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

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

THE HUFFINGTON POST

In 1932, the eminent theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wrote “Moral Man and Immoral Society” warning of the tendency of institutions to lose their sense of humanity. How better to explain today’s actions of the US State Department in toying with the lives and hopes of over 3000 Iranian dissidents being “voluntarily” relocated from Camp Ashraf , a small city 40 miles north of Baghdad, where they have lived for the last 25 years? From there they are being moved to a small isolated section of Camp Liberty, an abandoned American base, looted by the Iraqis, with no basic amenities and under the watchful eyes of Iraqi police who have viciously attacked them before.

In the State Department’s view, they are doing these dissidents, members of the MEK (The Mujahedeen-e Khalq), a favor and are not dishonoring a solemn commitment made to them by the US Army in July 2004 when it promised that they would be treated as Protected Persons under the Geneva Conventions in return for the MEK’s surrendering their means of self-protection. But, sad to say, the State Department’s benevolent view is seriously flawed.

In reality, it has, as Niebuhr warned, lost its sense of humanity and has shown instead that US assurances of protection cannot be taken seriously in the face of institutional interests. The US has ceded any rights it may have had as an occupying power to a new Iraqi regime, one which wishes to placate neighboring Iran as the devil it must deal with. Who suffers as a result? In the short run, the MEK, of course; in the long run, the United States.

To be sure, the State Department can rightly claim that it has attempted to soften the blow to which the MEK would otherwise be exposed if its people remained at Camp Ashraf. For there they would be subject to additional lethal attacks by Iraqi forces and perhaps forcible deportation to Iran to face death sentences. Instead, State, working with UN officials, has proposed the “solution” of a so called voluntary transfer to Camp Liberty, where despite sub-standard conditions it would serve as a gateway to Europe and the Americas once the new arrivals are processed as refugees by the UN.

Here is what is wrong with this scenario as provided by recent reports by those on the ground: 400 MEK members who, despite strong skepticism about the plan accepted the offer as a way of testing the good intentions of the State Department, the United Nations and the government of Iraq.

1. Camp Liberty has no serviceable water supply let alone drinking water.

2. The trailers in which new arrivals are to be housed are worn-out and extremely dirty to the point of being un-inhabitable. There are only 80 trailers and most of them lack electrical wiring and thus there is no light and no heating.

3. The sewage system is not functioning and thus the lack of hygienic facilities is likely to cause serious health problems, with raw sewage in open areas of the residential quarters.

4. Contrary to assurances by the Secretary General’s Special Representative for Iraq, Ambassador Kobler, that Camp Liberty meets humanitarian standards – and similar assurances from the State Department on which MEK members relied in accepting relocation there, minimal international humanitarian standards are blatantly absent.

5. The police headquarters is situated northwest of the camp, next to section where the residents are located. In addition there are four other police stations and checkpoints with one situated on the pathway to the dining facility so that every resident going to the dining facility must pass the police checkpoint. More ominously, the police commander in charge of the camp appears to be the same commander responsible for incursions into Camp Ashraf which on two occasions left a total of more than 40 unarmed civilians dead and hundreds wounded. In addition, police are constantly patrolling within the camp on vehicles with heavy machine-guns.

6. Furthermore, the Iraqis have installed seven surveillance cameras all directed on the residential area of the Camp. Those cameras leave absolutely no privacy for anyone.

7. A prison would be much better than Camp Liberty, because in a prison, the prison guards will have to abide by certain rules, and the prisoners have certain rights. In Camp Liberty, the Iraqi policy operation seems to be unbridled.

All of this raises the question of why the State Department would be party to such chicanery, for Camp Liberty gives no sign of being a processing center for resettlement, but more in the nature of a prison where liberty is a dead-letter word. We have only one State Department and would of course like to give it the benefit of the doubt. Certainly, this is what the leadership of the MEK has done. Yet, what credibility does the State Department have with regard to the MEK when it has persisted in keeping it on its FTO (Foreign Terrorist Organizations) List, long after the UK and EU have taken it off its respective lists for lack of any substantiating evidence.

Unfortunately, it appears that Camp Liberty may be but a cruel hoax perpetrated on this group. Surely the State Department is aware that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al -Maliki has made his intention perfectly clear: to rid the MEK from Iraqi soil. Problem is no one wants to accept them for relocation so long as they remain on the State Department FTO List. Instead of removing them from this list, the State Department, without any showing of good reason, as called for by the US Court of Appeals in Washington, has refused to delist the MEK. Thus it enables the Iraqi regime to fall back on the canard that the MEK, deemed as a terrorist entity by the United States, deserves whatever treatment the Iraqi government deems fit. Thus, understandings reached about resettlement, whatever they may be, are undermined by the State Department itself.

Apparently, the State Department refusal to budge, despite a US Court of Appeals order in July 2010 to expedite the de-designation review process, is anchored in the fantasy that Iran can be induced to negotiate its nuclear development program if Iran’s key opponents – the MEK – can be kept in shackles.

Aside from questions of the integrity of what the United States says and does – today the MEK, tomorrow who knows who?–there is something about the State Department position which defies logic as well as law. The MEK is the enemy of our enemy, not America’s enemy. It has renounced terrorism. In the face of extreme provocation the MEK has once again shown its commitment to non-violence and exhaustion of all peaceful means to transforming Iran from brutality to humanity, from theocratic autocracy to a semblance of democracy.

Perhaps, against a dismal picture so far, some good will still come of the State Department’s efforts at resettlement at Camp Liberty. This much is certain: if Camp Liberty turns out to be a hoax, there is no reason for anyone ever to believe that the United States will stand up to Iran.

Allan Gerson is the Chairman of AG International Law in Washington D.C. He is presently involved with other attorneys in representing the PMOI/MEK in its efforts to be removed from the State Department List of Foreign Terrorist Organizations.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/allan-gerson/camp-liberty-a-cruel-hoax_b_1294291.html