Ashcroft’s Baghdad Connection
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