BLOOMBERG NEWS

The People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran, designated a terrorist group, must be told within four months by the U.S. State Department whether the label will be removed or an appeals court will order the change itself.

The U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington today said the department ignored a congressional mandate that requests for delisting be answered within 180 days, noting the People’s Mojahedin’s petition was filed almost four years ago. Unless Secretary of State Hillary Clinton rules within four months, the court will order the group’s delisting itself, the judges said.

“The specificity and relative brevity of the 180-day deadline manifests Congress’s intent that the secretary act promptly on a revocation petition and delist the organization if the criteria for the listing no longer exist,” the judges said in the decision. “The Secretary’s 20-month failure to act plainly frustrates the congressional intent and cuts strongly in favor of granting” the request by the People’s Mojahedin.

The debate over lifting the group’s designation as a terrorist organization comes as the U.S. and other powers are trying to negotiate an end to Iran’s suspected nuclear weapons program, and likely would be viewed as a hostile act by the Iranian government, said an administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive issue.

Useful Intelligence

Nevertheless, the official said, members of the group, known by its Farsi acronym MEK, have provided useful intelligence on the Iranian nuclear program to Israel, the U.S., and the International Atomic Energy Agency. A number of former senior U.S. officials, including former Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Louis Freeh and ex-Attorney General Michael Mukasey, are campaigning to remove its terrorist designation.

The People’s Mojahedin said in its 2008 petition that although it engaged in terrorist actions in the past, it had ended its military campaign against the Iranian regime, renounced violence, surrendered its arms to U.S. forces in Iraq and shared intelligence with the U.S. regarding Iran’s nuclear program, according to the ruling.

On Jan. 7, 2009, then Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice denied the petition. The court granted the People’s Mojahedin’s request for a review of that decision on July 16, 2010, saying that “due process protections” hadn’t been followed.

‘Slow Going’

“Since our July 2010 remand, the Secretary’s progress has been — to say the least — slow going,” the three-judge panel wrote. By failing to make a final decision, the Secretary is able to maintain the People’s Mojahedin status as a terrorist group, while preventing them from seeking judicial review, leaving the group “stuck in administrative limbo,” the court said.

“We are in receipt of the D.C. Circuit’s June 1 opinion, and we are currently reviewing it,” the state department said in a statement. Officials are continuing to review the group’s designation as a foreign terrorist organization, according to the statement.

Maryam Rajavi, the wife of a founder of the People’s Mojahedin Organization and the leader of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, a coalition of Iranian exile groups, welcomed the ruling in a statement as a “triumph of justice over machination and appeasement.”

Iranian Lever

Rajavi urged Clinton to move quickly to carry out the court’s order, saying the terrorist designation “continues to be a lever in the hands of the Iranian regime and the Iraqi government to suppress the residents of Camps Ashraf and Liberty,” Iranian refugee camps in Iraq.

The People’s Mojahedin was formed in 1965 to resist the Iranian Shah. After the Shah’s fall, MEK broke with the revolutionary Islamic government and engaged in armed action against the regime from Iraq. The group says it disarmed in 2003.

The Council of the European Union removed the MEK from its terrorist list on January 26, 2009, and the U.S. may follow suit if MEK members abandon their refuge at Camp Ashraf peacefully and disperse to other countries. If they remain there, some officials fear, Iraq’s Shiite-dominated government, which has close ties to Iran and killed 11 Iranians in a 2009 raid on the camp, might mount an all-out assault on the camp and its inhabitants.

The case is In Re: People’s Mojahedin Organization, 12- 1118, U.S. Court of Appeals, District of Columbia (Washington).

To contact the reporters on this story: Sara Forden in Washington at sforden@bloomberg.net; Indira A.R. Lakshmanan in Washington at ilakshmanan@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Michael Hytha at mhytha@bloomberg.net; John Walcott at jwalcott9@bloomberg.net.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-06-01/iran-group-must-get-ruling-on-terrorist-label-court-says.html

CNN

A federal appeals court has ordered Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to make a prompt decision on whether to remove an Iranian dissident group from the State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations.

The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia gave Clinton four months from Friday to deny or grant Mujahedeen-e-Khalq’s request for removal from the list, or the court would issue a so-called writ of mandamus and remove the group itself.

“We have been given no sufficient reason why the secretary, in the last 600 days, has not been able to make a decision which the Congress gave her only 180 days to make,” the court said in its ruling. “If she fails to take action within that (four month) period, the petition for a writ of mandamus setting aside the (foreign terrorist organization) designation will be granted.”

The State Department had argued for an open-ended decision-making process.

MEK has waged a widespread and well-publicized campaign for enforcement of a 2010 ruling by a federal court ordering the State Department to review the group’s status on the Foreign Terrorist Organization list. In that ruling, the court gave the State Department 180 days to review the request from MEK to be removed from the list.

The MEK appealed for the writ to compel the State Department to make a decision in a timely manner.

At the time, the State Department told the court the determination required “close analysis of highly classified information, … expert judgments about the continuing capabilities and intentions of a currently designated foreign terrorist organization, … extremely sensitive national security judgments and difficult decisions concerning the best way to avoid possible serious human rights violations.”

The group has been on the terror list since 1997 because of the deaths of Americans during the 1970s. The group was granted refuge in Iraq by Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war. The MEK supports the overthrow of the Iranian theocracy.

Maryam Rajavi, the MEK’s Paris-based leader, issued a statement to CNN saying that the ruling “demonstrated that maintaining the terrorist designation on the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK) is absolutely illegitimate and unlawful, and is guided by ulterior political motives.”

The State Department issued a statement Friday afternoon saying it “intends to comply” with the court’s opinion, but noting that “We continue to review MEK’s designation.”

“Our review includes all relevant materials, including extensive materials provided by counsel to the MEK. At the conclusion of the review, the secretary will make a decision regarding the designation.

“As the secretary has stated previously, given the ongoing efforts to relocate the residents of Camp Ashraf to Camp Hurriya, MEK cooperation in the successful and peaceful closure of Camp Ashraf, the MEK’s main paramilitary base, will be a key factor in her decision.”

-CNN’s Bill Mears contributed to this report.

http://security.blogs.cnn.com/2012/06/01/court-gives-clinton-4-months-to-decide-terror-group-fate/

REUTERS

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A U.S. appeals court on Friday ordered Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to decide within four months whether to remove an Iranian dissident group from a U.S. terrorism list.

The three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit unanimously ruled for the group, Mujahadin-e Khalq, or MEK, which has sought to force the State Department to take it off the list or decide within a specified time period on its request to be removed.

The appeals court ordered Clinton to either grant or deny the group’s petition in four months. If she fails to take action in that time, it said it would set aside the U.S. government’s designation of the group as a foreign terrorist organization.

The appeals court, however, rejected the group’s request for a 30-day deadline.

The State Department, which is reviewing the ruling, intends to comply with the opinion, spokesman Mark Toner said in a written response to a question.

In arguments before the appeals court on May 8, an administration lawyer said Clinton planned to rule on the group’s request in about two months, after its refugee camp in Iraq closes.

Iranians who belong to the group have been moving out of its Camp Ashraf base in Iraq to a processing center at a former U.S. military base in Baghdad.

Also known as the People’s Mujahideen Organization of Iran, the group led a guerrilla campaign against the U.S.-backed Shah of Iran during the 1970s that included attacks on U.S. targets. It was added to the list in 1997, but the group has said that it has renounced violence.

The group, which has pushed for the overthrow of Iran’s clerical leaders, found itself no longer welcome in Iraq under its new Shi’ite-led government that came to power after Saddam Hussein’s downfall in 2003.

As a result of the MEK’s listing as a foreign terrorist organization, Americans have been barred from supporting the group and its members or representatives have been banned from entering the United States.

The appeals court ruled nearly two years ago that Clinton had violated the group’s rights and instructed her to “review and rebut” unclassified parts of the record she initially relied on and say if she regards the sources as sufficiently credible.

It said Clinton had yet to make a final decision. “We believe the secretary’s delay in acting on (the group’s) petition for revocation is egregious,” the appeals court said.

The appeals court said it declined to immediately revoke the group’s designation in light of “national security and foreign policy concerns.”

(Reporting by James Vicini; Editing by Vicki Allen)

http://ca.reuters.com/article/topNews/idCABRE85011U20120601

LEGAL TIMES BLOG (THE BLT)

THE NATIONAL LAW JOURNAL

A federal appeals court in Washington appears poised to rule against the U.S. State Department in a dispute over the continued designation of a fringe Iranian resistance group as a foreign terrorist organization.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit has a number of options available to it, including ordering the government to remove the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran from the foreign terrorist list or setting a deadline for the government to act on the petition from the group. The court could take a middle ground, requiring the government to provide reports on the status of the ongoing assessment.

The Justice Department’s Robert Loeb, arguing for the State Department, asked a three-judge panel May 8 to outright deny the delisting petition, arguing that the government continues to collect valuable information for its review of the PMOI’s designation. The government, Loeb said, has not determined whether PMOI no longer has the intent and capacity to engage in terrorist activity even though the group claims it has renounced violence.

Judge David Tatel and Senior Judge Stephen Williams of the D.C. Circuit seemed inclined to rule for the PMOI, represented by a team from the law firms Bancroft and Mayer Brown. Tatel noted in court that a decision forcing the State Department to act could end up in a denial of the Iranian group’s petition for removal from the foreign terrorist organization list. A lawyer for PMOI, Viet Dinh of Bancroft, said a denial is better than no action at all because it allows a follow-up challenge.

Top administration officials — including Harold Koh, the State Department legal adviser, and Beth Brinkmann, a senior Civil Division appellate lawyer at Main Justice — attended the hour-long hearing. More than 80 observers, including many advocates for the PMOI, crammed into a courtroom in the E. Barett Prettyman U.S. Courthouse in downtown Washington.

At issue in the dispute is whether the State Department has ignored a D.C. Circuit’s order in 2010 directing the government to reassess the designation. The appeals court then sided with PMOI, saying the State Department did not accord certain due process rights to the group. The D.C. Circuit did not, however, give the government a deadline to make a decision one way or the other.

Lawyers for the PMOI earlier this year filed court papers in the D.C. Circuit asking the court to delist the group as a foreign terrorist organization or to give the State Department one month to make a decision on the petition. Advocates for the PMOI then, as they did today, expressed frustration at the slow pace of the State Department review.

Inclusion on the foreign terrorist organization list caries severe consequences. Supporters in the United States, for instance, cannot directly fund the group. And banks are authorized to freeze assets of foreign terrorist groups.

In court today, Dinh told the D.C. Circuit panel that the State Department has shown its indifference to the earlier appellate court order in the case. Dinh urged the court to hold the government accountable.

Henderson defended the State Department during one exchange with Dinh, saying that “it’s not as if they’re just sitting on their hands.”

The PMOI review, Loeb maintained, is ongoing in good faith and should not be cut short. Government officials, he said, are regularly receiving information regarding the movement of PMOI members and supporters from a camp in Iraq that he described as a “paramilitary base.” (PMOI lawyers dispute that characterization.)

The continued cooperation in the relocation effort, Loeb said, will “speak volumes” as to whether PMOI no longer has the intent and capacity to commit terrorist acts. Loeb said the government has not had a chance to inspect the base for arms.

Tatel asked twice why the State Department doesn’t just deny the PMOI petition. At least a denial, the judge said, would allow the appellate process to move forward. “As long as the secretary isn’t acting, that process can’t go forward,” the judge said.

Asked how much more time the State Department needs, Loeb declined to speculate. The government, he said, would aim to make a decision on the PMOI petition within 60 days of the final relocation of people from the camp in Iraq. But the move of residents from the camp is months from being final, Williams noted.

Tatel disputed Loeb’s assessment of the State Department review as a “minor delay,” saying that the appeals court ordered the agency to review the foreign terrorist organization designation nearly two years ago.

Loeb said in court “this is not a rolling process that will go on forever.” The State Department, he said, has a “duty to the public to get it right.”

The appeals court did not immediately rule this morning.

Contact Mike Scarcella at mscarcella@alm.com.

http://www.law.com/jsp/law/article.jsp?id=1202552796631

THE WEEKLY STANDARD (Magazine)

The Treasury Department has issued subpoenas to the speakers’ agencies of 11 prominent former U.S. officials, including a governor of Pennsylvania, a chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and director of Homeland Security, who have given speeches on behalf of the Mujahedin e-Khalq, or MEK. Treasury’s action is meant to find out whether Ed Rendell, Hugh Shelton, Tom Ridge, and others have taken money from an outfit designated by the State Department as a foreign terrorist organization (FTO).

However, the nub of the case is whether the MEK merits the designation. The former officials contend that the group of Iranian exiles based in Iraq hasn’t used violence in over a decade and doesn’t fit the State Department’s definition of a foreign terrorist organization. The last time the MEK waged an operation against Americans was in the mid-1970s, and in recent years it willingly handed its weapons over to U.S. troops at Camp Ashraf in Iraq. Neither, say its advocates, does the MEK qualify as a threat to U.S. national security, especially given that the organization provided the Bush administration with intelligence regarding Iran’s nuclear facility at Natanz.

The MEK has taken its case to court. On May 8, it will ask the U.S. Court of Appeals, D.C. Circuit, to order the secretary of state to act within 30 days on the removal of the FTO designation. State has already delayed its decision for almost two years.

To some, it appears that it was precisely this public campaign that annoyed the Obama administration, which on this reading responded by unleashing the Treasury Department on former U.S. officials. The timing is suggestive: Even though many of the former officials speaking out for the MEK have been at it for more than a year, it was days after what was said to be an especially contentious meeting between lawyers for the MEK and the State Department that the Treasury started issuing subpoenas.

The advocates for the MEK haven’t mysteriously gone soft on terrorism. Rather, the MEK and Washington story is one of bureaucratic stasis, the petty exercise of power, and the repeated failures of U.S. policymakers in their dealings over three decades with the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The MEK, which is part of a coalition called the National Council of Resistance of Iran, and identified in U.S. court documents as the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran, was an anti-shah student movement founded in the mid-’60s. Its ideology was a mixture of revolutionary internationalist anti-imperialism, Marxism, Islam, and a uniquely Persian blend of mysticism and metaphysics privileging sacrifice and suffering. In the wake of the 1979 Islamic revolution, the MEK sided with the Khomeinists for a time. But within two years, the MEK and Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps were at war with each other.

Whether Iran’s current ruling order fears the MEK because this onetime ally poses a threat to the regime is a matter of dispute. The reality is that their enmity is shaped by the nature of the conflict they waged against each other—not a civil war but a fratricidal struggle, with hundreds killed on both sides. Some MEK cadres fled to Iraq and others to France, where the government in Paris set the precedent for what would soon become a habit of Western policymakers—cracking down on the MEK at the behest of Tehran, in exchange for expected concessions from the Islamic Republic.

In 1986, Hezbollah was holding hostage nine French nationals in Lebanon, and in an effort to get Iran to secure their release, France expelled MEK leader Massoud Rajavi. Iran’s Lebanese proxies freed only two hostages, but that didn’t stop France from going back to the well. In 2003, according to the former editor of the Journal du -Dimanche, French foreign minister Dominique de Villepin sought concessions for the French energy giant Total S.A. and flexibility on the nuclear issue and in exchange agreed to round up hundreds of MEK members in France, on charges later summarily dismissed by a French counterterrorism court.

Since the mid-’80s, Tehran had been lobbying Western governments to designate the MEK a terrorist organization, and in 1997 its work paid off in Washington. Mohammad Khatami had just been elected president of Iran, and as a sop to a man deemed moderate by the standards of the Islamic Republic, the Clinton administration agreed to list the MEK as an FTO.

The road map charted by Sandy Berger and Madeleine Albright never led to the dialogue of civilizations that Khatami promised, and Washington was stuck with an albatross around its neck. The MEK had not participated in a terrorist attack on Americans since the mid-’70s, and even then it seems that the group responsible for at least some of the violence was a Marxist element within the MEK. Regardless, as Reuel Marc Gerecht, an Iran specialist at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, tells me, “they were never as bad in their anti-American activity as the PLO.” Palestine Liberation Organization chairman Yasser Arafat had given direct orders to kill the U.S. ambassador to Sudan, Cleo Noel, and yet during the Clinton years the late PLO leader was a welcome guest at the White House. “If the PLO can be rehabilitated,” says Gerecht, “so can the MEK.”

The confusion that the Clinton administration had sown by politicizing an FTO designation would be compounded after the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The MEK had long been hosted by Saddam Hussein, and stands accused of fighting alongside him in the eight-year-long Iraq-Iran war. U.S. forces moved the remaining MEK members from various sites around Iraq to Camp Ashraf. “It was in the middle of nowhere and a great place to disarm them,” says Brig. Gen. David Phillips, the retired commandant of the U.S. Army Military Police, whose job was to disarm the MEK.

Phillips says that in the wake of 9/11 he was thrilled to have the opportunity to stick it to a band of terrorists. But that’s not what he found. “We investigated all 3,400 members with the FBI,” Phillips says. “I thought the FBI would come with a list, saying these are the 200 people we want, and I continued to pressure my intelligence officers, but they kept coming back to me, saying, ‘Sir, we can’t find much.’ The FBI found no credible allegations against them and said we’re out of here.”

Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon promised that in exchange for disarming, the MEK would receive protected person status, but now, says Phillips, “we’re walking away from that promise.” The reason, as usual, is trepidation about antagonizing the Iranian regime, and the self-inflicted anxiety that seems to strike U.S. policymakers whenever it comes to dealing with the Islamic Republic.

Tehran wanted Iraqi prime minister Nuri al-Maliki to close Ashraf and expel the MEK, and the Iraqi prime minister sought relief from the Americans. Some U.S. officials argued that it was wrong to go back on a promise to a population under its protection and urged Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to delist the MEK. If the MEK were free of the FTO designation, the United States could have accepted some of its members as refugees and encouraged allies in the region and Europe to do the same. Rice balked, fearing the Iranians would take their anger out on U.S. troops, sending even more IEDs across the border to kill Americans.

The problem was passed on to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who has bizarrely explained that a “key factor” in her decision on the MEK’s designation will be the organization’s “cooperation in the successful and peaceful closure of Camp Ashraf” and relocation to Camp Liberty, an Iraqi facility where conditions, say MEK advocates like Phillips, are horrific. 

The point of moving the group from Ashraf to Liberty is to separate them from their communication sources. “We do the same thing in the U.S. Army,” Phillips explains. “Cellphones, anything they use to communicate with, the Iraqi security forces are taking away from them. It’s cutting them off from the world.”

Worse, says Phillips, the Iranians are likely waiting for all of the MEK leadership to be moved from Ashraf to Liberty before they start “disappearing” people. It was only a few days after the United States withdrew its protection at the end of July 2009 that Iraqi security forces killed 11 at Ashraf and wounded more than 500. In April 2011 the Iraqis attacked Ashraf again, killing 36 and wounding 345. 

Phillips believes that at Liberty, cut off from the rest of the world, it can only get worse for the MEK. “If I know Maliki, he’ll put them on buses and hand them over to the [Iranian] Qods Force.”

American credibility and prestige are on the line, says Phillips, not only in how we treat people under our protection but also in how we deal with Iran. “We’re afraid of sending the Iranians a strong message and getting them mad. But that’s exactly the message we want to send them.”

Lee Smith is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/terrorists-or-fall-guys_642189.html