A number of high-profile former US officials are getting paid by an exiled Iranian terrorist group known as Mujahedin-e Khalq Organization (MKO) to lobby the Obama administration against diplomacy with Iran.
The former US government officials lobbying on behalf of MKO include former Vermont Governor Howard Dean, former Ambassador to Morocco Marc Ginsberg, General James L. Jones, and former US Special Envoy for Nuclear Nonproliferation Robert Joseph, reports BuzzFeed’s Rosie Gray who attended a briefing sponsored by the group.
A US-based Iranian group affiliated with the MKO sponsored the event Wednesday in the Dirksen Senate office building on Capitol Hill to press for additional sanctions against Iran as nuclear talks continue to unfold.
The MKO has “combined efforts with Israeli, Zionist” groups to “bribe” US officials, said Scott Rickard, a former American intelligence linguist in Florida.
The four American officials “are nothing more than Zionist puppets who are consistently being paid by this group (MKO) and this group obviously being funded by anti-Iranian and pro-Israel initiatives,” Rickard told Press TV on Saturday.
“This is a form of bribery and the bribery goes on and on and on,” he added.
The MKO is listed as a terrorist organization by much of the international community and has committed numerous terrorist acts against Iranians and Iraqis.
The group fled Iran in 1986 for Iraq, where it had former Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein’s support and set up Camp Ashraf near the Iranian border.
In December 2011, the United Nations and Baghdad agreed to relocate some 3,000 MKO members from Camp New Iraq, formerly known as Camp Ashraf, to Camp Liberty.
“I said I was for it, but as a condition of signing the nuclear agreement, we ought to make sure these 3,000 people are safe and they ought to be out of Iraq,” Dean said of his stance on negotiating with Iran, according to BuzzFeed.
The last group of the MKO terrorists was evicted by the Iraqi government on September 11, 2013, to join the other members of the terrorist group at Camp Liberty and await potential relocation to other countries.