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Terrorists or Fall Guys? The MEK puzzle.

May 7, 2012 by

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

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United States is Iran’s handmaiden against opposition

May 6, 2012 by

THE TAMPA TRIBUNE

 By LEO MCCLOSKEY, DAVID PHILLIPS, WESLEY MARTIN

One year ago, the peace at a refugee camp under the “protection” of Iraq’s government was shattered by the thunder of military vehicles storming the gates. Iraqi soldiers murdered 36 defenseless Iranian dissidents, and left hundreds injured in the rampage. Despite calls from the U.S. Congress, the European Union and the United Nations, there has been no independent inquiry into the incident. No one has been held accountable.

How could this massacre go unpunished? The answer goes into a dark, uncomfortable place.

This was not the first deadly attack on the unarmed residents, who are members of Iran’s Mujahedin-e-Khalq (PMOI/MEK), living in what is known as Camp Ashraf. There is a pattern of violence and intimidation against them at the hands of the Shiite officials of the Al-Maliki government, a government the United States paid mightily to train and set up.

A cruel irony of America’s sacrifice is that a sphere of influence now exists between Baghdad and Tehran that includes efforts to crush the MEK, the mullahs’ only viable and organized opposition.

The core members of the MEK — who promote a secular, democratic and non-nuclear Iran — were hounded out of Iran and set up Camp Ashraf near Baghdad 26 years ago. In 1997, as the United States pursued a futile policy of dialogue with Tehran, the opposition group became listed as a terrorist organization worldwide, despite the fact that the group shared many values with the free world. In diplomatic parlance, this is called a “confidence-building” gesture.

In 2003, U.S. forces assumed control of Camp Ashraf. At that time a thorough investigation, including background checks and interviews, was conducted on the residents of Ashraf, and it was determined that not one terrorist was among the 3,400 dissidents. The residents voluntarily disarmed to the United States and in return were given official “Protected Persons Status” and protection under the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Iraq assumed responsibility for the camp’s security in 2009 and gave assurances that the refugees would be given “humane treatment.” But then came the brutal attack on the residents of Ashraf.

Video footage showed unarmed civilians being shot in the head at close range by Iraqi soldiers, or being run over by Humvees. Al-Maliki did not stop there — within days he vowed to close Camp Ashraf, which would have sent these defenseless people into the desert to fend for themselves.

Another atrocity was only averted after a massive international campaign compelled the UN to draw up a memorandum of understanding with the Iraqi government to assure the safety and welfare of Ashraf residents.

The Iranian opposition movement leader Maryam Rajavi agreed for the residents to move to a new home, an abandoned U.S. military base known as Camp Liberty. Some 1,500 have already relocated there. However, reports from inside the camp describe conditions as prison-like and not meeting the bare-minimum humanitarian standards. The residents fear another disaster is looming around the corner.

The issue at hand is now more than a humanitarian crisis; the people scattered between camps Ashraf and Liberty represent the only viable check on the power and ambitions of the Iranian regime. There is, however, one simple way the U.S. State Department can stop this persecution: Delist the MEK as a foreign terrorist organization.

Why, at a time when international tensions with Iran are escalating, when policy options for rolling back Tehran’s nuclear program are dwindling, when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is condemning Iran for “interfering with neighbors” (in reference to Syria) and “exporting terrorism,” would unleashing the opposition be off the table?

Why would the U.S. government go so far as to launch an investigation into Americans who have dared to expose some dark truths about U.S. policy, as the Treasury Department recently did against several former senior U.S. officials from both parties?

Why would the U.S. government go so far as to investigate and harass American former senior officials who have spoken out against the unwarranted designation of MEK? That the United States is dragging its heels over delisting them is inexplicable, given that the UK and EU removed the MEK from the blacklist more than three years ago.

The United States and the U.N. need to expedite the process of relocating these vulnerable men and women to third countries and getting the MEK into the struggle to contain Iran. The United States needs to recognize the humanitarian crisis and the strategic value of the Iranian opposition before it is too late.

 
Lt. Col. Leo McCloskey (ret.), is a Tampa resident and was the commander of Joint Interagency Task Force at Camp Ashraf, Iraq, until January 2009. Brig. Gen. David Phillips (ret.), is the former chief of the Military Policy School at Fort Leonard Wood and former commander of all police operations in Iraq, which included the protection of Camp Ashraf. Col. Wesley Martin (ret.), served as the senior antiterrorism/force protection officer for all coalition forces in Iraq and was the first colonel in charge of Camp Ashraf.
 
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The most powerful weapon Obama can deploy against Iran

April 16, 2012 by

FoxNews.com

By Tom Ridge, General Hugh Shelton, Patrick Kennedy

To believe that the resumption of negotiations in Istanbul could — or ever will –avert Iranian nuclear breakout and a possible Middle East conflagration, is to believe in the triumph of hope over experience. When it comes to the Mullahs’ intentions, however, we believe that the past is best viewed as prologue.

Consider that on the eve of these new negotiations, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad brazenly mocked President Obama’s “last chance” proffer to the Mullahs, declaring that sanctions were a failure because Iran has stockpiled enough hard currency to survive for years without selling any oil.

True or not, the fact remains that the so-called “P5 +1,” (the US, Britain, China, France, Russia and Germany) have begun their first talks with Iran in over 15 months after a previous round of negotiations ended without agreement in January 2011.

It is hardly surprising to us that little of substance was discussed and that no concrete proposals or confidence-building measures were agreed to now, either.

After all, ten years of diplomatic efforts have only emboldened the Mullahs’ terrorist regime. These latest talks only enable the regime in Tehran to buy time while building their nuclear weapons program.

But the Obama administration has another option worth trying at its disposal.

Secretary of State Clinton got it exactly right when she focused world attention on the critical distinction between the people of Iran and the Mullah’s oppressive terrorist regime.

Following the April 1 Conference on Syria, Clinton rightly said that, “In the last six, eight months we’ve had Iranian plots disrupted from Thailand to India to Georgia to Mexico and many places in between. This is a country, not a terrorist group…the people deserve better than to be living under a regime that exports terrorism.”

As President Obama struggles to find a solution to Iran’s increasingly threatening nuclear ambitions, he should realize that the most powerful weapon the US can deploy now is not the sanctions of diplomacy, or the missiles of war, but support for regime change in Iran.

Opposition parties in Iran are brutally oppressed and the most viable organized resistance in the country—the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK) has been exiled and persecuted relentlessly by the Mullahs for more than thirty years.

The regime in Tehran views MEK as an existential threat because MEK strives to replace the unelected, clerical regime with a liberal democracy that champions a non-nuclear Iranian future, equal rights for women and minorities, and a free press. But the major opposition to the Mullahs is being prevented from realizing these dreams of freedom for the Iranian people because both Iran and the US designate them as a terrorist organization.

MEK is a movement that epitomizes the very spirit of the Arab Spring. By removing MEK from an unjust designation, the Obama administration can create a new political dynamic – one that can effectively undermine the worlds’ leading state sponsor of terrorism.

The Clinton administration initially added MEK to the State Department’s blacklist in 1997 as part of a failed political ploy to appease Iran—mistakenly thought at the time to be moving towards moderation. The Mullahs demanded that the group be listed as a precondition for potential negotiations with the US. Those negotiations never materialized then — and won’t work now either.

Still, the Obama administration outrageously delays removing  MEK, a declared democratic ally that has provided invaluable intelligence on the location of key Iranian nuclear sites, from its list of “Foreign Terrorist Organizations” (FTO) even though it meets none of the legal criteria.

This folly has given Iran and its proxies in Iraq a license to kill thousands of MEK members, including a massacre on April 8 of last year, that killed 47, including eight women, or wounded hundreds of unarmed members of the exiled MEK dissidents living in Camp Ashraf, Iraq—each and every one of whom was given written guarantees of protection by the US government.

Now that US troops have left Iraq, Iran is determined to extend its influence in the region and has vowed to exterminate the unarmed men and women at Camp Ashraf. The residents of Camp Ashraf have all been interviewed by the FBI and seven other U.S. agencies and there has never been a shred of evidence anyone in that camp was motivated by, interested in, or capable of conducting acts of terrorism.

In a bipartisan initiative, nearly 100 Members of Congress, including Chairs of House Intelligence and Armed Services as well as Oversight and Government Reform committees, have called for MEK to be de-listed.

The unfounded MEK designation only serves as a license to kill for both the Iraqi forces and the kangaroo courts in Iran, which regularly arrest, torture, and murder people because of their MEK affiliation. It shames the State Department’s designation process that has wrongly maintained the blacklist for misguided political reasons and it prevents the safe resettlement of Camp Ashraf residents to other countries, including the United States where many Iranian-American citizens are waiting to be reunited with their exiled family members.

Nearly two years after a US Court of Appeals found that the State Department had violated MEK’s due process rights, and ordered a re-evaluation, Secretary of State Clinton is still “reviewing” this inappropriate and unlawful designation.   

Under the agreement brokered by the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI), Ashraf residents are in the process of relocating to a site at an abandoned former US military base known as Camp Liberty, in Baghdad. Despite uninhabitable conditions there, and frequent assaults by Iraqi police, Secretary Clinton told Congress that residents’ cooperation in moving from their home of 26 years to Camp Liberty would be a precondition for delisting MEK.

So far, 1,600 residents have been relocated to Camp Liberty and this “process” has claimed one life and resulted in unprovoked attack by Iraqi police (at Iran’s bidding) that left 29 wounded last week.

MEK members have shown remarkable cooperation and restraint and have been extremely tolerant and peaceful in dealing with Iraqi mistreatment. Still, the State Department continues to stall on de-listing the MEK, which explains why it has been ordered to appear in the US Federal Court of Appeals in Washington, DC on May 8 to publicly explain its reasons for inaction on this vital matter of grave humanitarian consequence.

In the meantime, one can only hope that Secretary Clinton means it when she says that the Iranian people deserve to be free of the mullahs. Unshackling the main Iranian opposition movement from an unwarranted State Department blacklist and honoring US promises to guarantee the safety of exiled Iranian dissidents would certainly be a good place to start.

General Hugh Shelton was the 14th Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff.  Former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge served as the first U.S. Homeland Security Secretary. Patrick Kennedy represented Rhode Island’s 1st District in the House of Representatives from 1995 to 2011.

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2012/04/16/most-powerful-weapon-obama-can-deploy-against-iran/

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Former US Officials Reiterate Backing for Delisting the Iranian Opposition Group, Say They Will Not be Intimidated or Silenced

April 9, 2012 by

WASHINGTON, April 9, 2012 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ — A group of prominent former officials say they refuse to abandon their support for the People’s Mujahedin of Iran (PMOI/MEK) and their efforts to have the group removed from the State Department’s terrorist list, despite indirect warnings from the Treasury Department that their support for the group could constitute a crime.

“I never knew obtaining a subpoena from your own government would be so much fun,” former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell told a crowd of nearly 1,000 at an event to commemorate the first anniversary of an attack by Iraqi military forces against Iranian citizens in the Camp Ashraf in Iraq, where 36, including eight women, were killed and hundreds wounded. “On the one hand we’re being investigated by the Treasury Department… for contact with the MEK, (but) the State Department asked us to have contact with the MEK. Can someone explain that to me?”

Referring to the media reports on the Treasury’s potential probe of a number of the luminaries who have spoken out about the failure of the United States to uphold its commitments to protect Iranian dissidents at Camp Ashraf and the need to delist the MEK, Harvard Law Prof. Alan Dershowitz said, “It’s a tragedy that we have had to place our own sacred honor at risk by supporting humanitarian cause, the saving of innocent lives and obligation of our government to keep its commitments.” “I never thought I would live to see the day when my own country… threatens its own citizens who speak up on behalf of law, justice and humanitarian obligations of the United States.”

“Up here on the dais with me…we have some of America’s most distinguished public servants, most decorated military officers, and most respected diplomats,” said Ambassador Mitchell Reiss, who served as Policy Planning Director under former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell.

“We come together today at a time when some people in the U.S. Government are trying to intimidate us…our presence here…is a rebuke to those who oppose this cause,” Reiss who moderated the event added. “We will not be intimidated, discouraged, and we will not be silenced.”

“I want to say with all of my heart and sincerity that I was advised by my friends in the administration not to be here today,” said Ambassador Marc Ginsberg, the former U.S. Ambassador to Morocco said, adding, “Why are they leaking inflammatory and inappropriate information about the rights of the people sitting up here today to speak their minds even if they were being paid to leave their offices and to spend time before you. Are they trying to shoot the messenger because they don’t like the message?”

Referring to the writ of mandamus submitted to the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia by the MEK Counsel, Attorney General Michael Mukasey said, “The State Department can do all the conduct in foreign relations that it wants, but it can’t put anybody on the list or keep anybody on the list unless they qualify. And I think, as a piece of friendly advice, it is ill-advised to tell a court that it is none of their business. I suggest to you that they will find out soon enough that it is the business of a court.”

“We had seen within the past weeks Secretary Clinton say that the conduct of the MEK in transferring residents from Ashraf to Camp Liberty would be a factor in deciding whether the MEK would stay on the list of foreign terrorist organizations… Another fundamentally political point,” the former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Ambassador John Bolton said. “If the original designation was bad and it was, and if the decision in 2008 to continue the listing was worse, this is worst of all.”

“I think we all have to be very vigilant and this is a real test for the United Nations as to what UNHCR does at Camp Liberty…there should be an evaluation of what can be done at the Security Council to push and accelerate the process to repatriating our colleagues and family members and friends in Camp Liberty,” former U.S. ambassador for special political affairs, Stuart Holliday, said.

Former Marine Corps Commandant General James Conway and former chief judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces Eugene Sullivan questioned the designation of the MEK and underscored the need to fulfill America’s promise to protect the residents of Camp Ashraf until they are resettled in third countries.

The MEK formally renounced violence in 2001, and voluntarily disarmed when US forces arrived at Camp Ashraf in 2003. Investigations since by the US military, the CIA, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and others US agencies have all concluded the group is not a terrorist organization.

SOURCE Iranian American Community of Northern California

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/former-us-officials-reiterate-backing-for-delisting-the-iranian-opposition-group-say-they-will-not-be-intimidated-or-silenced-according-to-iranian-american-community-of-northern-california-2012-04-09

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Bipartisan Political Leaders Urge Removal of MEK from Terrorist List, Denounce Attempt to Silence State Department Policy Critics

March 24, 2012 by

PRNEWSWIRE

WASHINGTON, March, 24, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ – With a federal appeals court deadline looming for the U.S. State Department to answer why it has defied earlier court rulings requiring review of a decision to maintain the main Iranian opposition movement, the Mujahedin-e Khaq (MEK) on the terrorist list, top former US officials and Members of Congress are urging the Department to remove the group immediately.

“I believe we will not only get our day in court, I believe we will succeed,” former U.S. Department of Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge told an audience of Members of Congress, staff members, and Iranian-Americans during an event, marking the Iranian New Year, Nowrouz. “Sometimes justice takes a little longer than normal, but sooner or later, righteousness and the law prevail, and we will prevail.”

Other speakers included Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), the House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair, Rep. Mike Kaufman (R-CO), Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) and retired Army Col. Wesley Martin, who commanded Camp Ashraf.

At issue is the fate of 3,400 Iranian dissidents now housed at Camp Ashraf and Camp Liberty in Iraq; their safe relocation has been vastly complicated by the State Department’s refusal the make a decision on the Status of the MEK.

In 2010, a three-judge panel in the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit unanimously ruled that the State Department had violated the due process rights of the MEK and ordered the Obama administration to revisit the issue. Since then, the State Department continues to be in violation of the due process in virtue of its refusal to make a decision based on instructions given by the Court.

Earlier this month, attorneys for the MEK filed a writ of mandamus seeking the court’s intervention in light of State inaction. The court did so expeditiously, and gave the government a deadline of March 26 to respond to the mandamus.

In the meantime, in a move which some observers believe is tied to the court developments, the Treasury Department is apparently contemplating a “potential” investigation into the source of funding for events where a number of senior former federal law enforcement, intelligence and and national security officials had urged that the MEK be dropped from the State Department’s terror list and the residents of Ashraf be protected.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-CA, who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Oversight and Investigations subcommittee, has called this inquiry “a travesty,” adding that it is “a sin that our government is going after these people trying to support the people of Iran.”

“It seems that the method to silence those who are in favor of the liberation of the MEK from the foreign terrorist organization… is to attack them personally… That is not going to work. Whoever is behind the attacks on these good men and women with unbelievable credentials, who believe in the de-listing of the MEK, it will not succeed,” emphasized the Texas Republican, Rep. Ted Poe.

Since the Court ruling, nearly 130 members of Congress, including House Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Mike Rogers (R-MI), Oversight and Government Reform Chair Darrel Issa (R-CA) and Armed Services Committee Chair Howard McKeon (R-CA), have co-sponsored resolutions calling for the delisting of the MEK. 

SOURCE: Californian Society for Democracy in Iran

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/bipartisan-political-leaders-urge-removal-of-mek-from-terrorist-list-denounce-attempt-to-silence-state-department-policy-critics-144065216.html

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Court orders US to review terror label for Iran exiles

March 7, 2012 by

AGENCE FRANCE PRESSE

WASHINGTON — A US court has ordered the government to examine quickly a request by the main Iranian opposition group to be taken off a US terror blacklist, according to documents seen Wednesday by AFP.

The People’s Mujahedeen of Iran (PMOI), Iran’s main exiled opposition, has appealed to US courts to rule urgently on the issue “to prevent the Iraqi government from continuing to endanger the lives of PMOI at Camp Ashraf, Iraq.”

Camp Ashraf, 80 kilometers (50 miles) from the Iranian border, houses some 3,300 supporters of the exiled group, which has been designated a terrorist organization by the United States since 1997.

Former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein welcomed the exiles to Iraq during the 1980-88 Iraq-Iran war and they have lived at the camp ever since.

But it has become a mounting problem for Iraqi authorities since US forces handed over security for the camp in January 2009, and amid pressure from Tehran to hand over the members of the militant group.

Baghdad is now seeking to close the camp by April.

The People’s Mujahedeen is the main component of the Iranian opposition group, the National Council of Resistance, which said an attack by Iraqi forces on the camp in April 2011 left 36 people dead and 300 injured.

The Mujahedeen in its filing said “expedited consideration by this court is necessary and to forestall the humanitarian crisis that threatens to unfold as third countries are reluctant to accept Ashraf residents for resettlement as long as PMOI remains on the (terror) list.”

The Washington appeals court on Monday gave the US government until March 26 to reply to the People’s Mujahedeen request.

The same court in 2010 ruled that the secretary of state had violated the constitution by refusing the group’s request, and had given the State Department 180 days to review the status of the People’s Mujahedeen.

“The secretary’s indecision imperils the lives and safety of PMOI’s members and supporters,” the Mujahedeen argued.

But the government has argued that it needs time to coordinate its response at a high-level, among different agencies including with intelligence bodies.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jst73NnEgd_19BuKsuM85Ag1OBYg

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Court backs Iranians

March 6, 2012 by

THE WASHINGTON TIMES

The Iranian resistance won another victory in a U.S. federal court this week, when a three-judge panel ruled the group has a right to a speedy hearing on its petition to be removed from the U.S. terrorist list – after nearly two years of delay by the State Department.

The judges gave the federal government until March 26 to respond to the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI), which was added to the list by President Bill Clinton when he was trying to open talks with the theocratic Iranian regime in 1997.

“It’s certainly a favorable development,” said Ali Safavi, president of Near East Policy Research in Northern Virginia and a supporter of the PMOI.

Mr. Safavi said the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia recognized that 3,300 members and supporters of the PMOI face a life-threatening situation in Camp Ashraf in Iraq, where they have been based since the 1980s.

The Iraqi government has ordered the Iranians expelled from the country by the end of April, but no other nation will accept them as refugees because the PMOI is on the U.S. terror list. Iraqi security forces have attacked the unarmed camp residents twice, killing 11 in July 2009 and 34 in April 2011.

The Justice Department, representing Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, argued that the court should deny the PMOI’s request for a writ of mandamus, a legal maneuver that asks a court to enforce an earlier order.

In 2010, the court ruled that the State Department had violated the PMOI’s constitutional right to due process two years earlier when then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice refused a request from the group to be removed from the list.

The court gave the Obama administration 180 days to review the status of the PMOI, which renounced its armed struggle against Iran in 2003, when U.S. forces disarmed the rebels after the invasion of Iraq.

Nearly two years later, the government is still arguing it needs more time to consider whether the resistance meets the standards to remain listed as a terrorist group.

Justice Department attorney Douglas N. Letter, in his response to the PMOI case, said the State Department must review “highly classified information, expert analyses of the material in the administration record, delicate foreign relations concerns and complex national security determinations.”

He argued that a decision on the PMOI’s status would have to be made by high-level officials at the State, Treasury and Justice departments.

PMOI attorney Viet Dinh, a former Justice Department lawyer, complained about the “unwarranted and unreasonable” delay by the State Department.

“While the secretary [of state] dithers on PMOI’s request to revoke its [terrorist] designation, Ashraf residents face a continuing threat of deadly violence from Iraqi forces, and other countries are reluctant to accept them for resettlement as long as PMOI remains on the list,” Mr. Dinh said.

Earlier this week, members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee pressed Mrs. Clinton to take the PMOI off the terrorist list.

“We are deeply concerned about the security and safety of these residents of Camp Ashraf,” Mrs. Clinton said. “We continue to work on our review of the [PMOI] designation.”

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/mar/6/embassy-row-court-backs-iranians/

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Iran group gets U.S. backers

March 5, 2012 by

THE NATIONAL LAW JOURNAL

Coalition urging State Department to take dissidents off terror list

For nearly 20 months, the legal status of a dissident Iranian group has remained in limbo, mired in a U.S. State Department review of the association’s official designation as a foreign terrorist organization.

A federal appeals court in Washington directed the agency in July 2010 to take another look at the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran, saying the government violated the group’s rights during an earlier assessment. But the agency,  almost two years later, still hasn’t made a decision.

Frustrated by the government’s protracted silence, lawyers for the People’s Mojahedin, or PMOI, last week asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit to immediately force the State Department to act.

The group’s prominent legal team — including Mayer Brown’s Andrew Frey in New York and Viet Dinh of Washington’s Bancroft — filed a petition on Feb. 27 that could force the government to either remove the resistance group from the terror list or require the State Department to rule within 30 days. The lawyers urged the appeals court to expedite the case, arguing that the lives of PMOI members and supporters are in danger at an exile camp near the Iran-Iraq border.

“The fact we have sat here for 20 months without any resolution really accentuated the need for court action,” said Dinh, a former top Justice Department lawyer in the George W. Bush administration and a founding Bancroft partner. “We’ve found ourselves in a situation where Secretary [Hillary] Clinton can achieve the same result of denial by sitting on our
application.”

In appellate court papers, the lawyers advocating for PMOI described the State Department’s inaction as an “unjustified pocket veto” of the group’s request for removal from the terrorist organization list. The attorneys contend the State Department only had 180 days by statute to resolve the dispute.

The Justice Department’s Douglas Letter, a senior Civil Division appellate attorney who specializes in terrorism litigation, declined to comment. In a court filing on March 1, Letter urged the D.C. Circuit to deny the petition from the Iranian resistance group, which is also called the Mojahedin-e Khalq Organization.

The final decision, Letter said, takes into consideration “delicate foreign relations concerns and complex national security determinations” that are unsuited for a judicial order compelling the State Department to make a decision.

PMOI’s advocates stretch well beyond Iranian community associations in northern California and in Texas, both of which spent hundreds of thousands of dollars last year on lobbying fees over the PMOI terrorist designation. Prominent former public officials representing Republican and Democratic administrations have advocated for the removal of the PMOI from the terrorist-organization list. Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic National Committee from 2005 to 2009, spoke earlier this month at a conference in Washington in support of PMOI.

Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani and former FBI director Louis Freeh were among the 21 signatories on a friend-of-the-court brief filed on Feb. 29 in support of the Iranian group’s petition. The group included top former officials in the national security and intelligence arenas.

PATIENCE EXHAUSTED

PMOI’s attorneys, who also include Greenberg Traurig partner Steven Schneebaum and Washington solo Allan Gerson, argue that the dissident group renounced terrorist activity in 2001 and is now bent on seeing a democratic, secular regime in Iran through social and political change.

PMOI, which was first designated a terrorist organization in 1997 under President Bill Clinton, wants to replace the current Iranian leadership through the National Liberation Army and through an opposition group called the National Council of Resistance of Iran.

Inclusion on the terror list, however, presents obstacles for fundraising and support. The State Department’s terrorist list comprises 50 groups, including al-Queda in Iraq, the Palestine Liberation Front and Hizballah. Federal law makes it a crime for anyone to provide material support or resources to a listed organization. Representatives and members of a designated group can be denied entry into, or removed from, the United States. Banks are authorized to freeze an organization’s funds.

DOJ said in court papers filed in an earlier version of the case in the D.C. Circuit that PMOI, founded in 1965 by students and intellectuals, engaged in terrorist attacks inside Iran in the 1970s that killed several U.S. military personnel and civilians. PMOI, Justice lawyers said, claimed responsibility in 1979 for the killing of an American Texaco executive.

DOJ’s legal team said PMOI had the burden to show that current circumstances had sufficiently changed to warrant revocation from the list. The United Kingdom removed the group from its terrorist list in 2008, followed by the European Union the next year.

The D.C. Circuit in the summer of 2010 revived PMOI’s legal challenge of its designation, weighing in for the fifth time in a series of related actions. A three-judge panel said the State Department denied the group timely access to unclassified information that the agency used to base its decision. The court remanded the case to the agency.

Dinh and Frey, a longtime U.S. Supreme Court advocate, said the State Department had no choice then but to delist PMOI.
The government, the lawyers said, cannot meet two critical prongs — that the group is still engaged in terrorist activity and that such activity threatens the security of the United States.

Frey said PMOI’s legal team did not file the mandamus petition lightly. DOJ, he said, was not pleased. “We would have preferred to have the secretary act,” Frey said. “I guess it’s fair to say my client’s patience was finally exhausted.”

The Iraqi government wants to shut down Camp Ashraf by April, presenting a challenge to relocate more than 3,200 residents. “That deadline is only two months away,” PMOI’s lawyers said in the D.C. Circuit petition. “Yet the Secretary of State shows no apparent sense of urgency to resolve PMOI’s petition for revocation by then.”

On Capitol Hill last week, Secretary Clinton told members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee that the State Department continues “to work on our review of [PMOI’s] designation as a foreign terrorist organization in accordance with the D.C. Circuit’s decision and applicable law.” The department, she also said, is “deeply concerned about the security and safety of the residents” at the refugee camp.

Clinton said the group’s cooperation with its removal from the Camp Ashraf base in Iraq, where thousands of PMOI members and supporters live, will be a “key factor” in the group’s removal from the foreign terrorist list.

BROAD SUPPORT

Throwing their weight behind PMOI’s legal fight are former top government officials in the national security, defense and intelligence arenas. Mukasey, who served as attorney general under Bush and who is now a partner at Debevoise & Plimpton in New York, said politics should have no role in assessing whether the Iranian resistance group remains on
the list of foreign terrorist organizations.

“When people say there’s a political component to this, that’s shocking,” Mukasey said in an interview. “There is no justification for it on the facts. The statute doesn’t say that if it’s politically convenient or advantageous you can keep them on the list.”

Advocates for PMOI in the United States, Mukasey said, are “well organized.” He said he is confident PMOI could “make a major contribution if they were allowed to function as a normal political group.”

Congressional records show that two Iranian community groups last year spent a combined $400,000 on lobbying efforts over PMOI’s designation as a terrorist group. Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld received $290,000 from the Iranian American Community of Northern California. The Iranian American Community of North Texas spent $110,000 for
lobbying work by diGenova & Toensing.

Victoria Toensing, who advocated on Capitol Hill for the group last year, trumpeted PMOI’s petition in the D.C. Circuit, saying that the legal strategy was a shot in the arm to get the State Department’s attention. “People from different disciplines have looked at this issue and see a dissident group that opposes Iran,” Toensing said. “What’s not to like?”

http://www.law.com/jsp/nlj/PubArticleNLJ.jsp?id=1202544280386&Iran_group_gets_US_backers

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Secretary Clinton Must Delist MEK; Ensure Safety, Security, and Dignity of Iranian Dissidents in Iraq

March 2, 2012 by

WASHINGTON, March 2, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — The U.S. Committee for Camp Ashraf Residents (USCCAR) calls on U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to promptly remove Iran’s principal opposition movement, the Mujahedin-e Khalq [PMOI/MEK], from the list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTO) and refrain from making the long-overdue delisting contingent on non-statuary demands.

USCCAR is troubled by Secretary Clinton’s remarks last Wednesday before a hearing at the House Foreign Affairs Committee where she said “MEK cooperation in the successful and peaceful closure of Camp Ashraf, the MEK’s main paramilitary base, will be a key factor in any decision regarding the MEK’s FTO status.”

The MEK must be delisted simply because, as recognized by 98 bi-partisan members of U.S. Congress and a roster of former senior U.S. national security and anti-terrorism officials, it does not meet the statuary criteria. Secretary Clinton’s remarks are, therefore, a clear breach of the statuary requirements and further underline the political nature of the decision to keep the group listed.

Contrary to Ms. Clinton’s description of Ashraf as a paramilitary base, the camp has been home to unarmed MEK members who in 2003 turned all their weapons to U.S. military. In 2004, the State Department acknowledged that MEK members were non-combatants.  In 2009, Iraqi government inspected Ashraf and found no weapons. Describing Camp Ashraf as a “paramilitary base,” would, therefore, only serve as a license for Iraq to kill the residents.

Some 400 residents have already relocated to Camp Liberty, a de facto prison run by the Iraqi government. The very Iraqi police forces which attacked Ashraf in 2009 and 2011, are now stationed inside the small area allocated to the residents in Camp Liberty, where there is no freedom of movement. Secretary Clinton should use her good offices to get the Iraqi police moved to the gates of the camp, provide access to the lawyers and family members, and allow independent human rights organizations to visit the camp.

Rather than linking MEK’s delisting to the relocation of Ashraf residents, Secretary Clinton should act promptly based on merits so as to deny justification for the murder of our loved ones in Iran and Iraq and to remove the obstacles for their resettlement in third countries. Otherwise Camp Liberty – billed a temporary transitional residence – could effectively turn into a permanent detention center. 

SOURCE: US Committee for Camp Ashraf Residents (USCCAR)

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/usccar-secretary-clinton-must-delist-mek-ensure-safety-security-and-dignity-of-iranian-dissidents-in-iraq-141216603.html

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Clinton Under Pressure

March 1, 2012 by

THE WASHINGTON TIMES

Members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee this week pressed Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on her failure to remove the Iranian resistance from the U.S. list of terrorist groups.

They warned that the lives of more than 3,000 dissidents living in a camp in Iraq are in danger because of the State Department’s refusal to take them off the list. The Iraqi government has even used the list as an excuse to attack the unarmed dissidents, one committee member said.

Rep. Ted Poe told Mrs. Clinton that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki last year cited the U.S. terrorist designation as a reason to refuse to allow a congressional delegation to visit the rebels of the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI) in Camp Ashraf, north of Baghdad.

Mr. Poe, Texas Republican, recalled that Mr. Maliki said his government treats the people there as a terrorist group because the United States lists them as such.

“So he dumped it back on our designation as the reason he was treating them the way he was treating them,” he said.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher warned Mrs. Clinton that the rebels are “in grave danger.”

“There are 3,000 Iranian exiles who have been residing in Iraq … because they are enemies of the Iranian mullah dictatorship,” the California Republican said.

Mrs. Clinton defended her department’s handling of the group’s nearly 4-year-old request for removal from the list. Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice rejected the request from Camp Ashraf in 2008, but a federal appeals court two years later ordered the State Department review the request.

“We are deeply concerned about the security and safety of these residents of Camp Ashraf,” Mrs. Clinton said. “We continue to work on our review of the [PMOI] designation.”

Attorneys for the PMOI this week increased pressure on the State Department by filing a request that the federal appeals court in Washington order Mrs. Clinton to remove the group from the terrorist list.

Viet Dinh, a former top Justice Department lawyer now representing the resistance, noted that Mrs. Clinton has recognized the group’s reunuciation of violence and is “legally bound to delist their organization.”

“She cannot pocket veto PMOI’s application for revocation of its terrorist status,” he said.

The group operated as an armed resistance against the Iranian regime from the Iraqi base as a guest of dictator Saddam Hussein, a bitter enemy of Iran’s.

The rebels surrendered their weapons to U.S. forces who toppled Saddam in 2003. The U.S. later declared them protected persons under international law, but Washington turned them over to Iraq on Jan. 1, 2009.

The resistance has been on the terrorist list since 1997, when President Bill Clinton declared them a terrorist group in an attempt to improve relations with Iran.

Mr. Dinh on Tuesday filed a writ of mandamus, a legal maneuver that asks a judge to order a public agency to fulfill a statutory duty. He said the PMOI’s lawyers want the federal court to “order the secretary of state to delist the group as a foreign terrorist organization.”

Mr. Dinh drew immediate support from many former U.S. national security officials who joined a legal brief filed by Alan Dershowitz, a Harvard Law School professor and one of the top U.S. defense attorneys.

Mr. Dershowitz said the former national security officials and retired generals who joined him in his brief all had access to intelligence on the PMOI or had first-hand dealings with the resistance.

They believe “there is no evidence that PMOI has the capability or intent to engage in terrorism or terrorist activities,” Mr. Dershowitz said.

He also complained that the State Department’s “foot-dragging” is “powerful evidence” it cannot justify keeping the PMOI on the list.

Others who joined Mr. Dershowitz in the brief include: former Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey; former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge; former FBI Director Louis Freeh; former New York City Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani; and retired Gen. Hugh Shelton, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/mar/1/embassy-row-clinton-under-pressure/

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