The MEK is engaged in a multifaceted effort to get off the list, and, as part of its strategy, supporters of the group have recruited prominent former lawmakers and government officials from both parties to appear at pro-MEK events in both the U.S. and Europe. Some of these advocates have received tens of thousands of dollars for their appearances.
But Rendell is far from the only former government official who has publicly acknowledged accepting speaking fees from supporters of the MEK, which has been lobbying to get the group off the State Department’s list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations. The Huffington Post put together a list of 33 speakers at various MEK related meetings and conferences, though not all of them had accepted payments.
Hamilton, who once chaired the House Foreign Affairs Committee and was a co-chair of the 9/11 Commission, told reporter Barbara Slavin he was paid”a substantial amount”to appear at a panel in Washington D.C. in February. Zinni, who spoke at a similar event in January, said he had been paid his”standard fee,”without detailing what that is. According to Slavin, both men said they were unaware of the cultish elements attributed to the MEK. ..
..”The Mujahedin have absolutely no backing in Iran,”Sadri told TPM. He said he’d first become aware of the MEK 40 years ago, when he occasionally listened to the group’s clandestine radio shows, broadcast before the fall of the Shah. He described the MEK in its early days as a”vanguard organization.”Sadri, who moved from Iran to the U.S. in the mid-1970s to attend a Ph.D program at The New School, said”never heard a positive word uttered”about the MEK..
… Ridge was referring to the 3,400 or so MEK members who currently live at Camp Ashraf..the State Department says the Geneva Convention claim is wrong.”MEK members are not ‘protected persons’ under the Fourth Geneva Convention,”a State Department official in the Counterterrorism Office told TPM..”After the end of the occupation of Iraq, the Multi-National Force-Iraq (MNF-I) continued to treat the MEK as ‘protected persons’ as a matter of policy, not as a matter of legal obligation, until MNF-I’s UN mandate expired at the end of 2008.”…
..None of the speakers, however, said that the State Department considers the group to have “cult-like characteristics,” and that Maryam Rajavi has established a cult of personality. MEK members are not allowed to marry, attend weekly “ideological cleansings” and children are separated from parents. When Elizabeth Rubin, a New York Times Magazine reporter, toured Camp Ashraf in 2003, she found Rajavi’s image displayed “almost as ubiquitously as the image of Saddam in Iraq or Khomeini in Iran..