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The latest from America's war against Iran – 15 May, 2019
Beyond the headlines.
Beyond the headlines.
I
have taken the latest video from Chad Boukzam of AMTV as a summary
of the latest developments and a discussion of the headlines.
Next,
I have taken relevant parts of a video from Steven be-Noon of Israeli
News Live in which he discusses the terrorist organisation, the MEK
(Mujahedin) and how John Bolton's involvement with them.
He
also discusses an email from a friend in Iran who posits that the
latest attacks, on the tankers and on Saudi oil facilities were in
fact carried out by the Iranian state, emboldened by their successes
in Syria, as an attempt to attack on the USA where it most hurts –
the economy and the flow of oil.
He
believes that by moving in troops and naval assets the United States
is heading towards a blitzkrieg war against Iran in the same pattern
as the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
With
the Americans moving all their pieces into place it would be naive to
think that the Iranians are not going to respond in a way that is
going to benefit them rather than sit back and make idle threats.
They
are not stupid and realise they can't win against the massive
advantage in terms of firepower.
I
believe this is part of the puzzle and has to be taken seriously –
more seriously than propaganda coming out of either side.
HUGE
ESCALATION!! IRAN ROCKET SYSTEMS POINTED AT US TROOPS (AMTV)
This
is the original video from Israeli News Live
Iran
- The Last Country to Fall
From
Israeli media:
US
Betrayal at the highest level
America’s
collusion with the MEK, one of the most dangerous terrorist groups is
devious and a blatant double standard.
Our
Men in Iran?
Not
included in the analysis, this is an item by the UK's Channel 4 on
the MEK
Not included in the video,here is an item from Britain's Channel 4 on the MEK.
The MEK: The shadowy cult Trump advisers back to rule Iran
This is the article cited by be-Noon from the right-wing, pro-Netanyahu Israeli National News
US
Betrayal at the highest level
America’s
collusion with the MEK, one of the most dangerous terrorist groups is
devious and a blatant double standard.
7
July, 2017
American
politicians sometimes wonder why people of other nations show
contempt toward America. Perhaps this article will shed some light in
the understanding of this enigma.
A
few years ago, several high ranking American and European officials
and dignitaries attended an NCRI (National Council of Resistance of
Iran) rally held in Paris.
The
invitees included MG Paul E.Vallely, US Army (Ret.), former
Ambassador to the UN John Bolton, former New York City Mayor Rudi
Giuliani, former Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich and several
others. The participants gathered in a conference room supposedly to
support Iranian Opposition Groups.
Here
is the problem:
NCRI
is not representative of an opposition group, in fact, NCRI is an
offshoot of the MEK, (Mujahidin Khalq) organization, a devout
Islamist-Marxist entity known for their ISIS-style terrorism.
Both
NCRI/MEK are controlled by Masoud and Maryam Rajavi, a brutal couple
who are no strangers to torture, terror and assassination. They both
are responsible for numerous killings of Iranians and even murdering
and abusing members of their own group for trying to defect or escape
from the MEK (Camp Ashraf in Iraq).
Leaving
Iran
After
long and arduous bickering between MEK and Iran’s new leader,
Ayatollah Khomeini, Masoud Rajavi, the leader of MEK started a series
of bomb campaigns against the newly formed Islamic government. In
1981, it attacked the headquarters of the Islamic Republic Party,
killing 74 senior officials including the party leader and 27 members
of Parliament. A few months later it bombed a meeting of Iran's
national security council, killing Iran's new president Mohammad-Ali
Rajai and his Prime Minister.
To
save their lives, Masoud and his companions were forced to flee Iran
to Paris. But, the French government expelled the MEK leader, Masoud
Rajavi, in 1986. The group then ran into the arms of Iran's arch
enemy, the Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein. Iraq provided MEK
thousands of fighters, artillery, guns, tanks and then housed them in
three camps near Baghdad and along the Iranian border. Baghdad also
provided money for the group. Saddam Hussein allowed the Iranian
exiles, members of the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (MEK), to set up their
paramilitary base at Camp Ashraf in the 1980s. The dissidents oppose
Iran’s theocratic regime.
Human
Rights Report
According
to Human Rights Watch which interviewed several former MEK members,
the organization is a cult that has kept its members virtually
imprisoned in a compound in Iraq and controlled them psychologically.
They eliminated anyone who expressed their intent to leave.
A
RAND report commissioned by the US DOD found that the MEK is a cult
that utilizes mind control and practices mandatory divorce, celibacy,
authoritarian control, forced labor, sleep deprivation, physical
abuse and confiscation of assets.
The
FBI reported that the MEK’s “NLA [National Liberation Army]
fighters are separated from their children who are sent to Europe and
brought up by the MEK’s Support Network. […] These children are
then returned to the NLA to be used as fighters upon coming of age.
Interviews also revealed that some of these children were told that
their parents would be harmed if they did not cooperate with the
MEK.”
In
a seminar held in Paris ex-MEK members recounted tales of horror from
Camp Ashraf, Iraq where their members are kept without any
communication with their relatives for decades, they are ordered to
divorce, and Masoud Rajavi had sex with female members of those
within the cult.
More
evidence of the cultic nature of MEK came to light when in 2003 the
French police arrested Maryam Rajavi for terrorist charges. The group
reacted in a manner consistent with its cultic nature. Ten of them
set themselves on fire to protest their leader’s detention.
At
one point, the US State Department labelled the MEK as cutting a
"swath of terror" across the country in the following years
and of "violent attacks in Iran that victimize civilians."
"Since
1981 the MEK have claimed responsibility for murdering thousands of
Iranians they describe as agents of the regime," the report
said.
MEK’s
Ideology
Ideologically,
the MEK initially sought to blend revolutionary Marxism with Islam.
That’s why they are routinely referred to as an Islamist-Marxist
organization. The group was shaped in the 1960s by leftist Iranians
(supposedly) students opposed to the Shah’s regime. The MEK is
responsible for the killing of six Americans in Iran during the
1970s. They included three military officers and three men working
for Rockwell International, a conglomerate specializing in aerospace,
including weapons, who were murdered in retaliation for the arrest of
MEK members over the killings of the US military officers.
The
MEK was also responsible for support and seizure of the US embassy in
Tehran following the Iranian revolution. During the 1980s and 1990s,
the MEK fought as a private militia on behalf of Iraqi leader Saddam
Hussein against the Islamic Republic of Iran. (IRI). That angered the
Iranian people and they called them traitors.
US
Invasion of Iraq
Interestingly
enough, in 2003, the MEK’s position became very weak when the US
and its allies won the Persian Gulf war and entered Iraq. They made a
180-degree change in their attitude and suddenly, these Marxist
terrorists declared they would no longer resort to violence (after
being disarmed by the American military and not within the camp) and
cast itself as supporters of the democratic opposition in Iran. Not
everyone bought the group’s transformation into defenders of
liberty, secularism, and women’s equality. Of course, no one
believed the cult leader, Masoud Rajavai.
In
April 2003, US forces signed a cease-fire agreement of “mutual
understanding and coordination” with the MEK. Finally, in May 2003,
as a result of negotiations between the MEK and US forces led by
General Ray Odierno, the MEK agreed to a “voluntary consolidation”
and disarming of its forces in exchange for US protection of Camp
Ashraf and its residents.
In
2003, New York Times reporter Elizabeth Rubin visited the group’s
Iraqi compound at Camp Ashraf and described it as resembling a
“fictional world of female worker bees … dressed exactly alike,
in khaki uniforms and mud-colored head scarves, driving back and
forth in white pickup trucks, staring ahead in a daze as if they were
working at a factory in Maoist China.”
US
Leaving Iraq
As
soon as the U.S. troop pullout of Iraq began in 2008, the pressure
began to mount on the MEK. The Iraqi government officially ordered
that they needed to take over security at Camp Ashraf because the MEK
was a “terrorist organization.” Gen. David Petraeus insisted that
they were “protected persons” and U.S. forces would defend them.
But Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki declared his intention was to “put
an end” to the MEK.
Image
Once
all U.S. combat forces had left Iraq, he demanded a joint Army and
police attack on the camp. In July 2009, U.S. military observers
watched desperately as Iraqi forces overwhelmed and then attacked the
camp, killing 11 residents (six were shot, the others beaten to
death) and wounding hundreds. The operation was apparently intended
to terrify the residents into leaving voluntarily, but instead it
steeled their resolve.
Secretary
Clinton
The
MEK has a great deal of money and with that, undeniable political
connections across the globe, and this is the one thing it has in
common with the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI).
The
MEK also began a multiyear, multimillion-dollar lobbying campaign to
remove itself from the terrorist list.
Regrettably,
because of these political networks and monetary support, the MEK and
its leadership was able to enlist the support of Secretary of State,
Hillary Clinton and have her take them off the list of terrorist
groups. Another reason was they were reportedly passing information
from their supporters within the Islamic Republic on nuclear
facilities to the U.S. intelligence community.
Conclusion
Both
Americans and Iranians desire regime change in Iran, but for
different reasons. While America wants to remove a threat in the
region, the Iranians want democracy. These two are not mutually
exclusive and America would commit an unforgivable sin if it ignores
the wishes of Iranians once again.
America’s
collusion with the MEK, one of the most dangerous terrorist groups is
devious and a blatant double standard. This is worse than the
instalment of the Ayatollah Khomeini by former President Jimmy
Carter. It is unfathomable how on the one hand, America claims to be
fighting against terrorism and on the other, supports it by aligning
itself with the MEK. What Iran needs is freedom and democracy, not
another MEK led dictatorship.
It
is the democracy-seeking secular Iranians who are thoroughly capable
of dislodging the tyrannical Mullahs. The call of the opposition
should be resoundingly answered by President Trump and all other
nations and leaders, not only for humanitarian reasons, but in
furtherance of their own national security interests
This
article was written by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Seymour(“Sy”) Hersh back in the days when he was still writing for
publications within the United States.
Our
Men in Iran?
By
Seymour M. Hersh
5
April,2012
From
the air, the terrain of the Department of Energy’s Nevada National
Security Site, with its arid high plains and remote mountain peaks,
has the look of northwest Iran. The site, some sixty-five miles
northwest of Las Vegas, was once used for nuclear testing, and now
includes a counterintelligence training facility and a private
airport capable of handling Boeing 737 aircraft. It’s a restricted
area, and inhospitable—in certain sections, the curious are warned
that the site’s security personnel are authorized to use deadly
force, if necessary, against intruders.
It
was here that the Joint Special Operations Command (jsoc) conducted
training, beginning in 2005, for members of the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, a
dissident Iranian opposition group known in the West as the M.E.K.
The M.E.K. had its beginnings as a Marxist-Islamist student-led group
and, in the nineteen-seventies, it was linked to the assassination of
six American citizens. It was initially part of the broad-based
revolution that led to the 1979 overthrow of the Shah of Iran. But,
within a few years, the group was waging a bloody internal war with
the ruling clerics, and, in 1997, it was listed as a foreign
terrorist organization by the State Department. In 2002, the M.E.K.
earned some international credibility by publicly
revealing—accurately—that Iran had begun enriching uranium at a
secret underground location. Mohamed ElBaradei, who at the time was
the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the
United Nations’ nuclear monitoring agency, told me later that he
had been informed that the information was supplied by the Mossad.
The M.E.K.’s ties with Western intelligence deepened after the fall
of the Iraqi regime in 2003, and jsoc began operating inside Iran in
an effort to substantiate the Bush Administration’s fears that Iran
was building the bomb at one or more secret underground locations.
Funds were covertly passed to a number of dissident organizations,
for intelligence collection and, ultimately, for anti-regime
terrorist activities. Directly, or indirectly, the M.E.K. ended up
with resources like arms and intelligence. Some American-supported
covert operations continue in Iran today, according to past and
present intelligence officials and military consultants.
Despite
the growing ties, and a much-intensified lobbying effort organized by
its advocates, M.E.K. has remained on the State Department’s list
of foreign terrorist organizations—which meant that secrecy was
essential in the Nevada training. “We did train them here, and
washed them through the Energy Department because the D.O.E. owns all
this land in southern Nevada,” a former senior American
intelligence official told me. “We were deploying them over long
distances in the desert and mountains, and building their capacity in
communications—coördinating commo is a big deal.” (A spokesman
for J.S.O.C. said that “U.S. Special Operations Forces were neither
aware of nor involved in the training of M.E.K. members.”)
The
training ended sometime before President Obama took office, the
former official said. In a separate interview, a retired four-star
general, who has advised the Bush and Obama Administrations on
national-security issues, said that he had been privately briefed in
2005 about the training of Iranians associated with the M.E.K. in
Nevada by an American involved in the program. They got “the
standard training,” he said, “in commo, crypto [cryptography],
small-unit tactics, and weaponry—that went on for six months,”
the retired general said. “They were kept in little pods.” He
also was told, he said, that the men doing the training were from
jsoc, which, by 2005, had become a major instrument in the Bush
Administration’s global war on terror. “The jsoc trainers were
not front-line guys who had been in the field, but second- and
third-tier guys—trainers and the like—and they started going off
the reservation. ‘If we’re going to teach you tactics, let me
show you some really sexy stuff…’ ”
It
was the ad-hoc training that provoked the worried telephone calls to
him, the former general said. “I told one of the guys who called me
that they were all in over their heads, and all of them could end up
trouble unless they got something in writing. The Iranians are very,
very good at counterintelligence, and stuff like this is just too
hard to contain.” The site in Nevada was being utilized at the same
time, he said, for advanced training of élite Iraqi combat units.
(The retired general said he only knew of the one M.E.K.-affiliated
group that went though the training course; the former senior
intelligence official said that he was aware of training that went on
through 2007.)
Allan
Gerson, a Washington attorney for the M.E.K., notes that the M.E.K.
has publicly and repeatedly renounced terror. Gerson said he would
not comment on the alleged training in Nevada. But such training, if
true, he said, would be “especially incongruent with the State
Department’s decision to continue to maintain the M.E.K. on the
terrorist list. How can the U.S. train those on State’s foreign
terrorist list, when others face criminal penalties for providing a
nickel to the same organization?”
Robert
Baer, a retired C.I.A. agent who is fluent in Arabic and had worked
under cover in Kurdistan and throughout the Middle East in his
career, initially had told me in early 2004 of being recruited by a
private American company—working, so he believed, on behalf of the
Bush Administration—to return to Iraq. “They wanted me to help
the M.E.K. collect intelligence on Iran’s nuclear program,” Baer
recalled. “They thought I knew Farsi, which I did not. I said I’d
get back to them, but never did.” Baer, now living in California,
recalled that it was made clear to him at the time that the operation
was “a long-term thing—not just a one-shot deal.”
Massoud
Khodabandeh, an I.T. expert now living in England who consults for
the Iraqi government, was an official with the M.E.K. before
defecting in 1996. In a telephone interview, he acknowledged that he
is an avowed enemy of the M.E.K., and has advocated against the
group. Khodabandeh said that he had been with the group since before
the fall of the Shah and, as a computer expert, was deeply involved
in intelligence activities as well as providing security for the
M.E.K. leadership. For the past decade, he and his English wife have
run a support program for other defectors. Khodabandeh told me that
he had heard from more recent defectors about the training in Nevada.
He was told that the communications training in Nevada involved more
than teaching how to keep in contact during attacks—it also
involved communication intercepts. The United States, he said, at one
point found a way to penetrate some major Iranian communications
systems. At the time, he said, the U.S. provided M.E.K. operatives
with the ability to intercept telephone calls and text messages
inside Iran—which M.E.K. operatives translated and shared with
American signals intelligence experts. He does not know whether this
activity is ongoing.
Five
Iranian nuclear scientists have been assassinated since 2007. M.E.K.
spokesmen have denied any involvement in the killings, but early last
month NBC News quoted two senior Obama Administration officials as
confirming that the attacks were carried out by M.E.K. units that
were financed and trained by Mossad, the Israeli secret service. NBC
further quoted the Administration officials as denying any American
involvement in the M.E.K. activities. The former senior intelligence
official I spoke with seconded the NBC report that the Israelis were
working with the M.E.K., adding that the operations benefitted from
American intelligence. He said that the targets were not “Einsteins”;
“The goal is to affect Iranian psychology and morale,” he said,
and to “demoralize the whole system—nuclear delivery vehicles,
nuclear enrichment facilities, power plants.” Attacks have also
been carried out on pipelines. He added that the operations are
“primarily being done by M.E.K. through liaison with the Israelis,
but the United States is now providing the intelligence.” An
adviser to the special-operations community told me that the links
between the United States and M.E.K. activities inside Iran had been
long-standing. “Everything being done inside Iran now is being done
with surrogates,” he said.
The
sources I spoke to were unable to say whether the people trained in
Nevada were now involved in operations in Iran or elsewhere. But they
pointed to the general benefit of American support. “The M.E.K. was
a total joke,” the senior Pentagon consultant said, “and now it’s
a real network inside Iran. How did the M.E.K. get so much more
efficient?” he asked rhetorically. “Part of it is the training in
Nevada. Part of it is logistical support in Kurdistan, and part of it
is inside Iran. M.E.K. now has a capacity for efficient operations
that it never had before.”
In
mid-January, a few days after an assassination by car bomb of an
Iranian nuclear scientist in Tehran, Secretary of Defense Leon
Panetta, at a town-hall meeting of soldiers at Fort Bliss, Texas,
acknowledged that the U.S. government has “some ideas as to who
might be involved, but we don’t know exactly who was involved.”
He added, “But I can tell you one thing: the United States was not
involved in that kind of effort. That’s not what the United States
does.”
Illustration
by Guy Billout.
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