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Protesters rally against Iranian leader outside UN

September 22, 2011 by

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Demonstrators rally outside the UN headquarters to protest against controversial Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad before he is scheduled to speak at the UN General Assembly, Thursday, Sept. 22, 2011, in the Manhattan borough of New York. Former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge and former UN Ambassador John Bolton were among the speakers at the event. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

NEW YORK, (AP) — Former United Nations ambassador John Bolton said Thursday that the Obama administration is doing “almost nothing” to protect Iranians from the violence of their own regime — as represented at the U.N. by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Minutes before Ahmadinejad addressed the annual U.N. General Assembly, about 1,000 Iranian-Americans staged a protest rally in nearby Dag Hammarskjold Plaza.

Children stomped on a poster of Ahmadinejad among banners that covered the pavement. “Down With the Islamic Republic of Iran,” read one.

Bolton, who served as ambassador during George W. Bush’s presidency, told The Associated Press that the United States had failed to stop Iran from torturing and killing its own people.

“We expect that our commitment to the people of Iran is going to be upheld,” he said. “Right now, the Obama administration is doing almost nothing.”

Former UN Ambassador John Bolton speaks to the crowds at an anti-Ahmadinejad rally outside the UN headquarters before the controversial Iranian president is scheduled to speak at the UN General Assembly, Thursday, Sept. 22, 2011, in the Manhattan borough of New York. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

He said this week’s release of two American hikers held for years by Iran was what he called “just Broadway theater.”

Some protesters were draped in the Iranian flag, while others hoisted yellow flags representing Iran’s political opposition led by Maryam Rajavi, head of the Paris-based National Council of Resistance of Iran.

Protesters say tens of thousands of the opposition group’s supporters in Iran have been executed by the regime.

Speaking live from Paris via satellite on a giant television screen, Rajavi told the crowd that Ahmadinejad does not represent the Iranian people.

She urged the U.N. and the U.S. to stand with the Iranian people and their organized opposition, including more than 3,000 U.N.-defined refugees in Camp Ashraf in Iraq, which was attacked twice, with 47 killed and about 1,000 wounded.

“There is no doubt today that the United States has clearly abandoned its international obligations toward Camp Ashraf,” Rajavi said.

Former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge speaks to the crowds at an anti-Ahmadinejad rally outside the UN headquarters before the controversial Iranian president is scheduled to speak at the UN General Assembly, Thursday, Sept. 22, 2011, in the Manhattan borough of New York. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

While addressing protesters, former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said he agreed with Bolton that the U.S. government’s policy toward Iran is inadequate — especially in how it treats the MEK, or People’s Mujahedin of Iran that is the main component of Rajavi’s resistance group.

The U.S. State Department lists it as a terrorist organization, while supporters say the group opposes Ahmadinejad.

As the nation’s first head of homeland security after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Ridge said he started every day with a list of potential threats against the United States.

“Never, not once, among hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of potential terrorist threats, did I ever see the MEK as a terrorist organization,” said Ridge, who also served under Bush. “It’s about time we took them off the list.”

That position was echoed by many of the protesters, including one group busy assembling cardboard rolls into a “cage” symbolizing the one that held former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak at his trial. Inside was a man wearing a mask resembling Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Demonstrators rally outside the U.N. headquarters to protest against controversial Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad before he is scheduled to speak at the U.N. General Assembly, Thursday, Sept. 22, 2011, in New York. Former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge and former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton were among the speakers at the event. Demonstrators hold pictures of Massoud Rajavi, president of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, and his wife Maryam Rajavi. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

“We hope that Khameini will be in a cage like this soon, to be tried for crimes against humanity,” said Farid Ashkan, 55, an Iranian-born New York dentist.

At the entrance to the plaza, a same-sex “wedding” was staged mocking the alliance of Syria and Iran. A protester posing as ousted Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi presided over the ceremony, with yellow cake served to onlookers, representing the uranium used to make nuclear weapons.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2011/09/22/national/a102622D80.DTL#ixzz1YoUmDyMN

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Will U.N. Chief Ban Ki-Moon Do the Right Thing and Protect Iranian Dissidents?

September 22, 2011 by

FoxNews.com

Each September, like clockwork, a bestiary of the world’s worst rogues and criminal heads of state arrive at the U.N. building on First Avenue to join in the organization’s opening of the 193-member United Nations General Assembly.  

Protestors gathered outside United Nations headquarters in New York to protest the appearance of Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad at the UN General Assembly. New York, USA. 22nd September 2011

This season, the winner of the contest for “greatest rogue with diplomatic immunity” is, once again, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran – a president with blood on his hands and nukes in his dreams who will get his 8″ by 10” glossy photograph of a handshake with U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon–and a P.R. platform supported by U.S. tax dollars. 

Despite Ahmadinejad’s infamy as a Holocaust denier and his wild-eyed claim that the September 11 terrorist attacks were a Western conspiracy, it’s a banner year for the Mullahs’ regime, with the Iranian ambassador soon to be seated as vice president of the U.N. General Assembly.

Unfortunately, such diplomatic bon-bons are available only to heads of state, and not to their victims.For the grieving relatives of thousands of Iranian dissidents who have been killed by the Iranian Mullahs — both in jail and during peaceful demonstrations in the streets of Teheran — there will be no photo opportunity at the U.N.

Other Iranian dissidents, in the United States and Europe, are also shut out of these rarefied U.N. precincts — despite their high status in the West as university professors, medical specialists, and entrepreneurs.

The reason is simple: these successful Iranian-American and Iranian-European dissidents have asked that the world organization and its Secretary General protect their less fortunate relatives who are currently held captive at a threatened place in Iraq called Camp Ashraf.

They are, quite simply, trying to prevent a bloodbath, but that is not high on the U.N. agenda. Twice in the last 14 months, Iraqi military forces have attacked the 3,400 unarmed residents at the Ashraf camp — using U.S.-supplied military equipment — killing dozens of unarmed protesters and wounding hundreds more. Iraq will likely soon attack again, and use their cache of automatic weapons originally supplied by the U.S. to build the Iraqi army, to finish off the camp inhabitants — despite the 2004 U.S. promise to them of a protected status as unarmed civilians under the Geneva Conventions.

The reason for this crime is simple: Iraq’s Shia prime minister Nouri al-Maliki wants to prove his usefulness to Teheran, and the Ashraf residents are anti-Mullah activists. Despite this imminent danger, the American family members of Ashraf victims have not been allowed to see the U.N. Secretary General — even for a symbolic moment — amidst his chockablock schedule of handshakes and photo-ops with creatures like Ahmadinejad.

The rebuff comes even though the Ashraf residents and their allies have supplied the international community with much of the key intelligence about the location and progress of the Iranian regime’s program to build a nuclear bomb.

How would the Secretary General explain to these desperate families why the U.N. diplomatic mission in Iraq rarely visits the camp and does not bear witness when attacks are mounted against the unarmed residents, including young women and children? 

Maliki has now announced that after December 31, Iraqi military forces will dismantle Camp Ashraf and scatter the dissidents around Iraq – for a fate easily imagined.

The Secretary General has an opportunity to use his moral platform wisely at the General Assembly, to show some courage and demand that Maliki postpone this “drop dead” deadline, so that the international community has time to work out a happier solution than the one Maliki and Tehran are preparing for the residents of Camp Ashraf, Iraq.

The United States Congress has been aghast at the U.N.’s inaction, on both sides of the aisle. House of Representatives Foreign Affairs committee chairman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida cut her teeth fighting Fidel Castro and has made Camp Ashraf a personal issue. Texas Congressman Ted Poe has linked UN appropriations to the demand for protection of Ashraf. 

Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee — who hailed from Jamaica, Queens, across the river from the United Nations, before she moved to Texas — is equally adamant. Senator John Kerry and Congressman Howard Berman have also condemned the violence against Camp Ashraf in the strongest terms.

The U.S. currently contributes over $6 billion a year to the U.N. at a time of record-high unemployment, skyrocketing deficits, crushing debt, and great economic challenges to our citizens. Ban Ki-moon’s obtuse snub of the Ashraf victims may provoke the Congress to snub the delivery of U.S. dollars to Turtle Bay. Even as the Secretary General talks about the “responsibility to protect” as the U.N.’s new motto, he has refused to give it teeth.

Yet it is within Ban Ki-moon’s power, by the stroke of a pen, to appoint a U.N. Special Representative for Ashraf who will travel to the camp and report on its daily condition.

It is within his power to demand an immediate meeting with Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki, not to exchange diplomatic niceties but to deliver a warning that the international community will not tolerate another attack on the camp.

And it is within Ban Ki-moon’s power to openly express his support for the dissidents in Iran and Iraq who have opposed the brutal regime of the Mullahs.

The American relatives of the Ashraf hostages are also asking the Secretary General and the U.N. mission to hire private security guards — which they will pay for — in order to protect the camp’s residents and escort the Secretary General’s representative for Ashraf. Though the U.S. pays 27 percent of U.N. peacekeeping bills, this will not require any financial contribution from the U.S. or the U.N.

And finally, it is within Ban Ki-moon’s power to tell Maliki that the December 31 deadline for the relocation of Ashraf camp residents must be postponed, for so far, they have nowhere else to go. And let’s be clear: when Maliki says deadline, he emphasizes “dead.” Ban Ki-moon could do all this. The question is whether he has the fortitude and simple decency to act boldly and to save the lives of these unarmed men, women and children of Ashraf.

Michael B. Mukasey, a former federal judge, served as Attorney General of the United States from 2007-09. Ruth Wedgwood is a member of the Hoover Institution Task Force on Law and National Security and a former member of the United Nations Human Rights Committee.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2011/09/22/will-un-chief-ban-ki-moon-do-right-thing-and-meet-with-iraqs-maliki/#ixzz1YodX8VmB

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Iran’s Seat Does Not Belong to Clerical Rulers

September 21, 2011 by

 THE HUFFINGTON POST

On Wednesday, September 21, Iran’s state-run media announced that the two American hikers held in Iran, Shane Bauer and Josh Fattal, were being released after more than two years in custody, just in time for Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s speech at the UN the following day. Not coincidentally, the third hiker, Sarah Shourd, was released a year ago just before Ahmadinejad’s last UN speech.

Alireza Jafarzadeh is the author of 'The Iran Threat: President Ahmadinejad and the Coming Nuclear Crisis'

Ahmadinejad brazenly claimed that both releases were “humanitarian” gestures. No surprise there. But it is shocking, not to mention shameful, that he is allowed to get away with it by the various media, that conducts interviews, exclusives and gives him extensive airtime to churn out his propaganda.

Perhaps the media should think about tagging its interviews with Ahmadinejad: “Iran’s chief hostage-taker.”

Reminiscent of the mid-1980s and early 1990s, when the Iranian regime earned and kept the title of the world’s most active state-sponsor of terror, partly because of its involvement in hostage-taking in Lebanon. Local proxy groups brandishing Kalashnikovs would take Americans and Westerners hostage, and then Tehran, acting on a “humanitarian basis,” would take the negotiating seat to get them released in exchange for the concessions Tehran needed.

The Iran-Contra fiasco during the Reagan administration evolved from the desire to arrange the release of Americans held hostage in Lebanon by pro-Tehran elements. In exchange, the erstwhile “moderates” among the ruling clerics of Iran asked for, and got, a few thousand TOW missiles and a terrorist label on Iran’s main opposition movement.

That policy has since evolved into a new form of hostage-taking. Over the past few years, particularly under Ahmadinejad, we have seen many Americans who had traveled to Iran, including journalists like Roxana Saberi, arrested, declared spies, sentenced to prison, and then eventually released.

What Tehran accomplishes is to take American foreign policy hostage. As the hostages linger in jail, the United States is dissuaded from pursuing a tougher approach regarding Iran, and persuaded to delay sanctions and drag its feet on decisions that run counter to the interests of the Iranian regime. Ultimately, Tehran’s rulers release the victims when it suits them, i.e. to coincide with Ahmadinejad’s visit to the United Nations.

Meanwhile, the entire region has been engulfed in uprisings. The world watches as the Arab Spring blossoms, and some of the mullahs’ closest allies fall or totter in Libya and Syria. To distract attention from the forces for change in the region, and in particular in Iran, Ahmadinejad puts on his dog-and-pony show, making the release of the hostages the news of the day. Does anyone remember that the hikers should have never been arrested to begin with, much less used as human shields for Tehran’s onslaught?

Ahmadinejad actions, however, cannot change the reality on the ground, where his regime is in deep trouble. At home, he struggles to deal with the internal infighting, even among the closest allies of Supreme Leader Khamenei, a moribund economy, and increased protests now spreading to ethnic areas. Over the past few weeks, anti-government demonstrations have been mounting in Western Azerbaijan Province, particularly in the city of Orumieh, where there is major discontent about the government’s destructive inaction on measures to prevent the drying of Lake Orumieh.

Discontent is widespread in Iran, where this year several more anti-government protestors and political prisoners have been sentenced to death on the bogus charge of “mohareb,” or waging war on God. Since January, the regime that Ahmadinejad presides over has killed a number of others for their association with the main organized opposition group and their participation in the 2009 uprising. Tehran has announced the hanging of over 450 people, including minors, some publicly.

In February, clashes between state security forces and hundreds of thousands of protesters wracked central Tehran. Security forces beat and fired tear gas at opposition supporters hoping to evoke an Egypt-like popular uprising.

As Ahmadinejad prepares to speak at the UN on Thursday, the media would do better to pay attention to the voices of change in Iran. Outside the UN, thousands of Iranian-Americans, many of them relatives of political prisoners in Iran or of those murdered by the Iranian regime, will stage a protest. Their message is to declare Ahmadinejad, once again, the representative of the most repressive regime in the region, and not the representative of the Iranian people.

This year, history will be made as the United Nations turns over Libya’s seat to its democratic representatives. Isn’t it time to do the same and turn over Iran’s seat to the Iranian opposition?

Alireza Jafarzadeh is the author of ”The Iran Threat’

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alireza-jafarzadeh/iran-hikers-released_b_974686.html

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My Aunt, the Iranian Heroine

September 20, 2011 by

THE HUFFINGTON POST

It was an early Friday morning. I woke up with the sound of the radio in our living room and the worried voice of my father who was trying to get a hold on an important news through the statics that the Iranian regime was throwing in to block the opposition broadcast. I had never seen my parents that distraught and devastated.

Zahra Rajabi

After some time went by, I went in and asked what had happened. I was told that my aunt, Zahra Rajabi, 39, one of the leading women in the struggle against the Iranian regime was brutally assassinated in Istanbul, Turkey. Iranian agents had tracked down her whereabouts and broke into her apartment, and shortly after killed her and one of her bodyguards by gunshots. That was the 20th February 1996.

I did not know and could not understand why anyone would want to kill a member of my family. Questions started swirling in my head and then I was told… “She died fighting for the freedom of Iran and its people.”

As a nine year old my perception of the word “freedom” changed that day. I realised that in my country Iran, and under the brutal government that we were living in, in order to have freedom, you had to fight and even pay the highest price that a human can, giving up one’s life.

Zahra Rajabi was a member of the People’s Mojahedin (PMOI), an Iranian opposition group that has been fighting for the freedom of Iran and Iranians for over three decades and has had its members threatened, tortured, humiliated and executed by the Iranian regime over the course of this period.

At the time of her assassination, Zahra was working for the rights of Iranian women and refugees in Turkey. She decided to rise against the mullahs’ regime after realising what a lie the Islamic revolution of Iran really was and what a disaster was becoming of Iran and Iranians under the mullahs’ fundamentalist interpretation of “Islam”.

She lost two of her loved ones at the beginning of the revolution when her husband Mohammad and her 20 year old sister Afsaneh were executed by the Iranian regime. No doubt this contributed to her cause of fighting for freedom and justice and made her become one of the bravest women of her time.

Her assassination meant that living in Iran was no longer an option for my family, as we had to live in constant fear of our lives everyday. Despite our love and passion for Iran, thousands and thousands of families like mine were forced to leave their homeland and take refuge in other parts of the world in order to stay alive.

The loss of loved ones and the trauma that my family went through still haunts me and affects me every single day. I feel a strong sense of responsibility to be the voice of Zahra and many other martyrs who gave up their lives fighting for freedom against the barbaric regime of Iran.

The Iranian people have been suppressed for over 30 years under the current regime and there are thousands of prisoners whose voices have never been heard. The PMOI is the only opposition group, which echoes the stories and voices of the victims, political prisoners and martyrs of Iran on a global scale. They should be recognised and credited as a group which are active for the purpose of liberty, humanity and justice.

History has shown that yes dictators may rule, but they are always defeated at the end. The dark era of the mullahs’ rule is coming to an end. But until that day the PMOI shall fight for what it believes in and with it, it will carry the voice of martyrs like Zahra and the hopes of millions of people for a completely free and democratic Iran.

Naghmeh Rajabi is an Iranian Business Graduate

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/naghmeh-rajabi/my-aunt-the-iranian-heroi_b_970699.html

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Senior Panel Denounces Ahmadinejad’s Visit to the United States, Urges the U.S. to Stand with the Iranian Opposition

September 18, 2011 by

PRNEWSWIRE

Senior Panel Denounces Ahmadinejad’s Visit to the United States, Urges the U.S. to Stand with the Iranian Opposition

WASHINGTON, Sept. 18, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — On Saturday, September, 17, 2011, a senior panel of former Secretaries, Generals, and Governors, as well as State and Justice Departments officials denounced the presence of the Iranian regime’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at the United Nations, and urged the removal of Iran’s main opposition, the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), from the State Department’s list of Foreign Terrorist Organization, according to Human Rights and Democracy International.

The panel of former senior officials included Attorney General Michael Mukasey, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham, Governor Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania, Commandant of the Marine Corps General James Conway, Deputy Commander of United States European Command General Charles Wald, Ambassador John Bolton, and FBI Director Louis Freeh. The continuing designation of the MEK was acting as a license for genocide at Camp Ashraf, Iraq, the officials said.

“So what can the Secretary do as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad prepares to come to New York and stage his annual obscene performance at the United Nations?” asked Judge Mukasey. “She can do what the European Union has already done; what the United Kingdom has already done and remove this evil designation and she can do it as a splendid welcome to Ahmadinejad as he comes to New York to spit in the collective face of humanity.”

Gov. Rendell added, “Not one of the sources has listed any act of violence by the MEK against the United States or any of its allies since 2001 for more than a 10 year period… We have expert witness, circumstantial evidence, opinion of another court; that ought to be enough if we follow the law, if we decide this case on the merits.  It’s overwhelmingly not guilty; delist the MEK and let’s do it now.”

“The maintenance of this organization, contrary to all the facts and the law is not just passivity. It is the basis by which we provide a license to kill to the Iranian regime and unfortunately to the Prime Minister of Iraq. And this license to kill is used on a frequent basis, whether it’s the kangaroo courts in Iran, arresting, torturing and killing people or the atrocities on April 8th. This is averting genocide and war crimes. So time here is not of the essence; time is critical,” emphasized Director Freeh.

Speaking of his personal experience with the MEK at Camp Ashraf, General Conway said, “My operations officer and battalion commander came back shaking their heads, saying these people are not terrorists, they’re no more terrorist than the framers of our own constitution. They don’t like the government of their host nation but there’s no terrorist activity that we have to be concerned about… What happened there [at Ashraf] a few months ago now is pure outrage. We as a nation had, and it has been said many times, a moral responsibility for the protection of those people.”

“I think particularly it is distressing to hear of the circumstances of camp Ashraf. Simply put the United States in my view has a moral obligation to protect the people there… At the end of the day Congress and the Administration must go beyond the resolutions and written things. We have to be a lot more forceful. This is a serious humanitarian matter and we cannot sit back,” stressed Secretary Abraham.

“One of the central elements of the opposition has been the MEK,” noted Amb. Bolton, adding, “I had a passion in the government to read intelligence… I read what I could read about the MEK… I haven’t seen anything that justifies the MEK being on the list of foreign terrorist organizations… The Director of Counterterrorism at the end of the Bush administration and Secretary Rice’s legal officer both argued with her as a matter of law and policy that the designation could not be sustained.”

“I agree with everything that’s been said mostly it is specifically on the Camp Ashraf and MEK issue,” said General Wald, emphasizing that “to make an exception for people like the MEK that aren’t at all identified with a terrorist organization, from a legal standpoint, falls in the category of immorality for me from the stand point of how we recognize citizens in our world.”

Dr. Allan Gerson, former Chief Counsel to the U.S. delegation at the U.N. moderated the event, “Averting a Humanitarian Crisis at Camp Ashraf: U.N., U.S. Obligations.” He said in part of his remarks, “The title of our conference is the obligations of the U.N. and the United States to avert a humanitarian crisis…It’s about avoiding death and slaughter. What’s looming [at Camp Ashraf] is not simply a humanitarian disaster but death and destruction and self-humiliation for the United States on the grand scale because if these people were ever to be allowed to be repatriated in some way to Iran that would be a self-humiliation for the United States that would take generations to erase.”

 SOURCE Human Rights and Democracy International

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/senior-panels-denounces-ahmadinejads-visit-to-the-united-states-urges-the-us-to-stand-with-the-iranian-opposition-hrdip-conference-130093483.html

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Free Iran’s freedom fighters

September 18, 2011 by

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

Those who slander the MEK know nothing about its promise.

As the first colonel to command Camp Ashraf in Iraq, where the main Iranian opposition movement, the People’s Mujahedin of Iran (MEK) is located, I should like to think I can speak with some authority about this deeply misunderstood organization now at the center of a fierce debate in Washington.

The MEK is the largest component of the National Council of the Resistance to Iran (NCRI), Iran’s parliament in exile. They established several bases inside Iraq in 1986, when Iraq was locked in a war with Iran.

Today, as Iraq grows ever closer with Iran, the MEK is being targeted for annihilation in its temporary Iraqi home at Camp Ashraf. 

The marginalization and murder of MEK members defies American values and interests – but far too little has been done about it.

The State Department is about to announce a decision on whether or not to remove the MEK from its terror list. PHOTO BY Muhly/Getty

The group was previously thrown to the wolves by the Clinton administration, which placed the MEK on the State Department‘s terrorist list at Iran’s request in a futile effort at rapprochement in the late 1990s. Not only was a grave injustice done to the democratic opposition to Tehran, but America‘s reward for appeasement has been Iran’s sprint toward nuclear weapons, attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq and its crushing of the human rights of its people.

The MEK surrendered to the U.S. military in 2003 without firing a shot, turned over all its weapons, accepted consolidation at Camp Ashraf and fulfilled every requirement placed on it. The MEK has even provided reliable intelligence to the U.S concerning Iran’s nuclear program and interference in Iraq.

What did the MEK get in return? Nothing we should be proud of. As part of its drawdown, the U.S. turned over the protection of Ashraf to the Iraqi government in January 2009. Twice since then, the Iraqi military has attacked the camp, killing or wounding hundreds. Today, the 3,400 remaining people in Camp Ashraf live in constant fear.

These are the facts.

With the State Department about to announce a decision on whether or not to remove the MEK from its terror list, anti-MEK “experts” are popping up everywhere in the American media to discredit the group. These “experts” range from the sister of a Clinton administration State Department official who admitted spending but hours analyzing the group, to Iranian-Americans who have consistently and publicly defended the Iranian regime. Their claims range from the MEK being a Marxist/Leninist Islamic extremist organization to it being a dangerous cult in which women are automatons, marriage is prohibited and members are prevented from leaving. %A0 They claim the group has no support inside Iran or harbors terrorist ambitions.

These “experts” are maligning a group I have come to know up close and personally. Firstly, this is no Marxist cult. The MEK was founded on democratic principles, including equality between government and governed, between men and women and among various religions and races. The MEK also believes the clergy should not have total control over interpretation of the Koran, nor should the clerics have total control over their congregations. Contrary to a recent claim by Elizabeth Rubin, sister of Jamie Rubin, a former spokesman for the State Department, the MEK promotes the empowerment of women.

Concerning the ability of members to depart the organization: At Ashraf I had responsibility for almost 200 people who left for Kurdistan. As for the claim that the group has no support in Iran, I ask the experts, where was I getting the intercepted sensitive intelligence that a State Department officer was releasing to a well-known Iranian sympathizer within the Iraqi government?

My colleagues and I had unfettered access to Ashraf. As a matter of fact, the only time Americans have been denied access to Ashraf was in 2011, when the Iraqi government refused to allow visitation by a congressional delegation. I know for a fact the MEK does not have weapons. Just search for “Ashraf” on YouTube to see horrific videos of attacks on the camp by the Iraqi Army in 2009 and 2011, in which MEK members armed only with courage rescued their fallen comrades.

A decision by the State Department that is based on the facts on the ground will result in the MEK being removed from its terrorist list and added to America’s kit bag in managing its greatest strategic threat: the Iranian regime. Any decision to the contrary is to the benefit only of this repressive theocracy and its allies.

Martin, who retired as a colonel in the U.S. Army, served as the senior antiterrorism/force protection officer for all coalition forces in Iraq during Operation Iraqi Freedom.

http://www.nydailynews.com/opinions/2011/09/18/2011-09-18_free_irans_freedom_fighters.html

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Who’s afraid of the Iranian opposition?

September 17, 2011 by

THE AMERICAN THINKER

Iranian American demonstrators protest during a rally in front of the US Department of State on August 26, 2011 in Washington, DC. The group was demanding the removal of the People's Mojahedin Organization of Iran from the list of terrorist organizations by the State Deptartment. (Photo credit should read PAUL J. RICHARDS/AFP/Getty Images)

The West has spent more than thirty years looking for incentives for compromise with the Islamist regime in Iran.  After the takeover of the alleged reformer Khatami in 1997, things looked brighter than ever before.  In what U.S. diplomat Martin Indyk described as a “goodwill gesture,” the Clinton administration put the Iranian opposition group the Mullahs fear most — the “Peoples Mujahedin Organization of Iran” (MEK) — on their list of “Foreign Terrorist Organizations.”

The European Union followed suit with a similar decision in 2001, but had to remove the MEK of their list of terrorist organizations in 2009.  The many accusations that have been brought forward against the MEK could not bear examination.  Several verdicts of the British and the European Courts of Justice considered the listing as a violation of the rule of law.

Only the U.S. government keeps the MEK on its terrorist list, despite the obvious failure of the engagement policy with the Iranian regime.  Now a revision of the decision to keep the MEK on the list or remove it is expected in the near future.

The MEK was founded in 1965 as a group based on a leftist-Islamic ideology, fighting the rule of the emperor Mohammad Reza Shah.  In 1979 they supported the Islamic Revolution, but their refusal of Khomeini’s totalitarian principle of the guardianship of the Islamic jurists led to the rupture with the new regime.  Thousands of MEK members have been killed by the tyrants of Tehran since then.  In 1981 the MEK took up arms against the Islamic Republic; their leaders fled to Paris.  After their expulsion from France they accepted the invitation of Saddam Hussein to build their headquarters in Iraq, called Camp Ashraf.  When Saddam Hussein was overthrown in 2003, the MEK surrendered its arms to the U.S. Army and their members were closely monitored by American military personnel.  The U.S. finally granted the Ashraf inhabitants the status of protected persons under the Fourth Geneva Convention based on the United States investigators’ conclusions that none of them had committed a crime under any United States laws.

For the mullah regime, the terrorist designation of the MEK has been a priceless tool against the whole Iranian opposition.  Anyone who speaks up for the end of the religious dictatorship in Iran can be easily labeled as terrorist by the regime and its apologists regardless of his ideological background.  Executions of dissenters in Iran have been justified with an alleged MEK membership of the victims.  The regime countered Western protest by the claim that it just killed people who are seen as terrorists even by the American government.

The same argument is used by Tehran’s ally in Iraq, president Nouri al-Maliki.  His soldiers have murdered dozens of Iranian expats in two attacks on Camp Ashraf in 2009 and 2011, which enraged Iranians regardless of their attitude towards the MEK.  The justification for this slaughter against unarmed members of the MEK has also been a supposed fight against terrorism.  Maliki’s government has announced to erase Camp Ashraf until the end of the year — a clear menace to the lives of its 3,400 inhabitants.

U.S. public debate on this topic is divided.  On one side of the issue are politicians like John Bolton, Rudolph Giuliani, and Patrick Kennedy, who advocate for an end of the Islamic dictatorship and support regime change in Iran.  They spoke out for a de-listing of the MEK as a signal of support to the Iranian people and a clear sign of an end to the engagement policy towards the Islamic Republic.

At a conference in France, Elie Wiesel, political scientist and Holocaust survivor, expressed his solidarity with the residents of Ashraf.  He condemned the silence of the Western media about the atrocities committed in Iraq on orders of Khamenei, which appalled him.  Prince Reza Pahlavi, the son of the Shah of Persia and surely the most important competitor of the MEK under exiled Iranians, also voiced protest against the killing of Iranian refugees in Ashraf by Iraqi forces.

On the other hand, there is a campaign to keep the MEK on the list headed by Trita Parsi, leader of the “National Iranian American Council,” the “Iranian lobby in Washington” according to Iranian regime media.  But also political scientists like Michael Rubin and Kenneth R. Timmerman spoke out against the de-listing of the MEK, claiming that it is an anti-American, anti-Zionist, “Islamo-Marxist” organization.  Beyond the question of whether this would be enough to label an organization as “terrorist,” this argument ignores the fact that the MEK has provided invaluable information about the Iranian nuclear program obtained under mortal danger to the American authorities and therefore proved to cooperate in a pragmatic way with Western powers.  The organization also refrains from the sort of anti-Israeli propaganda that Islamist reformists and old-school leftists still engage in.

The hope that negotiations with the Iranian Islamists could help to stop the mullahs’ atomic program or their support for international terrorism has proven to be futile.  The leaders of the Islamic Republic have been frank about their terrorist intentions from the beginning, and they do not hide their fears, either: a possible de-listing of the MEK is one of their main concerns.

The question of the de-listing of the MEK is not only and not mainly a question about the future of the organization itself.  It goes far beyond and points to two possible scenarios:

An ongoing demonization of the MEK will be understood as a signal of support for the Iranian regime — a green light for more brutal crimes against humanity in- and outside Iran.  This will discourage the Iranian opposition and strengthen the regime, helping the mullahs to become nuclear, with all the catastrophic consequences of that development.

A de-listing of the MEK would lift the taboo surrounding this group and provide the opportunity for a free debate in the West about the political strategies and goals of the Iranian opposition.  In Iran, the mullahs dictate the rules of engagement and the suppression of the protests of 2009 highlighted that the will for freedom is not enough to end the dictatorship in Iran.  As during the fight against Nazism in Europe, a well-organized and determined coalition will be necessary to bring down the clerical regime.  The de-listing of the MEK would be a clear signal of solid support for democracy in Iran.

The writers are founding members of the German chapter of the European coalition Stop the Bomb.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/09/whos_afraid_of_the_iranian_opposition.html

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Misguided policy and bias on MEK

September 16, 2011 by

UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL

WASHINGTON, Sept. 16 (UPI) — On Aug. 26, hundreds of students and faculty from various universities in the United States, Canada and Europe joined Iranian-Americans in front of the U.S. State Department in Washington to call on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to remove Iran’s major opposition group, the People’s Mujahedin of Iran, from the department’s list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations.

The PMOI is also known as the Mujahedin-e-Khalq.

State Department Rally to Demand MEK Delisting

WASHINGTON - A huge crowd of Iranian American demonstrators protest during a rally in front of the US Department of State on August 26, 2011 in Washington, DC. The group was demanding the removal of the People's Mojahedin Organization of Iran from the list of terrorist organizations by the State Deptartment. (PAUL J. RICHARDS/AFP/Getty Images)

Participating students led the protesters with a banner that read, “Secretary Clinton, you now have the backing of the court, the U.S. Congress and the Iranian people to delist the MEK.”

Why does the MEK continue to draw support from universities and why the Western academia has done little to study the group, its influence on the political landscape of Iran and even the region?

Founded in the 1960s by university students, MEK opposed the shah’s rule in Iran and sought a democratic republic. From the outset, universities were the first place where most Iranians, especially women, were introduced to the MEK.

Massoud Rajavi, the sole surviving member of MEK’s original leadership, had the most popular lectures on major political issues of the day and his philosophical discourse on the origins of life and the epistemological awareness that he raised on university campuses in the early months of the 1979 revolution.

The MEK’s political platform and ideological standing as a distinctly nationalist group with a modern, progressive and profoundly anti-fundamentalist interpretation of Islam drew students and faculty en masse to the group.

By 1980, chancellors, deans and faculty of major Iranian universities declared their support for Rajavi’s platform on individual liberties, equality, pluralism and ethnic and religious freedoms.

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, threatened by the growing influence and popularity of the MEK among academia, declared the “cultural revolution” and closed universities for three years (1980-83). Campuses across the nation witnessed a brutal crackdown.

Violence ensued with thousands of students and faculty purged and executed in Khomeini’s drive to “cleanse” higher education from “anti-revolutionary influences.”

MEK’s anti-theocracy campaign has since expanded and transformed to a relentless struggle underground and in exile, making the group Tehran’s political, social and ideological arch-foe.

This has come at a heavy price. At home, tens of thousands of MEK members and sympathizers have been executed as “mohareb” — enemies of God. Tehran’s strategy to uproot the group has relied on a combination of physical intimidation and political assassinations.

Many outspoken opposition activists, including Rajavi’s brother, Professor Kazem Rajavi, have been killed by Tehran’s terror squads. Kazem Rajavi, 56, who held six doctorate degrees in the fields of law, political science and sociology from European universities, was gunned down in Switzerland by Iranian agents in 1990.

Tehran’s sustained and sophisticated campaign to demonize and discredit the MEK as a legitimate alternative to the rule of clerics has served as the other pillar of its strategy to defeat the group. It relies heavily on a plethora of lies and fabrications about the past and present of the MEK and its leadership.

According to court testimony of former agents of Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security, the anti-MEK campaign has been, and still is, run from the MOIS headquarters in Tehran and then propagated through a web of agents who frequently pose as opposition activists abroad and through what Tehran considers its “assets” in Western media and academic outlets.

One significant consequence of this campaign is the bias that has been instilled among Western academics, scholars and even some non-governmental organizations who have chosen to accept the dominant paradigm in Iran without questions.

In spite of four decades of history involving students, faculty and scholars inside Iran, MEK remains understudied and continues to be misrepresented outside of Iran. The U.S. FTO designation of the MEK, and the legal consequences the label caries, has created an environment that isn’t conducive to seeing MEK as a legitimate political organization.

The MEK’s FTO designation dates to 1997 when the Clinton administration, keen on placating Tehran’s regime through various “goodwill gestures,” designated the MEK as a terrorist organization. Since then, the MEK has won every legal challenge it filed, whether in the United States, the United Kingdom, France or the European Union.

Eight European courts have reviewed thousands of pages of classified and unclassified materials and have concluded that the MEK is simply not involved in terrorism.

With the start of the new academic year, in a joint letter, Iranian and U.S. scholars from several prominent academic institutions in the United States are urging Secretary Clinton to remove the MEK from the State Department’s FTO list, citing Tehran’s use of the terror tag for executions at home, the bipartisan congressional resolution for delisting (H.R. 60) and the July 2010 U.S. Federal Court of Appeals’ ruling as grounds for de-listing.

Kazem Kazerounian, one of signatories from University of Connecticut, says: “Given the tens of thousands of university student supporters of MEK and thousands of faculty supporters executed by the Iranian regime, for their thoughts and not their acts, the issue of MEK is an issue that concerns academicians everywhere.

“Terror tagging MEK, tying their hands and having them defenseless and vulnerable against the atrocities of the ayatollahs — because it is a convenient policy against Tehran — will not be acceptable to us.”

Director of the graduate program in Negotiation and Conflict Management in the School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Baltimore, Ivan Sascha Sheehan, another signatory to the letter, says: “The latest State Department report on MEK further confirms the group’s ineligibility for FTO listing based on statutory language used to label terrorist organizations under U.S. law. MEK’s continued presence on the FTO list is a political setback and undermines a valuable non-military option for supporting indigenous democratic change in Iran.”

Through significant support from the finest minds and talents Iran has ever produced, with more than three generations of experience from different periods of Iranian political history, the MEK needs to be researched and studied free of politics and bias. That begins with their removal from the FTO list.

(Ramesh Sepehrrad is a scholar practitioner from School of Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University. She has focused her research and field work on Iranian affairs as it relates to human rights, gender equality and U.S. policy on Iran for more than two decades.)
Read more: http://www.upi.com/Top_News/Analysis/Outside-View/2011/09/16/Outside-View-Misguided-policy-and-bias-on-MEK/UPI-11101316171100/#ixzz1YAXXd5vt

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Getting on the right side of history

September 16, 2011 by

 

 

President Obama is in a quandary over what to do about Iran. News headlines over the last few weeks illustrate this:

·    “IAEA: Increasing concerns about Iran’s warheads designed to deliver nuclear payloads.”
·   “U.S. Treasury Department: Iran is aiding Al Qaeda.”
·   “Top al-Qaeda ranks keep footholds in Iran.”
·    “Iran continues to harbor and refuses to hand over bombers of Argentine Jewish charities.”
·   “Senior U.S. officials: Iran transferred lethal new munitions to Iraq and Afghanistan for attacks on U.S. troops.”

The Iranian regime has become brazen in its defiance of multiple UN resolutions and continues to thumb its proverbial nose at the entire international community. 

Another news headline, this time from August 26, gives a clue as to what excites the mullahs:
·         “Thousands of Iranian expatriates demonstrate outside the State Department, calling for protection of Ashraf and removal of PMOI/MEK from the State Department’s terror list.”

The People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK) is the principal Iranian opposition movement, and Ashraf is home to 3,400 of its members, 40 miles north east of Baghdad.

While historical changes are sweeping throughout the Middle East, the U.S. misguided, and outdated policy, has put the mullahs’ mind at ease about potential change from within by shackling Tehran’s most organized opposition and possible nemesis. This outdated policy puzzled many in 2009, when the Iranian people’s nationwide uprising against the stolen presidential election rocked the foundations of the tyrannical rule of Ali Khamenei. The U.S. response was silence at first and then offering lip service to the demonstrators. That was it. America’s silence was bluntly criticized by millions demonstrating in the streets of Iranian cities when they chanted: “Obama, Obama, Ya Ba-una, Ya Ba-ma!” [Obama, Obama, either with them or with us!]

And there has not been any serious improvement on the part of Washington since then. As a result Iran is fast reaching its goal of building nuclear weapons and mechanisms for their long-range delivery.

The incoherent policy of the U.S. is nowhere more evident than the way in which Iranian dissidents have been treated.

The PMOI/MEK was blacklisted in 1997 as part of the US and West’s appeasement policy. In 2010, the Federal Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C. reviewed the terrorism designation of PMOI/MEK by the State Department, found serious flaws with it, and ordered the State department to review this designation.

More than 100 members of the U.S. congress in a bipartisan initiative have called for delisting.  Dozens of prominent American officials in the past four administrations have added their weight in favor of MEK. On August 26, thousands of Iranian-Americans demonstrated in front of the State Department echoing the same demand.

Iranian-Americans want the U.S. to observe its commitment to protect residents of Ashraf. Since, under the paramount influence of Iran, the Iraqi government has attacked Camp Ashraf twice, killing 47 defenseless residents and wounding more than 1,000. Their excuse for the massacre? The designation of the MEK by the State Department.

On the other side of Atlantic, in 2009 the European Union’s High Court, ordered the EU to remove the PMOI from its terror list because it found no evidence to support such a designation. This ruling followed a thorough procedural and contextual review by the highest judicial authority in the UK in 2008, which found the designation of PMOI/MEK as a terrorist organization totally unjustified and called it “perverse.”

Meanwhile, the Iranian regime’s lobbyists who realize the delisting of MEK will be the beginning of the end of an appeasement policy have launched a propaganda blitz, trying to discredit the MEK, and urging the State Department to maintain MEK on its list.

While the whole Middle East is turning upside down, it is high time President Obama executed a U-turn on Iran policy too. U.S. policymakers must reject the defunct policy of appeasement of Iran and get on the right side of the history.

The U.S. has the opportunity to correct its mistakes vis-à-vis the Iranian people. If it is serious about fighting terrorism and stopping Iran’s nuclear bomb, it must begin by removing the PMOI/MEK from its black list and fulfill its written commitment to protect residents of Ashraf.

The Arab Spring is a wake up call to President Obama and he should see the important signal this policy change would send to those millions in Iran who cry freedom.

Corbett is a British Labour Party politician and is chairman of the British Parliamentary Committee for Iran Freedom

http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/foreign-policy/182073-getting-on-the-right-side-of-history

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MeK, Iran and the War for Washington

September 16, 2011 by

THE NATIONAL INTEREST

There is an escalating war for influence over U.S. policy toward Iran: It is a dispute among university scholars, think-tank analysts and former American officials. Reverberations of this war are not confined to the Washington beltway but have profound significance for the Middle East. As Arab republics like Egypt and Tunisia fall from popular protests, internally inspired regime-change scenarios abound. While largely peaceful protests brought down regimes in Cairo and Tunis, state suppression resulted in violent pushback in Libya, Syria and Yemen.

Secretary of State Hillat Clinton. Image by Harald Dettenborn

Although Arab republics are the immediate targets of their populations, Arab kingdoms like Bahrain, and to a much lesser degree Jordan and Saudi Arabia, are feeling the heat of popular unrest. Because there is generally a lack of consensus on how to transfer power in Arab republics, they are less stable than kingdoms. “The king is dead; long live the (new) king,” does not easily translate into “The president of the republic is dead; long live his son.”

Just as conflicts over succession occur among the Arab republics, so a succession crisis is likely to arise in the Islamic Republic of Iran. We should use the lens of such a conflict in Iran when viewing the war in Washington about an Iranian dissident organization—the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (MeK). Saddam Hussein’s takedown by foreign militaries highlights the need for a homegrown antidote to Iranian rulers because external regime change is off the table in the aftermath of the Iraq War.

Secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton is poised to announce the MeK designation in fall 2011, a decision long overdue. Nothing is likely to be more decisive in reducing the strategic threat from Tehran than having a vigorous democratic opposition in Iran; it is critical to have a coalition of prodemocracy dissidents working together to weaken the regime from within and replace it; the MeK can play an enhanced role in the prodemocracy movement if it is removed from the State Department terrorist list. But above and beyond the potential international benefit of facilitating internal regime change for Iran, the MeK simply deserves to be delisted on the basis of facts and law alone.

A search of U.S. government and private electronic and media sources by scholars in the Iran Policy Committee reveals an absence of evidence to support the inference that the MeK engages in terrorist activities or terrorism or has the capability and intent to do so. The databases are: the U.S. Worldwide Incident Tracking System; Department of Homeland Security-sponsored Global Terrorism Database; and U.S. government-supported RAND Database of Worldwide Terrorism Incidents. In these major databases, there are no confirmed associations of the MeK with any military action after 2001.

Given the absence of unclassified evidence of MeK involvement in terrorist activities during the course of nine years (2001-2010), any countervailing evidence in the classified record should be viewed with skepticism and subject to scrutiny for credibility. An assumption here is that terrorist incidents are too public not to appear in databases or in newspapers of record.

On 4 December 2008, the Court of First Instance of the European Communities issued a judgment annulling the MeK designation, and the European Union cleared the MeK of terrorist conduct in January 2009. The United Kingdom removed the group from its list of proscribed organizations in June 2008. In addition, the French judiciary dismissed all terrorism and terrorism-financing charges against the group in May 2011.

Two issues before the American court have been whether the State Department provided due process of law to the MeK and credibility of evidence in support of allegations against it. In a July 2010 ruling regarding a MeK appeal of its continued designation in January 2009, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the DC circuit faulted the decisionmaking process of the secretary of state.

The court questioned the credibility, sources and legal relevance of evidence in the Secretary’s January 2009 decision to maintain the designation and ordered the State Department to give the MeK an occasion to rebut some of the declassified material used in the re-designation. On 20 May 2011, the department released ten documents. Five were unclassified, mostly wire service reports from the Associated Press, Radio Farda and Azeri Press Agency. They concern allegations, such as MeK’s “cult-like” behavior and supposed lack of popular support within Iran. Such false, nonlegal allegations are no grounds on which to base a terrorist tag.

For the MeK to be re-designated absent any terrorist activity or terrorism, the State Department has to demonstrate that the group has both the capability and the intent to engage in terrorist activity or terrorism and that it either threatens U.S. national security or the security of American citizens.

In the Department of State Country Reports on Terrorism (CRT) 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010, a CRT 2006 accusation that the MeK has “capacity and will” to commit terrorist activities or engage in terrorism does not recur, and there are no terrorist activities or terrorist events cited during the legally relevant period of two years prior to the last re-designation decision of January 2009. In fact, no such actions are listed since 2001.

In view of the convergence of historical circumstances and the law in favor of delisting, consider the political origins of the MeK designation. The roots are in the Iran-Contra affair of the mid-1980s: In exchange for release of American hostages held in Lebanon by one of Tehran’s proxies, Hezbollah, the State Department alleged without evidence that MeK members used terrorism and violence as “standard instruments of their politics.” Thus began the use of that designation primarily as a tool to achieve foreign-policy aims rather than antiterrorism goals.

Martin Indyk, who served as assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs in 1997, said one of the reasons the MeK was put on the terrorism list was part of a “two-pronged” diplomatic strategy. It included increasing pressure on Saddam Hussein by linking him to a “terrorist group,” the MeK. The other “prong” was the Clinton administration’s interest in opening a dialogue with Tehran. On 8 June 1997, Mohammad Khatami was elected president of Iran, and the administration viewed him as a moderate. Clinton officials saw cracking down on the MeK as a way to strengthen Khatami at the expense of so-called hardliners. But this political use of the terrorist designation failed; Tehran pocketed the concession without reciprocity.

Because law and facts converge for removing the designation of the MeK, those who oppose delisting fall back on political grounds buttressed by vague factual allegations for a continuation of the terrorist tag. There is an unfounded claim that the MeK is unpopular within Iran because of “numerous terrorist attacks against innocent Iranian civilians.” Then there is an invalid policy conclusion: “Removing the MeK from the Foreign Terrorist Organization [sic] list and misconstruing its lack of democratic bona fides and support inside Iran will have harmful consequences on the legitimate, indigenous Iranian opposition.” The allegation of MeK unpopularity is false. Support within the expatriate Iranian community suggests popularity in Iran; no other dissident organization can mobilize similar numbers of expat supporters.

Some who believe delisting would limit Washington’s ability to reach out to the Iranian street are wrong; the disproportionate number of protestors arrested and hanged because of association with the MeK indicates the organization’s significant presence on the Iranian street. Those who oppose delisting the MeK and hold a dim view of the effectiveness of Iranian dissidents to bring about regime change weaken their opposition to removal of the tag on the MeK. An argument in support of delisting on foreign-policy grounds is that it would reinforce the democratic opposition in Iran.

In most of the arguments opposed to delisting the MEK, no statutory fact is presented. So opponents of removing the terrorist tag resort to irrelevant non-legal arguments to overshadow lack of evidence of its engagement in terrorist activities or terrorism. In effect, those in favor of maintaining the MeK listing want Secretary Clinton to disregard the facts and the law entirely. With a simple signature delisting the group, Secretary Clinton would not only bring her Department in line with law and facts; she also would help empower the Iranian people to change the regime and open a political option between failed engagement and ineffective sanctions, on one hand, and problematic military action on the other.

Raymond Tanter served on the senior staff of the National Security Council and as personal representative of the Secretary of Defense to arms control talks in Europe in the Reagan-Bush administration. He is currently an adjunct professor at Georgetown University and a professor emeritus at the University of Michigan.

http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/meks-war-washington-5889

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