| Now that the United States has de-listed the MEK as an international terrorist group, our government can overtly fund them to conduct terrorist attacks on Iran. |
Four years after Sarah Palin famously accused then-candidate Barack Obama of “palling round with terrorists,” it can be said truthfully. Last Friday, news leaked that the U.S. State Department is going to remove the Iranian terrorist group Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (MEK) from its list of foreign terrorist organizations.
MEK’s ideology is a mixture of Islam and Marxism with cult-like practices. The group once called itself “the People’s Holy Warriors of Iran.” They supported the Islamic revolution in Iran and later allied with the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. During the 1970s MEK conducted numerous attacks on American officials, including an attempted assassination of the U.S. ambassador in Tehran. Six Americans were killed. It has been listed as a terrorist organization since 1997. The MEK fought in the Iran-Iraq War, made use of chemical weapons, and brutally put down Iraqi Kurdish people in the early 1990s. The Bush administration cited Saddam’s support of MEK as a reason to invade Iraq, and the group was forcibly disarmed by the U.S. Army. In recent years, the MEK is believed to be involved in a wave of terrorist attacks against Iranian nuclear scientists.
The Obama administration’s decision was made with bipartisan support. MEK has many prominent U.S. political figures on its payroll, including Howard Dean, Rudy Giuliani, Wesley Clark, Bill Richardson, former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, former FBI Director Louis Freeh, former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, former National Security Advisers Frances Townsend and General James L. Jones, and former Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell.
Note to all U.S. Attorneys: Everyone associated with MEK can be charged with providing material support for terrorism, a federal crime under the USA PATRIOT Act (18 U.S.C. §2339A and §2339B) punishable by 15 years in prison.
Now that the United States has de-listed the MEK as an international terrorist group, our government can overtly fund them to conduct terrorist attacks on Iran. According to some reports, MEK has received covert U.S. and Israeli assistance for years.
Glenn Greenwald:
[W]ith the MEK, we have a group that, at least according to some reports, appears to have intensified its terrorism, and yet they are removed from the list. Why? Because now they are aligned against the prime enemy of the US and Israel – and working closely with those two nations – and are therefore, magically, no longer “terrorists.”