Hillary's Terrorists
Hillary Clinton is about to delist a dangerous terror group
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http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2012/05/15/hillarys-terrorists/
by Justin Raimondo, May 16, 2012
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On May 21, 1975, Col. Paul Shaffer, a military attach© to the US
mission in Iran, kissed his wife and two children goodbye, and entered a
waiting car with his colleague, Lt. Col. Jack Turner, whose wife was
getting their three children ready for school. It was the last time the
families of these two US servicemen would see them alive.
As the Iranian driver pulled into a side street to avoid traffic a car
blocked their passage and another car rammed them from behind. Three
gunmen appeared and fired at the two Americans pointblank, killing them
instantly: the three escaped in a third car, leaving a leaflet on the
blood-drenched seat. The leaflet denounced 'US imperialism' and bore
the imprint of the Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK), or 'People's Crusaders,'
a Marxist-Islamist group led by Massoud and Maryam Rajavi.
All in all, the MEK killed 6 Americans in Iran: Lt. Col. Louis Lee
Hawkins, an Army comptroller, cut down by gunman in front of his Tehran
home, and William Cottrell, Donald Smith, and Robert Krongard, all
employees of Rockwell International.
They wounded Air Force Gen. Harold L. Price, and tried and failed to
kidnap the US ambassador, Douglas MacArthur II. After the Iranian
Revolution, the MEK supported the takeover of the US embassy in Tehran,
opposed the release of the diplomats " calling a mass demonstration in
protest " and demanded their execution.
Today, the MEK is campaigning to be taken off the US State Department's
list of terrorist organizations - and they're on the brink of success.
According to the Wall Street Journal:
'Senior U.S. officials said on Monday that Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton has yet to make any final decision on the MeK's status. But they
said the State Department was looking favorably at delisting MeK if it
continued cooperating by vacating a former paramilitary base inside
Iraq, called Camp Ashraf, which the group had used to stage cross-border
strikes into Iran.'
What the article fails to mention is that those 'cross border strikes
into Iran' took place during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, when the MEK
enjoyed the patronage of Saddam Hussein: MEK cadre fought on the Iraqi
side during that conflict. They also were useful to Saddam in repressing
internal enemies of the regime: after the 1991 Gulf war, MEK fighters
were used by Saddam to crush uprisings in the south and in Iraqi
Kurdistan. Maryam Rajavi told her followers: "Take the Kurds under your
tanks, and save your bullets for the Iranian Revolutionary Guards."
MEK has been described as a cult, most notably in a scary report by
Human Rights Watch, a fascinating Al Jazeera video report, and in a
remarkable piece by Elizabeth Rubin in the New York Times. Rubin relates
the testimony of Salahaddin Mukhtadi, an Iranian historian living in
exile, who says dissident MEK members "are locked up if they disagree
with anything. And sometimes killed." In the MEK cult, having
particular friendships is strictly forbidden: sitting and talking
together is considered a crime, especially when the subject is one's
past life before joining the cult. Wives are ordered to divorce their
husbands, celibacy is mandatory, and families are broken up: nothing
must come between the members and their devotion to the cause. Forced
confessions and 'criticism sessions' occur on a daily basis, in which
participants are subjected to group abuse called "ideological
cleansings."
After the American invasion and occupation of Iraq, Massoud Rajavi
ordered his followers to greet the Americans as liberators - and
promptly went into hiding. He has not been seen since, but is said to
retain his control over the cult, using his wife, Maryam "who has been
proclaimed the self-styled 'President' of Iran by the group"as a
front. The US government took charge of the MEK facility, known as Camp
Ashraf, and, although the Bush administration continued to characterize
the group as a terrorist organization, President Bush cited Massoud's
cult as the source of 'intelligence' on Iran's alleged nuclear
weapons program. Prominent neoconservatives began agitating for
utilizing the MEK the way the Bush administration had used Ahmad
Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, but efforts to openly put them on the
CIA payroll stalled, along with the administration's war plans. Somebody
in the Bush administration must have figured out that funding and
supporting a terrorist group that had killed Americans would not sit
well while we were conducting an international "war on terrorism."
However, it turns out the Bush administration secretly brought MEK cadre
to the US for military training, including communications intercepts and
other clandestine cloak-and-dagger stuff: the program supposedly ended
just before the Obama administration took office.
Apparently the MEK were turned over to the Mossad, who utilized them to
carry out the assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists in Iran.
The MEK's campaign to get their terrorist group legitimized has been
characterized by large cash payments to prominent politicians and public
figures in both parties: the list of MEK endorsers reads like a
political Who's Who of Washington bigwigs. The payments are ostensibly
for speaking engagements at MEK rallies, but the size of these
disbursements - ranging upward from $50,000 - indicates some good
old-fashioned bribery.
There is an awful lot of MEK cash sloshing around the halls of Congress,
and the cultists haven't been shy about handing it out. Whether the
Clinton Foundation or some Clinton-affiliated 'charity' has partaken
of the MEK's largesse is presently unknown, but, as they say at the
National Enquirer, "inquiring minds want to know."
It's fair to ask: where is all this unaccounted for cash coming from?
While the Rajavi-ites use the familiar methods employed by cults to
strip their members of all their assets - see the Al Jazeera video for a
heart-rending account of how a major MEK spokesman ripped off his own
elderly parents - it seems likely that, during their sojourn as Saddam
Hussein's favorite assassins, the MEK received compensation from the
Iraqi dictator for slaughtering the Kurds and other regime opponents so
efficiently and ruthlessly. Which means people like former Pennsylvania
governor Ed Rendell, who has shilled for the MEK, and former Democratic
party chairman Howard Dean, are recipients of Saddam's gold.
Like so much of US foreign policy, the idea that the US would legitimize
a crazed cult like the MEK sounds like the plot of a bad thriller. Yet
it's all about the timing: as the US-Iran nuclear talks loom, the
prospect of our State Department in effect legalizing the MEK and its
activities in the US is an open provocation that could possibly shut
down the sensitive negotiations - and pave the way for war with Iran. No
doubt hardliners within the Obama administration are using the MEK issue
as a backdoor way to torpedo the Baghdad talks: whether they will
succeed remains to be seen. As one State Department official told the
Wall Street Journal: "To make that assertion on your own that the MeK
will be removed is a realistic one. But in policy making you never know
for sure what will happen."
I have to add that the MEK, while claiming to have 'renounced'
terrorism, exists in an atmosphere seething with violence, and my own
experience with them has borne this out. Whenever I have written about
them I have invariably received emails from MEK supporters laden with
explicit threats of violence. This is to be expected from members of a
psycho cult, but in the case of the MEK it's not like they've never
killed any Americans before. Just ask the families of Paul Shaffer, Jack
Turner, Louis Lee Hawkins, William Cottrell, Donald Smith, and Robert
Krongard.