THE TAMPA TRIBUNE

 By LEO MCCLOSKEY, DAVID PHILLIPS, WESLEY MARTIN

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/

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

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