been listed as a foreign terrorist organization by the US State Department for decades, yet it was still heavily armed, funded, and its operatives even trained on US soil – this despite the group being listed for kidnapping and slaughtering US officers and civilian contractors.

In 2012, the US State Department would finally officially delist MEK, and announce that they would begin funding and arming them in earnest against Iran. The LA Times would report in their September 2012 article, “U.S. to remove Iranian group Mujahedin Khalq from terrorist list,” that:

The small but influential Iranian exile group Mujahedin Khalq will be removed from the U.S. list of foreign terrorist organizations, a U.S. official said Friday, following a high-priced lobbying campaign claiming the controversial group had renounced violence.

The New Yorker and the Uk’s Daily Mail would each in turn report that MEK was being armed, trained, and directed by the West in terrorist activities against Iran, including the assassination of Iranian scientists.

MEK is just one of many terrorist organizations, that despite being listed by the US State Department as such, still receives weapons, training, cash, and political support from the US government. This is a pattern seen repeated in Libya and most recently in Syria – each case spun and excused with a myriad of lies wrapped in false, constantly shifting narratives. 

….

The US’ delisting and arming of MEK proves that the West possesses the political duplicity to hypocritically arm their own “declared” enemies. This double game of condemning terrorist organizations while simultaneously arming and directing them against the West’s enemies goes far in explaining how thousands of tons of weapons NATO and its regional allies have sent to so-called “moderates” in Syria have ended up almost exclusively in the hands of Al Qaeda’s Syrian franchise, al-Nusra , which has emerged as the most heavily armed, well funded, most organized militant front in the conflict.

The Brookings report is not just a piece of paper – it is a documented conspiracy, executed in plain sight by corporate-financier interests that have transcended at least two US presidencies in their latest campaign against Iran, Syria, and the wider Middle East. Haaretz may hope that people quickly read the article and conclude that Israel is somehow backing the Syrian state, never realizing what is being reported is instead a disingenuous “peace deal” meant to lure in, then fatally betray Syria just as was done to Libya.

Haaretz also hope readers do not realize the obvious – that Syria refused these insidious advances by the West which lead chronologically to the 2011 “uprising,” that Haaretz itself now admits is the work of terrorists, not “freedom fighters,” and that the New Yorker in 2007 revealed as being engineered by the US, Saudi Arabia, and Israel itself.

It is clear that Syria is being punished, divided, and destroyed for obstructing Western designs against Iran.  It is also clear that those forces fighting inside Syria against the Syrian people and their government, are aiding and abetting foreign aggression and what is essentially an attempt by Western interests to recolonize the Arab World. As mortars fired by NATO’s proxy forces, aimed at Damascus University, claim another 10-15 innocent lives, the public must be aware of the premeditated, punitive nature of the unhinged atrocities now being committed by these “rebels.”

Assassinating Iranian Scientists Is Terrorism: U.S. Official

“The American political leaders who support the de-listing of the MEK terror group"

By Jim Lobe,

... two “senior State Department officials” who cannot be otherwise identified, briefed the press on the decision in a teleconference last Friday afternoon, Sep. 28.

They explained the reasons for the de-listing, while making very clear the administration’s institutional distaste for the MEK. As was reported in the mainstream press, they said, among other things:

…[T]he Department does not overlook or forget the MEK’s past acts of terrorism, including its involvement in the killing of U.S. citizens in Iran in the 1970s and an attack on U.S. soil in 1992. The Department also has serious concerns about the MEK as an organization, particularly with regard to allegations of abuse committed against its own members. The Secretary’s decision today took into account the MEK’s public renunciation of violence, the absence of confirmed acts of terrorism by the MEK for more than a decade, and their cooperation in the peaceful closure of Camp Ashraf, their historic paramilitary base.…

 

As the briefing progressed, the emphasis was placed very much on the phrase “the absence of confirmed acts of terrorism,” as when one questioner recalled the NBC report earlier this year that quoted one unnamed U.S. official as confirming Iran’s charges that Israel had used MEK militants in recent years to carry out assassinations of Iranian scientists associated with Tehran’s nuclear program. The briefing’s senior official repeated the mantra about “confirmed acts”, noting,

And I should add that the United States Government has not claimed that the MEK was involved in the assassination of scientists in Iran. And that’s really all we’re going to have to say on that.

I followed up later in the briefing by asking whether the U.S. government considered the assassination of Iranian scientists an act of terrorism, and the following colloquy ensued:

Briefer: “If we had information on that and could pursue it, we would, but as I said, we have never said that this group was involved in those assassinations.”

Question: “…I just wanted to find out whether the USG considered that the assassination, regardless of who it was by, of Iranian scientists, would constitute an act of terrorism.”

Briefer: “Well that would be my understanding, but I think you’d have to have the lawyers take a look at that.”

I may be wrong about this, but I think this was the first acknowledgment by a senior State Department official that killing Iranian scientists was an act of terrorism. At the time of the assassination last January of Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, my recollection was that, while vehemently denying any responsibility for the killing, U.S. officials avoided using the word “terrorism” in describing the act. As Clinton said at the time, “I want to categorically deny any United States involvement in any kind of act of violence inside Iran.” Other officials also referred to the killing as violence, rather than terrorism. It seemed a deliberate avoidance; after all, all eyes were focused on Israel as the most likely instigator, if not perpetrator, of the killing — an assumption that Israeli officials did very little to dispel — and it would be politically pretty dicey for the Obama administration to suggest that Israel practices terrorism against its perceived enemies.

Of course, the senior State Department official who said it would be his understanding that the assassination constituted terrorism added an artful hedge, suggesting that the lawyers would have the last word on the question. And, because the briefing was on “background,” his statement did not constitute “official” U.S. policy in as authoritative a way as if it had been “on the record,” in which case his name would be public. But henceforward, at least, there is some institutional backing for the notion that killing Iranian scientists does indeed constitute terrorism and that those who are responsible can therefore be considered terrorists, including states.

Asked whether the U.S. might engage the MEK as a party in U.S. relations or actions regarding Iran, the same senior State Department official was pretty unequivocal:

I want to be very clear about this. We do not see the MEK as a viable opposition or democratic opposition movement. We have no evidence and we have no confidence that the MEK is an organization that could promote the democratic values that we would like to see in Iran.

There is nothing in the way they govern themselves that would suggest they’re interested in adopting democratic principles, and there is a long and fairly rich set of documentation on how they treat their own personnel that really does suggest to the contrary. So continue to have serious concerns about the group with regard to allegations of abuse that’s committed against its own members. They are not part of our picture in terms of the future of Iran.

It will be interesting to see if the advocates MEK has been able to accumulate and/or buy among former officials and members of Congress can overcome get any traction in the coming months.

Via: "LobeLog"

‘Our Terrorists’ The MEK

By Coleen Rowley,
Courtesy Of "Anti-War"

what kind of mind-boggling corruption — of the worst kind — influence peddling by a “foreign power” (as defined by the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to include foreign terrorist groups) — lies hidden behind the curtain? Could some members of the MEK “foreign terrorist organization,” their murderous history magically erased, be sent to a nice suburb somewhere to live as your next door neighbor as happens with the organized crime “witness protection program?” Or will the soon-to-be-legalized “terrorism” of the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (or Mojahedin-e Khalq, usually referred to as MEK) find more utilitarian function in the mode of how U.S. neoconservative officials plotted with and used convicted con artist Ahmad Chalabi and his Iraqi expatriate group to gin up the false “intelligence” that served to launch the unjustified and counter-productive war on Iraq? Even worse, might this new MEK operation end up resembling the sequel to Charlie Wilson’s War?

Since we cannot seem to learn from history and therefore seem doomed to repeat our mistakes, all of the above could be true. In any event, the old movie script will require few changes.

From MAK to MEK

The popular 2007 movie Charlie Wilson’s War found a way to glorify a rather derelict Texas congressman’s exploits and secret appropriations to fund CIA covert assistance to Mujahideen “rebels” (one faction recruited and trained by Osama Bin Laden himself) based on the repeatedly discredited notion that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” As John Hanrahan points out, Hollywood and Tom Hanks also found a way to edit out the real truth: “that the U.S.-aided Mujahedeen’s ouster of the Soviets in 1989 ultimately led to civil war and the ultra-orthodox Islamic Taliban coming to power in 1996, an event that also enabled anti-Soviet fighter Osama bin Laden and his fledgling al Qaeda to set up a base from which to plan the 9/11 attacks.”

…Osama bin Laden arrived in the country…sent by then-Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki bin Faisal, where he set up the Maktab al-Khidamat (MAK) which helped finance, recruit and train mujahidin fighters. Bin Laden, the MAK, and the Afghan mujahidin in total received about half a billion dollars a year from the CIA, and roughly the same from the Saudis, funneled through Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI)

…Continued US sponsorship of the al-Qaeda-Taliban nexus in Afghanistan was confirmed as late as 2000 in Congressional hearings. Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on South Asia, Congressman Dana Rohrabacher — former White House Special Assistant to President Reagan and now Senior Member of the House International Relations Committee — declared that ‘this administration has a covert policy that has empowered the Taliban and enabled this brutal movement to hold on to power’. The assumption is that ‘the Taliban would bring stability to Afghanistan and permit the building of oil pipelines from Central Asia through Afghanistan to Pakistan’ — From “Our Terrorists” by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed in New Internationalist Magazine.

In other words, Charlie Wilson’s War seriously backfired and was a significant factor that gave rise to the 9-11 attacks. (Incidentally — and a big reason why there’s so little hope of anyone having learned from this sordid history — is that Dana Rohrabacher happens to be one of the main Congressmen who has now taken big sums of money from the MEK front groups!)

An October 2010 report (“Restoring Afghanistan’s Tribal Balance”) for the New World Strategies Coalition described U.S. covert support of the Mujahideen as follows:

During the ‘jihad’ against the Soviets, the Judeo-Christian West teamed up with violent Islamic radicals of the worst sort, against the Soviets, because they shared a common hatred for the godless communists. The same people American leaders once called ‘freedom fighters’ throughout the 80′s are now [in the current war] violent extremist jihadist terrorists who commit immoral acts and heinous human rights violations that all Americans should find deplorable. Of course, before 9/11 when these ‘terrorists’ were fighting against the Soviets, they were ‘our terrorists’ and such human rights violations and war crimes hardly ever made the press. Today, people aren’t really supposed to remember nor point out this interesting historical irony, especially within the media.

By fast forwarding 30 years and changing one vowel, (MAK to MEK) we see history repeating almost exactly. There’s ample evidence that Iranian MEK terrorists, “our new terrorists,” are responsible for conducting assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists. U.S. officials confirmed the charges leveled by Iran’s leaders as well as the fact that the killings and bombings in Iran were financed, trained and armed by Israel’s secret service. In an exclusive report, NBC reported that:

The group, the People’s Mujahedin of Iran, has long been designated as a terrorist group by the United States, accused of killing American servicemen and contractors in the 1970s and supporting the takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran before breaking with the Iranian mullahs in 1980. The attacks, which have killed five Iranian nuclear scientists since 2007 and may have destroyed a missile research and development site, have been carried out in dramatic fashion, with motorcycle-borne assailants often attaching small magnetic bombs to the exterior of the victims’ cars. — From NBC Rock Center exclusive report February, 2012.

In April of this year, Seymour Hersh reported in the New Yorker article “Our Men in Iran” that members of MEK were also being trained in Nevada by U.S. Joint Special Operation Command for covert actions to topple the Iranian government.

The following comments are from former U.S. security experts Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett’s excellent analysis of the highly politicized flip-flop, “By Delisting the MEK, the Obama Administration is taking the Moral and Strategic Bankruptcy of America’s Iran Policy to a New Low“:

We have seen too many times over the years just how cynically American administrations have manipulated these designations, adding and removing organizations and countries for reasons that have little or nothing to do with designees’ actual involvement in terrorist activity… Yet, precisely because we know how thoroughly corrupt and politicized these designations really are, we recognize their significance as statements of U.S. policy.

Today, the Obama administration made a truly horrible statement about U.S. policy toward Iran… Just this year, U.S. intelligence officials told high-profile media outlets that the MEK is actively collaborating with Israeli intelligence to assassinate Iranian nuclear scientists, see here; Iranian officials have made the same charge. Since when did murdering unarmed civilians (and, in some instances, members of their families as well) on public streets in the middle of a heavily populated urban area (Tehran) not meet even the U.S. government’s own professed standard for terrorism?

…Here, the Obama administration is taking an organization that the U.S. government knows is directly involved in the murder of innocent people and giving this group Washington’s “good housekeeping seal of approval.”… Count on this: once the MEK is formally off the FTO list — a legally defined process that will take a few months to play out — Congress will be appropriating money to support themonafeqin as the vanguard of a new American strategy for regime change in Iran.

In the 1990s, similar enthusiasm for Ahmad Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress — who were about as unpopular among Iraqis as the MEK is among Iranians — led to President Bill Clinton’s signing of the Iraq Liberation Act, which paved the way for George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003. The chances for such a scenario to play out with regard to Iran over the next few years — with even more disastrous consequences for America’s strategic and moral standing — got a lot higher today.

Flynt Leverett served as a Middle East expert on George W. Bush’s National Security Council staff until the Iraq War and worked previously at the State Department and at the Central Intelligence Agency. Hillary Mann Leverett was the NSC expert on Iran and — from 2001 to 2003 — was one of only a few U.S. diplomats authorized to negotiate with the Iranians over Afghanistan, al-Qaeda and Iraq.

Governmental Influence Peddling Barely Hidden

A steady flow totaling in the millions of dollars during these last years has been revealed, funneled through various front groups to latter-day Charlie Wilson U.S. congresspersons, Washington lobbying firms and former high level Department of Justice, Homeland Security, military and U.S. counter-terrorism officials. Check out the excellent reports — here and here — of Chris McGreal, a Guardian investigative journalist based in Washington who really did some good research attempting to trace the sordid money trail, writing:

US policy change on banned Iranian group came after extraordinary fundraising operation to transform its image. Only a few years ago, US authorities were arresting pro-MEK activists. To the US government, the People’s Mojahedin Organisation of Iran (MEK) was a terrorist group alongside al-Qaida, Hamas and the Farc in Colombia. The MEK landed on the list in 1997 with American blood on its hands and by allying itself with Saddam Hussein along with a long list of bombings inside Iran.

But the organization is regarded very differently by a large number of members of Congress, former White House officials and army generals, and even one of the US’s most renowned reporters, Carl Bernstein. They see the MEK as a victim of US double dealings with the regime in Tehran and a legitimate alternative to the Iran’s Islamic government.

That difference is in no small part the result of a formidable fundraising operation and campaign to transform the MEK’s image led by more than 20 Iranian American organisations across the US. These groups and their leaders have spent millions of dollars on donations to members of Congress, paying Washington lobby groups and hiring influential politicians and officials, including two former CIA directors, as speakers.

In a highly sensitive political game, MEK supporters have succeeded in pressing the state department into removing the group from the list of terrorist organisations after winning a court order requiring a decision to be made on the issue before the end of this month. But its supporters were forced to tread a careful path so as not to cross anti-terrorism laws.

Only a few years ago, the US authorities were arresting pro-MEK activists and freezing the assets of front groups for “material support for a terrorist organisation”. Now members of Congress openly praise the group in apparent contradiction of the anti-terrorism legislation many of them supported. Nearly 100 members of the House of Representatives backed a resolution calling on the US government to drop the MEK from the terrorist list.

Most of the damning details, however, of what would probably be otherwise considered “material support for terrorism” will probably lie buried and stamped “Top Secret” in Treasury Department files forced closed when the presumptive targets of the investigation turned out to include over three dozen top U.S. officials and even many of the federal investigators’ former bosses and cronies: former Attorney General Michael Mukasey; former Assistant Attorney General and Homeland Security Director Michael Chertoff; two former CIA Directors; former DOJ Attorney and Homeland Security Advisor to the President Frances Townsend; former U.S. Attorney and NYC Mayor Rudy Guiliani; former FBI Director Louis Freeh; former Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge, etc. Clearly such powerful “political considerations” can trump the law and easily subvert even the U.S. terrorism laws constantly promoted since 9-11 as all-important but now turned on their head. So unless a brave whistleblower or two steps forward, we probably won’t know much more about the presumably forced closure of these criminal terrorism investigations for another 20 years or so until a federal judge finally rules in agreement with a FOIA request. Or unless new movie producers can force some leaks out to jazz up the old script.

“Terrorism” Propaganda: How to Play it Up or Play it Down

The last 11 years have seen almost uninterrupted, cynical exaggerating and distorting of the threat of Mid-east “terrorism” by our mainstream media (to scare us into doing dumb things like launching war on countries like Iraq that had no connection to 9-11) so it was strangely out of the norm for the Washington Post article to frame the de-listing of the MEK Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) as humanitarian intervention. Interestingly, the Post reporter also chose the term “label” to minimize the importance of the U.S. government’s designation-undesignation of a “FTO” in the case of the MEK.

So it’s just a “label” when Michael Mukasey and three dozen other high level political figures flaunted the law in support of a “foreign terrorist organization.” But would thePost say mere FTO “labels” justify launching thousands of US government investigations and prosecutions of ordinary, non-powerful, non politically-connected people for “material support”? There are 23 anti-war activists in the Mid-west who are still under Department of Justice investigation two years after their homes were raided by the FBI; and there are thousands of people serving long prison terms or, even worse, on “kill lists” to be summarily executed due, the Government would allege, to even a fleeting or tenuous connection to someone or some group on the US FTO list. Furthermore, no transparency, no judicial process has seemingly existed — until MEK’s big money lobbying campaign came along — to dispute the accuracy of such FTO “labels.”

An article at the Bill of Rights Defense Committee’s “Peoples Blog for the Constitution” entitled “Terrorist designation a problem? Befriend a politician” points out this terrible double standard:

The severe ramifications of this law have resulted in solitary confinement and a fifteen year sentence for US citizen Fahad Hashmi, who allowed a suitcase of raincoats at his apartment, and a 17 year sentence for Tarek Mehanna, who translated a text by a Saudi religious scholar. The removal of the MEK from the FTO list demonstrates not only the double-standard for enforcement of material support laws, but also the over-broad and heavy-handed criminalization of constitutionally protected activity.

When the overbroad law resulted in investigations of prominent politicians and former officials, the law was not modified to address First Amendment concerns, but instead maintained, while a specific organization was removed from the terrorist list to accommodate those politicians’ activities. The material support law should be changed so that it doesn’t criminalize association, expression, or other activity protected by the First Amendment, or efforts aimed to advance humanitarian goals.

Finally, consider how unbelievable and in-congruent for the MEK to have such a powerful lobby that it can reach its tentacles into U.S. political “leadership” like this, spending millions of dollars in exchange for political endorsements and yet be portrayed at the very same time, as the Post and other media does, as a poor group of refugees trapped in Iraq enemy territory in need of humanitarian intervention. Where would this refugee group which (for 15 years) has been designated a “foreign terrorist organization” get the millions it paid to U.S. officials and politicians for their assistance and influence-peddling? News articles do allude to the fact that the payments and the political pressure were in violation of U.S. law, but these articles fail to go into how and why federal investigators were apparently forced to drop their investigation of officials who received huge payments from the MEK.

The big money model for lobbyist success has paved the way for the coalition of MEK front groups to corrupt U.S. Government by funneling millions of dollars from who-knows-where to elected and appointed political figures to turn dark into light. Certainly there will now be other foreign-based front groups following this example in ever more flagrant disregard of what Justice Brandeis long ago warned us, about how government wrongdoing and contempt for (and subversion of) the law functions.

Contrast the portrayal of the need for “humanitarian intervention” on behalf of what was portrayed as defenseless women and children refugees in the MEK Camp in Iraq with the millions of dollars that have gone into PR propaganda firms, corrupt U.S. congresspersons and former high level DOJ, Homeland Security and counter-terrorism officials to essentially re-write the history of a violent terrorist group that worked for Saddam Hussein — who some of these same officials were, only a decade before, falsely implying was responsible for 9-11. Why did these millions of dollars not go to helping the MEK women and children move from Iraq if they are in such danger instead of going into corrupt U.S. political figures’ pockets?

If only the American people would wake up to this corruption, they might find themselves, at the very least, extremely confused that some of the same U.S. political figures who were so hell-bent to take out Saddam Hussein are now sponsoring one of Saddam’s main “terrorist” underlings. Don’t they remember Charlie Wilson’s War? Or what Friedrich Nietzsche said: “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.”

Working The Magic The 'Terrorcrat' Way

The Terrorist Outfit Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK) Is Now A 'Democratic Organisation'. Here's How They Did It.

Pepe Escobar relays the following in "Al-Jazeera":

Jamal Abdi, policy director for the National Iranian American Council (NIAC) didn't need many words to put it in perspective:

"The decision opens the door to Congressional funding of the MEK to conduct terrorist attacks in Iran, makes war with Iran far more likely, and will seriously damage Iran's peaceful pro-democracy movement as well as America's standing among ordinary Iranians."

According to the Iranian pro-democracy newspaper Kaleme- run by the Green Movement - "there is no organisation, no party and no cult more infamous than the MEK amongst the Iranian nation". No question; millions of Iranians despise the cult-like MEK, especially because it was aligned with Saddam Hussein during the 1980 to 1988 Iran-Iraq war.

During the war, the MEK's one and only obsession was to destroy Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini. Not that they had any chance, with a ragtag army assembled in Iraq launching a pathetic offensive inside Iran in 1988.
After the Tehran-Baghdad UN-brokered ceasefire of 1988, the MEK remained active in Saddam's Iraq during the 1990s - now reconverted to go after Iraqi Kurds. That's when the Clinton administration labelled them as "terrorists" - responsible for the assassination of US citizens in Iran before the Islamic revolution.

Hanging With The Mossad Crowd

One of the key reasons for the current upgrade is that the MEK seems to have agreed to leave its Iraqi base at Camp Ashraf and are about to relocate to a new US-built camp near Baghdad.

In spite of a torrent of denials, every shisha house all across the Middle East knows the MEK is trained - and funded - by Washington and Tel Aviv, and that includes training on US soil.

The MEK and its self-defined "political section" - the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) - are notorious (extremely unreliable) US intel sources on Iran's nuclear programme.

In February, NBC News admitted, "deadly attacks on Iranian nuclear scientists" were being carried out by the MEK, "financed, trained and armed by Israel's secret service". Predictably, NBC was careful not to investigate any US connection.

Unsurprisingly, the popularity-deprived US Congress erupted in joy to salute the State Department's decision - especially usual suspects such as Dana Rohrabacher (Republican from California), Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (Republican from Florida - the chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee), and Ted Poe (Republican from Texas). They all have repeatedly hailed the MEK as a "democratic organisation".

So how do you land an upgrade from terrorist to democrat? That's a no-brainer; you hire the best lobbying money can buy - and invest in effective PR.

Inside Story Americas - Paid to support Iranian terror group?

In MEK's case, that's been the job of three top Washington firms; DLA Piper; Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld; and DiGenova & Toensing. These three have bagged nearly $1.5 million over the past year to legitimise MEK at all costs.

Once more this is the true and tested way to bury a bloody history of bombings and assassinations that killed not only US businessmen and Iranian politicians, but also thousands of unaccounted for Iranian civilians.

There's nothing like a cool PR touch - in English, of course - to reconstruct a bunch of nutcases as loyal US allies fighting the "evil" Tehran regime. Congressmen and the proverbial armies of "former officials" - ubiquitous in the media - are suckers for this kind of stuff.

How come the mighty al-Qaeda never thought about it?

MEK's money - donations from the Iranian diaspora channelled through a web of shady organisations in Florida, Texas, Colorado and California - bought a muscular bipartisan portfolio.

That includes everyone from former mayor of New York and eternal 9/11 raconteur Rudy Giuliani to journalist Carl Bernstein; at least two former CIA directors; former Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell; former NATO chief Wesley Clark; former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson; and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Hugh Shelton.

It has been established, for instance, that Shelton, former FBI director Louis Freeh and former attorney general Michael Mukasey (who oversaw terrorism cases), among others, definitely profited from it. This is a decent roll call of most who joined the bandwagon.

In June, former Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich went to Paris for a pro-MEK rally alongside the cult outfit co-leader, Maryam Rajavi.

The Treasury Department did begin an investigation of "speaking fees" - some of them up to $40,000 a pop - collected on behalf of MEK.

Yet it's unclear whether this particular investigation will have legs. In cases involving Hamas and Hezbollah, people did go to jail for providing indirect financial support. But then again both Hamas and Hezbollah have not been "upgraded" to "democratic" status in the US.

Then, there's the curioser and curioser Clinton angle.

The MEK was added to the terror list during the Clinton administration because Bill Clinton was trying to charm former Iranian President Muhammad Khatami. Now, as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton has disclosed "classified" information about MEK to Congress, certainly involving the identity of Iranian nuclear scientists.
So from Saddam's puppets, MEK have finally graduated to CIA and Mossad puppets. Expect from now on the usual rash of unnamed "US officials" insisting the upgrade does not mean the US government is an official supporter of MEK. That will be yet another stance of "leading from behind".

It goes without saying this also works as a priceless PR coup for the military dictatorship of the mullahtariat in Tehran - who will take no prisoners in depicting Washington to be in bed with a terrorist outfit that even US intelligence admits is a facilitator of Mossad-style assassinations of Iranian scientists.

Terrorist groups of the world, unite; you have nothing to lose but your non-access to an ace Washington PR firm. It's time for all of you to be rebranded as "terrocrats".

5 Lessons From The De-Listing Of MEK As A Terrorist Group

A Separate Justice System For American Muslims, and The US Embrace Of Terrorism.

By Glenn Greenwald
Courtesy Of "The Guardian"

The Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), or People's Mojahedin Organization ofIran, is an Iranian dissident group that has been formally designated for the last 15 years by the US State Department as a "foreign terrorist organization". When the Bush administration sought to justify its attack on Iraq in 2003 by accusing Saddam Hussein of being a sponsor of "international terrorism", one of its prime examples was Iraq's "sheltering" of the MEK. Its inclusion on the terrorist list has meant that it is a felonyto provide any "material support" to that group.

Nonetheless, a large group of prominent former US government officials from both political parties has spent the last several years receiving substantial sums of cash to give speeches to the MEK, and have then become vocal, relentless advocates for the group, specifically for removing them from the terrorist list. Last year, the Christian Science Monitor thoroughly described "these former high-ranking US officials - who represent the full political spectrum - [who] have been paid tens of thousands of dollars to speak in support of the MEK." They include Democrats Howard Dean, Ed Rendell, Wesley Clark, Bill Richardson, and Lee Hamilton, and Republicans Rudy Giuliani, Fran Townsend, Tom Ridge, Michael Mukasey, and Andrew Card. Other prominent voices outside government, such as Alan Dershowitz and Elie Wiesel, have been enlisted to the cause and are steadfast MEK advocates.

Money has also been paid to journalists such as The Washington Post's Carl Bernstein and the Chicago Tribune's Clarence Page. Townsend is a CNN contributor and Rendell is an MSNBC contributor, yet those MEK payments are rarely, if ever, disclosed by those media outlets when featuring those contributors (indeed, Townsend can go on CNN to opine on Iran, even urging that its alleged conduct be viewed as "an act for war", with no disclosure whatsoever during the segment of her MEK payments). Quoting a State Department official, CSM detailed how the scheme works:

"'Your speech agent calls, and says you get $20,000 to speak for 20 minutes. They will send a private jet, you get $25,000 more when you are done, and they will send a team to brief you on what to say.' . . . The contracts can range up to $100,000 and include several appearances."

On Friday, the Guardian's Washington reporter Chris McGreal added substantial information about the recipients of the funding and, especially, its sources. As he put it, the pro-MEK campaign "has seen large sums of money directed at three principal targets: members of Congress, Washington lobby groups and influential former officials", including the GOP Congressman who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, Mike Rogers.

What makes this effort all the more extraordinary are the reports that MEK has actually intensified its terrorist and other military activities over the last couple of years. In February, NBC News reported, citing US officials, that "deadly attacks on Iranian nuclear scientists are being carried out by [MEK]" as it is "financed, trained and armed by Israel's secret service". While the MEK denies involvement, the Iranian government has echoed these US officials in insisting that the group was responsible for those assassinations. NBC also cited "unconfirmed reports in the Israeli press and elsewhere that Israel and the MEK were involved in a Nov. 12 explosion that destroyed the Iranian missile research and development site at Bin Kaneh, 30 miles outside Tehran".

In April, the New Yorker's Seymour Hersh reported that the US itself has for years provided extensive training to MEK operatives, on US soil (in other words, the US government provided exactly the "material support" for a designated terror group which the law criminalizes). Hersh cited numerous officials for the claim that "some American-supported covert operations continue in Iran today." The MEK's prime goal is the removal of Iran's government.

Despite these reports that the MEK has been engaged in terrorism and other military aggression against Iran - or, more accurately: likely because of them - it was announced on Friday the US State Department will remove MEK from its list of terrorist organizations. This event is completely unsurprising. In May, I noted the emergence of reports that the State Department would do so imminently.

Because this MEK scam more vividly illustrates the rot and corruption at the heart of America's DC-based political culture than almost any episode I can recall, I've written numerous times about it. But now that the de-listing is all but official, it is worthwhile to take note of the five clear lessons it teaches:

Lesson One: There Is A Separate Justice System In The US For Muslim Americans.

The past decade has seen numerous "material support" prosecutions of US Muslims for the most trivial and incidental contacts with designated terror groups. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that any Muslim who gets within sneezing distance of such a group is subject to prosecution. Indeed, as I documented last week, many of them have been prosecuted even for core First Amendment activities: political advocacy deemed supportive of such groups.

When they're convicted - and marginalized Muslims, usually poor and powerless, almost always are - they typically are not only consigned to prison for decades, but are placed in America's most oppressive and restrictive prison units. As a result, many law-abiding Muslim Americans have become petrified of donating money to Muslim charities or even speaking out against perceived injustices out of fear - the well-grounded fear - that they will be accused of materially supporting a terror group. This is all part of the pervasive climate of fear in which many American Muslims live.

Yet here we have a glittering, bipartisan cast of former US officials and other prominent Americans who are swimming in cash as they advocate on behalf of a designated terrorist organization. After receiving their cash, Howard Dean and Rudy Giuliani met with MEK leaders, and Dean actually declared that the group's leader should be recognized by the west as President of Iran. That is exactly the type of coordinated messaging with a terrorist group with the supreme court found, in its2010 Humanitarian Law v. Holder ruling, could, consistent with the First Amendment, lead to prosecution for "material support of terrorism" (ironically, numerous MEK shills, including CNN's Townsend, praised the supreme court for its broad reading of that statute when they thought, correctly, that it was being applied to Muslims).

Yet other than a reported Treasury Department investigation several months ago to determine the source of Ed Rendell's MEK speaking fees - an investigation that seems to have gone nowhere - there has been no repercussions whatsoever from this extensive support given by these DC luminaries to this designated terror group. Now that MEK will be removed from the terror list, there almost certainly never will be any consequences (as a legal matter, the de-listing should have no impact on the possible criminality of this MEK support: the fact that a group is subsequently removed from the list does not retroactively legalize the providing of material support when it was on the list).

In sum, there are numerous American Muslims sitting in prison for years for far less substantial interactions with terror groups than this bipartisan group of former officials gave to MEK. This is what New York Times Editorial Page Editor Andrew Rosenthal meant when he wrote back in March that the 9/11 attacks have "led to what's essentially a separate justice system for Muslims". The converse is equally true: America's political elites can engage in the most egregious offenses - torture, illegal eavesdropping, money-driven material support for a terror group - with complete impunity.

Lesson Two: The US Government Is Not Opposed To Terrorism; It Favors It.

The history of the US list of designated terrorist organizations, and its close cousin list of state sponsors of terrorism, is simple: a country or group goes on the list when they use violence to impede US interests, and they are then taken off the list when they start to use exactly the same violence to advance US interests. The terrorist list is not a list of terrorists; it's a list of states and groups which use their power to defy US dictates rather than adhere to them.

The NYU scholar Remi Brulin has exhaustively detailed the rank game-playing that has taken place with this list: Saddam was put on it when he allied with the Soviets in the early 1980s, then was taken off when the US wanted to arm and fund him against Iran in the mid-1980s, then he was put back on in the early 1990s when the US wanted to attack him.

And now, with the MEK, we have a group that, at least according to some reports, appears to have intensified its terrorism, and yet they are removed from the list. Why? Because now they are aligned against the prime enemy of the US and Israel - and working closely with those two nations - and are therefore, magically, no longer "terrorists". As the Iran experts Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett wrote on Friday:

"Since when did murdering unarmed civilians (and, in some instances, members of their families as well) on public streets in the middle of a heavily populated urban area (Tehran) not meet even the US government's own professed standard for terrorism?"

They answered their own question: "We have seen too many times over the years just how cynically American administrations have manipulated these designations, adding and removing organizations and countries for reasons that have little or nothing to do with designees' actual involvement in terrorist activity." In other words, the best and most efficient way to be removed from the list is to start engaging in terrorism for and in conjunction with the US and its allies (i.e. Israel) rather than against them.

Lesson Three: "Terrorism" Remains The Most Meaningless, and Thus The Most Manipulated, Term In Political Discourse.

The US government did not even pretend that terrorism had anything to do with its decision as to whether MEK should be de-listed. Instead, they used the carrot of de-listing, and the threat of remaining on the list, to pressure MEK leaders to adhere to US demands to abandon their camp in Iraq. But what does adhering to this US demand have to do with terrorism? Nothing. This list has nothing to do with terrorism. It is simply a way the US rewards those who comply with its dictates and punishes those who refuse.

Terrorism, at least in its applied sense, means little other than: violence used by enemies of the US and its allies. Violence used by the US and its allies (including stateless groups) can never be terrorism, no matter howheinous and criminal.

Lesson Four: Legalized Influence-Peddling Within Both Parties Is What Drives DC.

MEK achieved its goal by doing more than merely changing the beneficiaries of its actions from Saddam to the US and Israel. It also found a way - how it did so remains a mystery - to funnel millions of dollars into the bank accounts of key ex-officials from both parties, a bipartisan list of DC lobbyist firms, and several key journalists. In other words, it achieved its policy aims the same way most groups in DC do: by buying influence within both parties, and paying influence-peddlers who parlay their political celebrity into personal riches.

So pervasive is this scam that most people have become utterly numb to it (that's because people are willing to acquiesce to most evils when they become perceived as common; that acquiescence is often justified as worldly sophistication). As a result, there was no pretense here to hide these sleazy transactions. The very idea that Ed Rendell suddenly woke up one day and developed an overnight, never-before-seen passion for the MEK and Iran policy is just laughable. But the former Pennsylvania governor is a key advocate to enlist - he remains well connected within the Democratic Party and now has an important platform on MSNBC - so on the payroll he went.

Once the bipartisan list of DC officials receiving cash from MEK became known, it became almost impossible to imagine any outcome other than this one. As one person tweeted after reading this State Department decision: any American billionaire could easily have his birthday declared a national holiday by simply spreading the cash around enough to DC political and media figures on a bipartisan basis.

Lesson Five: There Is Aggression Between The US and Iran, But It's Generally Not From Iran.

Over the last decade, the US has had Iran almost entirely encircled, thanks in part - only in part - to large-scale ground invasions of the nations on its eastern and western borders. Some combination of Israel and the US have launched cyberwarfare at the Iranians, murdered their civilian scientists, and caused explosions on its soil. The American president and the Israeli government continuously and publicly threaten to use force against them.

And now, the US has taken a key step in ensuring that a group devoted to the overthrow of the regime, a group that sided with Saddam in his war against Iran, is able to receive funding and otherwise be fully admitted into the precincts of international respectability. Just imagine if Iran took steps to legitimize an American rebel group that has long been devoted to the overthrow of the US government and which has a long history of serious violence on US soil.

Not just the Iranian government, but also most of its citizens, are likely to perceive this de-listing as exactly what it is: yet another act of aggression toward their nation. As the Christian Science Monitor said of the group, it is "widely despised inside Iran". But the US has now officially offered a clear gesture of legitimization, if not support, for this group, one that only exacerbates the war-threatening tensions between the two nations.

UPDATE

Several commenters have raised questions about the motives of Dershowitz and Wiesel in supporting MEK. While motives can never be known with certainty - one can attempt only to make inferences based on conduct and circumstances - it was the JTA, the self-described "global news service of the Jewish people", which reported their involvement, and they suggested the motive was not any receipt of money but rather MEK's alignment with Israel:

"The names on the growing list of influential American advocates to de-list the Mujahedin-e Khalq, or MEK -- known in English as the National Council of Resistance of Iran -- suggest an effort to give the bid a pro-Israel imprimatur. . . .

"On the record, the people involved insist there is no Israel element to what they say is a humanitarian endeavor to remove the movement's followers from danger.

"'I don't see any Israel issue at all,' Dershowitz told JTA in an interview, instead casting it in terms of Hillel's dictum, 'If I am only for myself, who am I?'

"Off the record, however, figures close to the campaign use another ancient Middle Eastern dictum to describe the involvement of supporters of Israel: 'The enemy of my enemy is my friend.'"

"A source close to the effort to bring pro-Israel voices into the initiative cited reports that Israel has allied with the MEK, which reportedly maintains agents in Iran and in the past has published details of Iran's nuclear weapons program."

A separate JTA article reporting on the de-listing noted that "Iranian Americans sympathetic to the plight of MEK enlisted the support of a number of pro-Israel figures, including Nobel Peace laureate and Holocaust memoirist Elie Wiesel; Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz; and Irwin Cotler, the former Canadian justice minister." The original sentence has been clarified to reflect this report.