02/26/15 – Eli Clifton – The Scott Horton Show

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Next up is our old friend, Eli Clifton, now writing at The Intercept.
Hi, Eli, how are you?
I'm doing well.
Thanks so much for having me.
Very happy to have you back on the show.
And so, by the way, what is your bio these days?
I'm actually based at The Nation Institute, which is a few short blocks away from The Intercept.
Okay, good deal.
So it makes me collaborate with them.
Right on.
And so here you have one with our other old friend, and if I can only find it in this massive pile of tabs here, it's at The Intercept.
Again, that's firstlook.org slash The Intercept, and the article is Long March of the Yellow Jackets, How a One-Time Terrorist Group Prevailed on Capitol Hill, and it's about the Mujahideen e-calk, and it'll be running tomorrow on, actually, maybe in the top news today at antiwar.com.
It'll probably be running tomorrow, too, if you want to find it there.
Okay, so take us back in time.
Tell us the story.
What in the world is the Mujahideen e-calk?
Well, that's a question I think a lot of people ask, and really to go to their origins you have to go back to the mid-1960s when this was the Shahs, Iran, and there were small groups of students, middle-class university students, and they were all starting to organize and talk about sort of revolutionary religious tracts, how these were going to interact with one another, and a group came together under an Islamo-Marxist ideology, which was the initial group that formed the MEK, as they often go by, which the Mujahideen e-calk means Holy Wars of the People, and they recruited other young intellectuals, and some of them went off to training camps in the Jordanian and Lebanese deserts to the Palestinian Liberation Organization, and in 1971 they started their attacks, as they were, against the Shah.
They attacked a major power plant in Tehran, and by 1973 to 1976 they'd expanded this war against the Shah to the Shah's allies, who included the United States, and in those three years, from 73 to 76, the MEK actually assassinated six Americans, three were military, and three were civilian contractors with the American company Rockwell International.
All of this takes us through to the revolution, where there's a falling out between them and Khomeini, and they have to leave Iran, many of them are executed, many of them go to Paris, and eventually a lot of them wind up in the Iraqi desert in an alliance with Saddam Hussein by the 1980s, where they actually take up arms against Iran, and their organization becomes more and more inward-looking, it becomes what some people describe as cultish, and really focused on bringing their leaders, Massoud Rajavi and Maryam Rajavi, to retake, as they put it, Iran, and they start to frame themselves as the democratic leaders, while at the same time making themselves wildly unpopular with people in Iran, because, as I said, they're fighting on the side of Saddam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq war.
Needless to say, it doesn't work out so well for them, they're essentially used by Saddam to quell sectarian uprisings, including persecuting the Kurds, and by 1997 the State Department actually lists them as a terrorist group, leading them on a lengthy quest to get themselves off the terrorist list, which brings them in close contact with many U.S. members of Congress, and by 2012 they actually get themselves off the list, which brings us sort of up to the current day, where they are able to actually wield a bit of influence on Capitol Hill.
In this case, due to their proximity to Senator Robert Menendez from New Jersey, they are able to actually, it would appear that their influence over him may have played a role in slowing down the approval of Apache sails to the Iraqi military, when they arguably needed the most to combat ISIS in early 2014.
And now it's interesting that Hillary ended up taking them off the terrorist list, but Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell never did, and in fact, well, I like bragging about her, but my wife Larissa Alexandrovna reported back years ago about how Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, not the CIA, but the military and the vice president, were using MEK as spies inside Iran.
Others later reported, including a very Obama-approved leak, I believe, to NBC in 2012, that it was in fact the MEK working for the Israelis who were assassinating all the scientists inside Iran.
I mean, I think it's certainly true that they've worked with pretty much anybody who would align themselves with them, even on narrow sets of objectives.
There certainly are a rich set of anecdotes of them collaborating with the Israelis, other even perhaps more questionable anecdotes about them cooperating more recently with the CIA.
But just to turn back to the Bush administration for one moment, their presence in Iraq was even used as an example of Saddam Hussein harboring terrorists when there was discussion about the invasion of Iraq.
So they have this very mixed identity, and the way that even politicians here have used them rests on kind of two pedestals, as it were, one being an outright unawareness and naivete about who they are when they come to hearings and have their supporters carpet the hill by just going from one office to the next, lobbying.
But then also their willingness to be opportunist, and the fact that at various times they have served as useful allies for various countries and various intelligence organizations, or so it would appear.
Yeah, and now as far as their big protests, it's been reported at least one time in the past that they really just rounded up homeless people and paid them 50 bucks and gave them yellow shirts and said, help us fill out this crowd.
So that's kind of a fun little anecdote to show how easy it can be, I guess, to inflate your numbers and make it look like, well, as long as you're passing out big checks to congressmen to give speeches, too, it helps.
But have some influence up there.
When they hand out checks to U.S. politicians, these are usually politicians who are no longer in office, when they give it to politicians who are in office, it's in the context of campaign contributions.
Right.
Totally on the level, then.
Sure, absolutely.
I didn't mean to imply otherwise.
All right, so now I should have started with this, Eli.
I'm sorry, but one of the reasons this is very important, and I guess you guys have been working on this for a little while anyway, but of course they're in the news because two days ago they gave a big press conference.
Fox News was very impressed.
At least two days' worth of reporting out of it on Fox News.
I'm sure all the AM, top of the hour news stations were repeating it, exposed by the NCRI, which is the MEK, a new secret uranium enrichment parallel facility that has been hidden from all of the inspectors inside Iran, right there in Tehran, actually, and the kids at the Daily Kos immediately, I guess they just do a Google search, you can just right-click and say search for this image, and Google went and found where the image of this vault door came from, and it was an advertisement from an Iranian safe company that said, we sell some really sturdy vaults, and here's a picture of them, and they just said, yep, here's a picture of the vault door, just trust us, there are secret centrifuges behind that, and this is one of, I don't know how many times that they have done it.
Do you have a ballpark on that?
How many times the MEK has come up with some, has done like a press conference or a press release saying that they're exposing a secret part of Iran's nuclear program and then it all fell apart?
Yeah, I'm pretty sure at this point it would have required at least two hands to count the number, maybe more.
I would say in their defense that at times the intelligence that they've provided has been more accurate than other times.
Part of the problem, though, is they always present it the same way, which is that they have this new, their breathless announcement about a new Iranian secret nuclear facility, which either in past occurrences has already been reported on in some contexts, or in others, maybe it is some new information, but the way that they spin it, they tend to overplay their hands in terms of what it is they claim to have found.
And once again, this is all in the context of, this is a group that its sole and driving mission is to unseat the current government in Iran.
And anything else that comes along the way, very much their attitude, which we allude to in our article, is the enemy of my enemy is my friend, and that they are pretty much, the ends justify the means.
So any time that they think they have something, they tend to play it up in a rather aggressive manner.
All right, now hold it right there.
It's Eli Clifton from the Nation Institute, and we'll be right back in just a minute.
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I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Over at The Intercept, that's firstlook.org, slash The Intercept.
They got one by our old friends Ali Gharib and Eli Clifton.
He spends most of his time at The Nation, but here he is writing at The Intercept.
And this one's all about the MEK, Communist Terrorist Cult.
Used to work for the Ayatollah.
Then they worked for Saddam Hussein.
Then they worked for Donald Rumsfeld.
And then they worked for, I guess, Ehud Olmert.
And now, I guess, probably they work for Netanyahu and or John Brennan.
I don't know.
Who do they work for now, mostly?
Do you know?
Well, I mean, in case I presented an unsympathetic view of them, they work for themselves.
And whatever flexibility they've had and who they've aligned themselves with, I think, is largely a product of, you know, that they have a very narrow set of self-interested goals.
And they're open to collaborating with just about anyone who they think will help them further them.
Yeah.
Well, that sure seems to be apparent here.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, so how was it that they got off the terrorist list?
It seemed like, I mean, well, you already mentioned paying former politicians to give speeches, but it seems like that'd be pretty controversial to do because they were actually, you know, on the list at the time they were paying those former politicians to give those speeches.
So how'd they get away with all that?
Well, you know, for the most part, when they funded former politicians, as it were, to give speeches often at their events in Paris, sometimes here in the U.S., everybody's understanding of it is that money is always transferred to them by groups that just happen to be supportive of the MEK, not the MEK itself, or by individuals who are supportive of it.
And it's worth noting that in Europe, they weren't under the same restrictions during most of this time period that they were in the U.S., which made it far easier for money to be moved around, for money to be raised, for organizations to exist with the actual NCRI or MEK name on it, and for politicians to be handed large sums of money when they would attend the MEK's annual conferences or sometimes more often.
And remind the audience, if you would, about who some of these politicians and former politicians are who've been traveling around and associating with the MEK like this.
Well, I mean, certainly Patrick Kennedy, Howard Dean, some of the most well-known, Rudy Giuliani, are some of the most well-known who did it.
Probably the most influential, though, is former New Jersey Senator Bob Torricelli, who became the group's lobbyist.
He was the only client that he had for lobbying after 2012 or 2013, was being compensated as much as $35,000 a month for doing that.
And it seemed as if his primary contact on Capitol Hill was Senator Robert Menendez, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Yeah, well, good ally to have there.
A very valuable ally.
All right, now, so as far as this group, it's funny, if you call them a cult, you'll get 10,000 of them will swarm on your Facebook page denying that they're a cult kind of thing.
But I interviewed, oh, I forget the guy, Jeremiah Gulka, I believe.
No, wait, Jeremiah, yeah, that's it, from the Rand Corporation who helped do that study that you guys linked to here.
I hope I got his name right.
And he really talked about, he described them like they really are sort of, you know, much closer to Charles Manson or Bo and T than David Koresh as far as their cult-like control over here.
That, you know, all their members are sworn to celibacy.
Grown adults, you know, in their 30s, 40s, 50s, they have to raise their hand to ask permission to speak.
And it's just, you know, the most insane kind of comic book sort of group of weirdos in the world or something like that.
What do you think of that?
I mean, I've certainly heard similar stories.
I have met with them in a very controlled environment.
And I will say that, you know, they are all extremely, the folks I met with were very successful.
They were business people, very kind, very nice, very polite.
And I think it's worth, you know, putting in sort of a sympathetic nod to them in that, you know, this is a group who has sort of been a sad footnote often in recent history.
They have been mistreated in Iraq.
There have been attacks on them, certainly in the past several years.
And this is a group that, you know, for so many of the people in the Iranian diaspora who are members of this group, you get the sense that Maryam Rajavi, at this point the de facto leader of the group, sort of controls and is their connection and their Iranian identity.
So, I mean, the folks are all very nice.
They are well-meaning.
I think that one starts to get more of a sinister view of it when one starts to look at just the absolute power that it appears that the leadership seems to exert over the members.
And even the ways that some of the members have spoken to me adoringly of Maryam Rajavi, it certainly raises questions.
And it makes you wonder how exactly the group serves the interests of these members.
Well, I mean, there have been some reports, and I'm sorry, I only got to read about half of y'all's thing before the show started today.
But there have been some reports where these people, you know, their kids get kidnapped and taken off across the world or something like that to keep people under control and this kind of thing.
I mean, it's the typical type of allegations you do hear about in groups that are typically labeled as cults, the other one being the mandatory divorces, the forced celibacy, all of these types of things that you hear about in terms of cult-like behaviors that are designed in one way or another to form a system of sort of absolute control.
And I assume that there's a wide difference in terms of how members of the group are treated when they are, for instance, living in some small town in the United States, and their connection is through the Internet or by going to conferences versus their members who are in, you know, a refugee camp in Iraq where there's absolute control over them.
So there's probably a whole range there.
But certainly the role and controls that Rajavi has over them is really quite striking and does raise plenty of questions and concerns.
And by the way, do you have any kind of estimate on how much support they have among the Iranian diaspora?
I mean, we know they have absolutely no popular support inside Iran whatsoever, but what percentage of, say, American Iranians support them, do you think?
I certainly couldn't begin to offer a number.
What I will say is that every Iranian American I've met who is not identified as a follower of Maryam Rajavi certainly speaks negatively of them.
However, the MEK will claim, at least within Iran, that they are extremely popular and that pretty much every political prisoner who is executed or put in jail is actually a secret member of their group.
Once again, a hard thing to prove, but one that you might take with a grain of salt.
Well, and of course, I understand what you're saying about how, hey, nobody's perfect and all that kind of thing.
And I can sympathize with any Iranian exile who hates the ayatollah.
I hate all politicians.
If I was Iranian, I'd hate the ayatollah too, since he'd be my ayatollah or ex-ayatollah, that kind of thing.
But then again, these guys are always trying to foment wars and seemingly at the behest of the Israelis undermine peace efforts with their bogus press conferences like what happened the other day and that kind of thing.
So they can mean well and be exiles trying to gin up controversy as best they can, and then I can resent them back for that, if not.
But you're right.
I don't want to like, just because the pattern of allegations against them is the same as the pattern of allegations against every so-called cult group doesn't mean that they're all guilty of all of those things.
And I shouldn't go around oversimplifying that kind of thing either.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, they're a complex group and they're a complex group of people.
But their impact on U.S. policy has been rather consistent.
And I think that right now they've exerted more influence than they ever have before, which is rather noticeable in that they seem to have actually perhaps played a role in influencing Robert Menendez to hold up the sale of Apache helicopters to the Iraqi military at a time when arguably the Iraqi military needed those Apache helicopters the most.
Well, I wouldn't necessarily disagree with that, all things being equal, but it's an important story just for their role in it and all that kind of thing.
But anyway, so I already kept you over, but thanks very much, Eli.
It's great to talk to you again and a great piece of work here.
I appreciate it.
Thanks so much for having me.
All right, so that's Eli Clifton.
He's at the Nation Institute, and here he is writing with Ali Gharib at firstlook.org slash The Intercept.
Greenwald's thing there, The Intercept.
Long March of the Yellow Jackets.
How a one-time terrorist group prevailed on Capitol Hill.
Hey, y'all, Scott here.
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