Is MEK/MKO the source for the propaganda about Iran?

[Emit]

I posted earlier questioning why the "condition of anonymity" for the recent claim by the ptb of Iran Supplying Weapons to Iraq Militias:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=190030&mesg_id=190030

On that thread, I noted a recent presentation by Alireza Jafarzadeh, President, Strategic Policy Consulting, Inc. from just last month. Check it out -- according to this man, "The new information received from sources in Iran further confirms Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corp and its notorious Qods Force as the biggest threat and most challenging obstacle in Iraq."
http://www.spcwashington.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=250&Itemid=26

I'm still curious if this is where Bush & Co. are getting their info -- from the MEK? I know Perle supported the MEK and participated in an effort to get the MEK off the US Terrorist list some time ago. Here are some old threads on MEK, and there were more a while back with Hersh's article that mentioned US support of MEK factions in Iraq -- check out some of robertpaulsen's posts about Feith and MEK on the 2nd link, around post #31:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=364&topic_id=577982#578273

Hey Emit, here's that ABC link where Feith kisses up to MEK.
Published on Friday, May 30, 2003 by the ABC News
Pentagon Eyes Massive Covert Attack on Iran

WASHINGTON - The Pentagon is advocating a massive covert action program to overthrow Iran's ruling ayatollahs as the only way to stop the country's nuclear weapons ambitions, senior State Department and Pentagon officials told ABCNEWS.

The proposal, which would include covert sponsorship of a group currently deemed terrorist by the U.S. government, is not new, and has not won favor with enough top officials to be acted upon.

snip

The State Department argument was that MEK is on the terrorist list and any failure to disarm it would be an act of hypocrisy, which was the same line taken by the Iranians in confidential meetings that have been ongoing in Geneva, until the United States recently cut them off.

The office of Doug Feith, undersecretary for policy at the Department of Defense, argued that the MEK has not targeted Americans since the 1970s, which is true, and was only put on the terrorist list by the Clinton administration as a gesture to improve relations with Iran.

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0530-03.htm

More related info:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=364&topic_id=923696&mesg_id=923696
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=132&topic_id=2570340&mesg_id=2570340


This MEK group says it Advises Congress, various Executive Branch agencies, etc.:

Strategic Policy Consulting, Inc. (SPC)
Strategic Policy Consulting, Inc. (SPC) is an independent firm, whose purpose is to provide expert advice and analysis on geopolitical developments in the Middle East. SPC serves as a valuable consultant in researching, developing and deploying solutions to the problematics of terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, and Islamic Fundamentalism, particularly with respect to these issues in Iran and Iraq.

SPC specialties include:
• Advising Congress, various Executive Branch agencies, and non-governmental organizations;

• Offering speakers for seminars, conferences, briefings, Congressional hearings, and university lectures;

• Providing incisive commentary to the media;

• Anticipating, assessing, and helping to disrupt threats to world peace;

• Informing a wide range of clients from senior policymakers to all-source analysts about the strengths and weaknesses of policies addressing key issues;

• Researching the evolution of sensitive topics of concern.

SPC experts will give counsel on international policy matters, conflict resolution, and regional & international crisis management.

Our consultants will provide comparative analyses of the various strategies proposed as solutions to the tough challenges of the Middle East, especially as they arise in Iran and Iraq.

We have experience, knowledge, unmediated information and a proven record in areas crucial to global security, peace and human rights.

SPC has effectively combined insight and knowledge of global issues to meet ever-changing international and regional challenges.

http://spcwashington.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=26&Itemid=39

It was the Iran Policy Committee (IPC) who held this conference:

The IPC is supported by the neocon all-stars that we’ve come to know and love such as Doug Feith, Frank Gaffney, Mike Ledeen, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Don Rumsfeld, Condi Rice, et al. But these first benchers are running out of political muscle as their war in Iraq continues to drain the resources of the American people on all political, economic and military fronts. What’s worse, perhaps, is their “with us or against us” mentality that has caused new political and economic alliances to form (example: South America-China-Iran) and that has accelerated both conventional and nuclear arms races. Having failed on so many fronts, they recognize that to get the US into Iran, some new faces are needed and that’s where the IPC back benchers are critical to the forthcoming anti-Iranian/Persian propaganda operations.

The IPC is linked through its purpose and people to the Coalition for a Democratic Iran and the MEK, the Washington PAC, JINSA, AIPAC, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the DOD, the Center for Security Policy, and all the major US intelligence agencies. IPC members are primarily defense & security contractors/consultants and would benefit financially from a war with Iran.

http://www.dissidentvoice.org/May05/Stanton0519.htm

Launched in 2005, IPC's main modus operandi is to hold a press conference, typically at the National Press Club, at which it releases the findings of its latest “white paper.” On January 11, 2007, a day after President George W. Bush announced his “surge” strategy for Iraq, IPC held a press conference at the National Press Club to announce the release of its latest paper, “How to Make the Surge Work: A Complementary Political-Military Plan for Iraq.” Arguing that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki would be unlikely to meet important political milestones in quelling the violence in that country because of Tehran's supposed meddling, the IPC paper maintains that the Bush administration should find a role for “the Iranian opposition in Iraq to build a national compact among the Iraqi factions.” For the IPC, the “Iranian opposition in Iraq” is represented by the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), a group that has been identified by the U.S. State Department as a terrorist group.

http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/3280

On Jafarzadeh, he was the Washington spokesman for the National Council of Resistance, a front organization for the MEK/MKO:

The MKO operates in Washington out of a small office in the National Press Building under the name the National Council of Resistance of Iran. According to the State Department, the National Council of Resistance is a "front" for the MKO; in 1999, the National Council itself was placed on the State Department terrorist list. But National Council officials adamantly deny their group has earned the terror label and have aggressively portrayed itself to Washington lawmakers as a "democratic" alternative to a repressive Iranian regime that itself is one of the world's leading sponsors of terrorism. "You're talking about a really popular movement," says Alireza Jafarzadeh, the National Council's chief Washington spokesman, who insists that the MKO "targets only military targets."

http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:2ct7hA-JtlAJ:www.truthout.org/docs_02/09.30B.nswk.bagdad.htm+National+Council+of+Resistance+of+Iran+Alireza+Jafarzadeh&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=18&gl=us

Prior to becoming a contributor for FOX News Channel, and until August 2003, Jafarzadeh acted for a dozen years as the chief congressional liaison and media spokesperson for the US representative office of Iran’s parliament in exile, the National Council of Resistance of Iran. Jafarzadeh earned his Bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor, and his Master’s degree in Civil Engineering from the University of Texas, in Austin.

http://www.spcwashington.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=32&Itemid=49

Edited: clarity, I think

[Kagemusha]

1. We know quite well Iran is supplying weapons to... the Badr Corps.

Now what that has to do with Sunni guerilla operations against US forces, I have no idea.

[patrice]

2. Iran supplying Bush ally SCIRI

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x191985

[Emit]

4. And we did/are, too, perhaps

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=364&topic_id=3117417

[sam sarrha]

3. if Mexico invaded and occupied us and created death squads we'd take Canadas help

[Emit]

5. I intended this thread to be less about who is supplying what to whom but, more about

who is supplying the propaganda that we're getting -- what this relates to is the same players involved in the OSP (Feith, Perle, Ledeen, etc.) during the lead up to the Iraq invasion.

[sam sarrha]

8. i am aware of that.. just adding a perspective.... so what if they are, we illegally invaded and Ira...

occupied Iraq. we wouldn't be having this discussion if our wet brain alcoholic drug addict PResident hadn't knowingly lied us into a NEEDLESS WAR.. and is now trying to start another that will turn russia and china and all of Islam against us

civilization as we know it is about to end.. when he nukes Iran, and he's gonna do it.. probably to fulfill Bible Prophesy

[Emit]

11. I understand your sentiments fully

I thought perhaps that my title was confusing and maybe you thought I meant that the MEK was supplying Iran with weapons. :hi:

[sam sarrha]

14. this is a snow ball to hell.. they are going into Iran to drop a nuke.. cant stop em

[Emit]

6. .

[Emit]

7. Anybody else find this MEK/Feith/ Perle/neocon connection curious?

:shrug:

[Marie26]

9. Have you seen this article?

"On Cheney, Rumsfeld order, US outsourcing special ops, intelligence to Iraq terror group, intelligence officials say." -

One of the operational assets being used by the Defense Department is a right-wing terrorist organization known as Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK), which is being “run” in two southern regional areas of Iran. They are Baluchistan, a Sunni stronghold, and Khuzestan, a Shia region where a series of recent attacks has left many dead and hundreds injured in the last three months.

One former counterintelligence official, who wished to remain anonymous due to the sensitivity of the information, describes the Pentagon as pushing MEK shortly after the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The drive to use the insurgent group was said to have been advanced by the Pentagon under the influence of the Vice President’s office and opposed by the State Department, National Security Council and then-National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice.

Another former intelligence official added that the US military had detained as many as 3,500 members of MEK at Iraq’s Camp Ashraf since the start of the war, including the highest level ranking MEK leaders. Ashraf is about 60 miles west of the Iranian border.

“We disarmed of major weapons but not small arms. Rumsfeld was pushing to use them as a military special ops team, but policy infighting between their camp and Condi, but she was able to fight them off for a while,” said the intelligence official. According to still another intelligence source, the policy infighting ended last year when Donald Rumsfeld, under pressure from Vice President Cheney, came up with a plan to “convert” the MEK by having them simply quit their organization. “These guys are nuts,” this intelligence source said. “Cambone and those guys made MEK members swear an oath to Democracy and resign from the MEK and then our guys incorporated them into their unit and trained them.”

http://www.rawstory.com/news/2006/US_outsourcing_special_operations_intelligence_gathering_0413.html

Looks like we're creating new death squads out of the MEK. Negroponte, famous for his Honduran death squads, was also just transferred to Iraq recently - maybe this is one of his missions?

[Emit]

10. Yes! Thank you. It was posted previously by robertpaulsen on one of the threads

I had in the OP:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=364&topic_id=923696&mesg_id=923696

And, robertpaulsen, later in the thread, connected Geoffrey D. Miller with MEK:

33. OH MAN! Check out this link of MEK with Geoffrey D. Miller!
For those not familiar with this neo-con thug's machinations, the first two snips spell out his Gitmo & Abu Ghraib inhumanity. The third snip really pertains to this thread:

~snip~

July 21, 2004

Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, the deputy commanding general in Iraq, says in a memorandum that the US has designated members of the Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK) as “protected persons.” According to the Fourth Geneva Convention, people who are designated as “protected” cannot be punished collectively or forced to leave an occupied country. The members were afforded the new status only after signing an agreement rejecting violence and terrorism, the memo says. The memorandum angers Tehran. “We already knew that America was not serious in fighting terrorism,” Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi says, adding that by affording MEK fighters the new status, the US has created a new category of “good terrorists.” “The American resort to the Geneva Conventions to support the terrorist hypocrites is naive and unacceptable,” he says. Despite the members’ new status and despite having been cleared of any wrongdoing, the US military and the MEK leadership do not allow any of the group’s members to leave Camp Ashraf. Several of the members say they were lured into joining the group with false promises and now want to return home to Iran. The MEK has been called cult-like (see ) and its leadership compared to Stalin by former members of the group.

People and organizations involved: Geoffrey D. Miller, Mujahedeen-e Khalq

more...

http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/entity.jsp?id=1521846767-2744

[magellan]

12. I believe they're one of the sources at least

...and I've been posting similar info about them today. What BushCo have done with the MEK is chillingly similar to their use of Chalabi and the INC in the run-up to the Iraq invasion. I'd only be shocked to learn the MEK aren't involved in providing some of the "evidence" BushCo is now selling about Iran.

K&R

[Emit]

13. Yes, thank you. There is such a similar comparison that it seems

quite obvious. Thanks for your feedback.

[magellan]

15. BTW, on Democracy Now! today, I just heard a guy say

...(I believe his name is Craig Ungar) that Richard Perle attended a "fundraising" event for the MEK and later denied that's what it was. I was just being called away to work so didn't catch details like when this happened, but there'll be a rush transcript of it up on the DN! site later.

[Emit]

16. Newsweek 05: "For the White House, MEK is a source of intelligence on Iran."

Despite the group's notoriety, Bush himself cited purported intelligence gathered by MEK as evidence of the Iranian regime's rapidly accelerating nuclear ambitions. At a March 16 press conference, Bush said Iran's hidden nuclear program had been discovered not because of international inspections but "because a dissident group pointed it out to the world." White House aides acknowledged later that the dissident group cited by the president is the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), one of the MEK front groups added to the State Department list two years ago.

In an appearance before a House International Relations Subcommittee a year ago, John Bolton, the controversial State Department undersecretary who Bush has nominated to become US ambassador to the United Nations, was questioned by a Congressman sympathetic to MEK about whether it was appropriate for the U.S. government to pay attention to allegations about Iran supplied by the group. Bolton said he believed that MEK "qualifies as a terrorist organization according to our criteria." But he added that he did not think the official label had "prohibited us from getting information from them. And I certainly don't have any inhibition about getting information about what's going on in Iran from whatever source we can find that we deem reliable."

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7902719/site/newsweek/

[Nikki Stone1]

17. K & R

:kick:

[Emit]

18. Tony Snow's repeated mentioning of "Quds" in the WH press briefing today

Confirms, IMHO, that this MEK group is their primary source on Iran. This is nuts.

He said it like 15 times today -- "the finding of the intelligence community is that it's, in fact, linked to the Quds forces."

It's straight out of this group's recent slide show:

Qods Force’s command and control of terror network in Iraq:


1. The commander of this vast terror network in Iraq is Jamal Jafar Mohammad Ali Ebrahimi also known as “Mehdi Mohandes” who also uses the Iranian name Jamal Ebrahimi. In the 1980’s, as an experienced operative of a terrorist group, he was dispatched to Kuwait to plan the bombing of US and UK embassies. He is on the wanted-list of Interpol since 1984 and has since remained inside Iran.


2. Mohandes is among the veteran and more senior officers of IRGC Qods Force who has completed the command curriculum at the IRGC’s Imam Hossein University and is currently on the payroll of the Qods Force.


3. Mohandes is in contact with Abtahi in Iran, and with Hamid Hosseini in Najaf, Iraq. After the fall of former regime in Iraq in 2003, Mohandes secretly traveled to Iraq on the order of the Qods Force, to establish an organization called “Tajamo-e Islami” or “Islamic Gathering.” Within two years, by the direct order of Ghassem Soleimani, 950 of seasoned and trusted extremist operatives of the Qods Force were transferred to this organization. “Tajamo-e Islami” has offices in most Iraqi provinces and plays a major role in organizing militant Shiite groups loyal to the Iranian regime and directing their terrorist activities.


4. Mehdi Mohandes is currently a member of the National Assembly of Iraq from Babel province.

http://www.spcwashington.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=250&Itemid=26

[magellan]

19. Here's a bit of background in support of your (and my) suspicion

"The Qods (Jerusalem) Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is responsible for extraterritorial operations, including terrorist operations. A primary focus for the Qods Force is training Islamic fundamentalist terrorist groups. Currently, the Qods Force conducts training activities in Iran and in Sudan."

http://www.globalsecurity.org/intell/world/iran/qods.htm

Natural enemies of the MEK, considering the following:

"By mid-May 2003 Coalition forces (in Iraq) had consolidated 2,139 tanks, armored personnel carriers, artillery pieces, air defense artillery pieces and miscellaneous vehicles formerly in the possession of the Mujahedin-E Khalq (MEK) forces. The 4th Infantry Division also reported they have destroyed most of the MEK munitions and caches. The voluntary, peaceful resolution of this process by the MEK and the Coalition significantly contributed to the Coalition’s mission to establish a safe and secure environment for the people of Iraq. The 4,000 MEK members in the Camp Ashraf former Mujahedeen base were consolidated, detained, disarmed and were screened for any past terrorist acts.

(What happened to those 4000 MEK members? We know a certain number of them are now working for the US in special ops teams to overthrow Iran's regime.)

The United States, which lists National Council of Resistance of Iran as a terrorist organization, closed the NCRI's Washington office in 2003.

Description

Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (MEK) is the largest and most militant group opposed to the Islamic Republic of Iran. Also known as the People’s Mujahedeen Organization of Iran, MEK is led by husband and wife Massoud and Maryam Rajavi. MEK was added to the U.S. State Department’s list of foreign terrorist groups in 1997.

MEK was founded in the 1960s by a group of college-educated Iranian leftists opposed to the country’s pro-Western ruler, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/para/mek.htm

Imagine that -- BushCo has been cozying up to Marxist-Islamist terrorists!! :rofl: