… To start a broader dialogue on the nuclear issue, Obama would have to take one crucial step sought by Iran: end CIA and Special Forces support for insurgents seeking to overthrow the Islamic republic, especially Kurdish separatists and the Iraq-based Mujahedin-e Khalq. This move wouldn’t need to be publicly announced, however, and would thus have a low domestic political cost for Obama …
Behind her smile is a saleswoman’s savvy — and a revolutionary’s zeal to prove that she and her mysterious husband, Massoud Rajavi, are neither cultists nor terrorists. Maryam Rajavi is demanding that the exile groups they lead together, centered on the Mujahedin-e Khalq (People’s Holy Warriors) or MEK for short, should be taken off the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations, their assets unfrozen and their energies unleashed.
A controversial exile movement cited by President George W. Bush as a source of information on Iran’s nuclear ambitions is condemned for psychologically and physically abusing its own members in a new report by Human Rights Watch….former MEK/PMOI members told Human Rights Watch that when they protested MEK policies or tried to leave the organization, they were arrested, in some cases violently abused and in other instances imprisoned.
The case of Ashcroft and the MKO shows just how murky fighting terrorism can sometimes get. State Department officials first designated the MKO a”foreign terrorist organization”in 1997, accusing the Baghdad-based group of a long series of bombings, guerilla cross-border raids and targeted assassinations of Iranian leaders. Officials say the MKO aka PMOI–which originally fought to overthrow the Shah of Iran–was linked to the murder of several U.S. military officers and civilians in Iran in the 1970s.”They have an extremely bloody history,”says one U.S. counterterrorism official