I was shocked when our State Dept. under Hillary Clinton announced last fall that MKO/MEK/PMOI was being rehabilitated by taking them off the terror list. It seems the International Criminal Court might be off the hook for doing absolutely nothing about this group, thinking I guess that mass murderers only lived in the Balkans or Africa.
the de-listing of the MEK was mostly a quid pro quo to get most of the group’s members in Iraq to relocate from its old base at Camp Ashraf. It also fails to mention that many of the people at Camp Ashraf were being held there against their will. Taken together with the many disgraceful displays of support by members of Congress and various former officials, all of this creates the impression that the group’s “rehabilitation” is much more meaningful than it is.
An Iranian opposition group that was once considered a terrorist front by the State Department has hired an ex-senator to lobby for them….The MEK was blamed by the State Department for several attacks in the 1970s that killed Americans in Iran…
Critics of the NCRI have called the group a front for the People’s Mujahedin of Iran, or MEK, the group of Islamic Marxists that helped violently overthrew the Pahlavi Shah during a 1979 revolution in Iran and was credited with killing six American citizens that decade. As recently as 2002, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation told the State Department that ‘‘[i]t is the unanimous view of the FBI personnel who are involved in and familiar with the FBI’s investigation of the [MEK] that the NCRI is not a separate organization
Some US critics of the NCRI [MKO/MEK/PMOI]say there are no grounds for believing the group has anything of a positive image, let alone actual support, in Iran. Going further, they point to the high speaking and lobbying fees that some of the group’s prominent American advocates have reportedly been paid as evidence of Washington support that is only dollars-and-cents deep.
The congressional team led by Dana Rohrabacher, a California Republican, met the MKO/MEK/PMOI terrorists in Paris on Sunday and expressed strong support for the group.The US congress members called for the immediate transfer of the MKO terrorists to Camp Ashraf in Iraq’s Diyala Province.
The decision of the US State Department to remove the Mujahedin Khalq Organization (MKO) aka MEK/PMOI from its list of foreign terrorist organizations created an atmosphere of ambivalence particularly in the West. Public opinion in the West may face contradictory ideas regarding the decision. On the one hand well-paid supporters…
“The US government’s decision to take Mujahedin-e Khalq, the exiled Iranian organization, off its list of terrorist groups is a vivid example of the influence of money and lobbying in Washington. At worst it highlights the analytical fog that clouds many US policy heavyweights’ view of Iran.”
why has this obviously irrational delisting of the MKO taken place? Just as the Afghan mujahedin were used in a covert U.S. war to overthrow the Soviet-aligned government in Afghanistan, the MKO/MEK/PMOI is being used in conjunction with Mossad to fight a covert war against the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
The opposition has lost much of its aura in Iran.”The People’s Mojahedin are opponents in exile and have lost all legitimacy in Iran since the episode of the war with Iraq, where they conducted operations against the Iranian army,”explains Thierry Coville. The”Iranian public opinion far from considering them as opponents see them as traitors.