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I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
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All right, you guys, introducing Arthur Bloom.
He is the Editor of the American Conservative Online as of last week, and got this great new column, and it's got a co-author, Paul Bryan, here.
It's called, oh, you guys are going to love this, Another Opinion Columnist Pushing War with Iran, Who Doesn't Actually Exist.
I hope I enunciated that right.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, Arthur?
Good to be here.
Doing well.
Good.
Appreciate it.
So, doesn't actually exist, the subject of discussion here must then be the Mujahideen Iqalq Communist Terrorist Cult of Myra Murjavi and her goons, correct?
Yeah, that's right, and I guess to give your listeners a little bit of backstory, this isn't the first one.
It's sort of implied by the headline.
The one that was revealed in The Intercept last year was Heshmat Alavi, and there are, you know, it certainly looks like on Twitter there are a whole heck of a lot more of these people who aren't writing columns, and then, you know, I kind of wonder about their spokesperson, Jazi Yairi.
I mean, there's only one picture of him on the internet.
You know, I don't know.
I think it's pretty clear at this point that this is sort of a Potemkin operation.
The question is how much of it is real and how much of it is not.
But anyway, the thing that we found was that there's this other guy, Amir Basiri was his name, and he's also had a ton of bylines in all these different places.
The one revealed by The Intercept, he had written for The Daily Caller, where I actually used to be the opinion editor, and let's see, some other places, Forbes got them too.
And then this one, Basiri was mostly publishing, this was an interesting one because he had published mostly with The Washington Examiner, 52 times actually, but also, pretty funny, Open Democracy was on the list, which is sort of like a EU, you know, Europhile Atlanticist sort of democracy building blog.
So it was both left and right-leaning sites, and they were all, I mean, I think the utility of this group, from the standpoint of an opinion editor or a showbooker or something, they have the appearance of expertise on Iran, and I guess in some sense that they do.
Some of them have fled from Iran, but they also have their own agenda, and their agenda involves pushing war.
And the people that, what's really concerning about this, because there are a ton of groups that are non-existent and are relatively harmless, right?
What's different about this one?
It's that they have a lot of prominent politicians in their corner, basically treating these guys as if they're a shadow government or a government in exile.
And so that's the problem.
So when you combine that with the fact that they're writing these columns, they're basically sock puppet people.
So there were two people that we talked to for that piece.
There was the same defector from the MEK that The Intercept spoke to, and we spoke to a social media analyst who looked at some of the Twitter networks of these two people.
And so in addition to Alafi, this guy, Basiri, was fake too.
So that's how we did that.
And then since then, The Examiner and Open Democracy have both taken down the articles.
So take that for what you will.
Well, it ought to be a huge scandal in media, right?
This should be, oh, what's his name on CNN on Sunday morning and whatever.
There's got to be a reckoning here.
How can you print 52 articles mongering war by a cultist who actually isn't even real?
And which all editors are fired over this?
And what are their names?
And shame on them, right?
I'm living in some ancient era that probably never existed.
Well, this is something I actually have some sympathy for.
You know, the fact is, I mean, I may well, when I was emailing these outlets asking for comment, I told them, I'm not trying to do a gotcha thing here.
I very may well have published some of these guys myself.
And so, but nevertheless, when one of them has been revealed to be non-existent, that does mean you need to go back and take stock and see how widespread it was.
So I'm not trying to just like get these guys, but what it is, I mean, the way we've done opinion journalism for a long time, this is kind of changing.
There were pretty high quotas of articles they would expect editors to publish.
You know, at one time I was publishing between eight and 10 a day, things like that.
And so that's basically one person and they have to get a lot of content out there.
And so that means things that you're going to get a lot of schlock, you're going to get a lot of, you know, things that aren't looked at as closely as they could be.
So I think that's what's going on.
But at the same time, you're right that, you know, when this is, this is a pretty serious fraud that's being perpetuated on the American media and it should get a lot more attention.
Yeah.
Well, and it doesn't because of who it is that's perpetrating the fraud and the overall agenda that they're serving.
Right.
And so one of the things I was going to say was the defector that we spoke to, he, he told us that Basiri and Heshmat Alavi originated before the MEK's move to Albania, which they're there.
That's where they are right now.
And so this has been, this is something that's been going on for some time.
The dates for the examiner pieces were 2014 or 2015 through 2018.
So it was over multiple years.
And you know, there, there are a lot of these Potemkin think tanks.
I mean, is there, there is a not totally farfetched argument that, for instance, Jamal Khashoggi was sort of a, an intelligence asset.
And so, you know, of frauds being perpetrated in the media, they kind of go up and down the thing.
The MEK is an interesting example though.
And I, I've gotten into this on our podcast.
I, I, I didn't get into it in the piece, but you know, we hear about the MEK and they're, they're important to it to an extent because they fit into the other foreign policy priorities of regional powers, for instance, Saudi Arabia or something like that.
And that's the case with a lot of these other groups too.
You could argue, I was receiving pieces recently about Komala, which is an Iranian Kurdish Marxist Leninist party.
And they were sort of, you know, talking about how they're, they're democratic now and they believe in freedom.
And, you know, they too are, you're overlooking a lot of dark history there because they are useful in, you know, hitting Iran over the head with it.
And, but, but the fact is that, that a Kurdish communist party, that's, I think they're banned and you know, they don't have the resources to lobby Washington really.
And that's sort of, that's probably being paid for or facilitated by other people.
Right.
And by the way, I'm sorry, what'd you say their name was and are they related to the group PJAK, do you know?
I don't know the answer to that.
The word was K-O-M-A-L-A.
Okay.
Yeah.
And so I think these sorts of things happen all the time and like the whole, I'm no big defender of Saudi Arabia, but I am skeptical of the idea that Jamal Khashoggi's murder was the crime of the century.
Do you know what I mean?
Yeah.
I never considered it as such myself to tell you the truth, but certainly horrific and goes to show the character of, uh, you know, crown Prince Boneslaw over there.
No question about that, but yeah, as far as the outrage that they made it, you know, in comparison to other things, no, of course not.
Well, and you're talking about like the nephew of a key CIA money launderer, like, uh, all right.
Right.
Everybody went, wait, Khashoggi, where do I know that name from?
Right.
Oh, he helped with the Iran-Contra deal.
Oh, and, and this is in the middle of course, of the war, the ongoing American Saudi war in Yemen.
It was absolutely horrific.
That's a, a, a death on the level of the violence of what happened to him, to regular random people every day.
Yeah, that's true.
So that makes the complaint by a bunch of Washington post-ists a bit hollow when they don't care about the Yemenis at all, suffering far greater under the same regimes.
You could see, uh, MBS and Joe Biden, uh, clutching that orb just as easily as Trump, I think.
Yep.
Absolutely right.
Hey, I'll check it out.
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All right.
And so now for the MEK, I kind of came out just smearing them.
Of course I'm right, but commie tarot cult, that's three things at the same time right there.
A bit prejudicial sounding.
You want to explain a little bit about the history of this group for people?
Well other people have treated that more competently and more intensely than I could.
But I think that the issue for me is one, they have a record of having killed Americans.
That's a problem.
Less having to do with their beliefs.
What matters to me is what they've done, not what their beliefs are.
And what they've done is they seem to treat their members in ways that do bespeak a cult.
They've been accused of practicing forced sterilization, things like that that's really just not okay.
And the idea that we would be treating them as an important dissident force, so what they've done is genuinely bad.
And then also even if your goal is regime change in Iran, I don't think this makes you look like, treating them like government in exile does not make you look like you're going to bring stability to that country.
Right.
Yeah.
And so that's the thing of it too, I think probably I should admit that less emphasis on Kami, I think they pretty much dropped all the Marxist stuff a long time ago.
But they are terrorists and they have been for many years, including as you said, killed Americans during the Iranian revolution.
And they are a pretty crazy cult, as you said, with forced, God knows what, sterilization and kidnapping children and everybody has to raise their hand to speak like kindergartners all day and just completely bananas sort of control.
And as you said, sort of a Potemkin thing, they got to hire all these PR firms to run their straw man Twitter accounts and write their bogus articles.
You got two or three guys pretending to be 10 or whatever it is.
If anybody's ever tangled with the MEK on Twitter, you know it can be a real riot the way that they all kind of come together, even though it just be one or two people pretending to be 10.
But still, you know.
Yeah, it's a big network and they've been sliding into my DMs recently.
They haven't actually refuted any piece of the story.
But, you know, we we've heard a lot.
The other thing is, I think that this story kind of demonstrates how a lot of the stuff about, you know, we need to be worried about disinformation and troll campaigns and things like that is really quite one sided.
And it's not so much of a campaign against against disinformation and it as it is a campaign against the wrong kind of disinformation, because the M.E.K.
Hashimoto Laffey was banned from Twitter and then his account was restored.
And so it just looks like Twitter has not been as proactive about these guys as they, you know, are about the FSB or something.
So it's you could find other examples of that, too.
But this guy who the social media analyst for the piece, he was banned from Twitter and Hashimoto Laffey was restored.
So that's that's pretty weird.
So you see this kind of big disinformation campaign that basically gets a pass.
And then, you know, Twitter is now flagging or fact checking Trump's tweets.
I think this is pretty one sided.
Yeah.
Well, and what are the Iranians to think that, oh, you think you're going to force the M.E.K. on us?
Huh?
I mean, well, I think I would hope anyway that they can see that there are a lot of Americans that don't take them terribly seriously.
It's a lot of it's a lot of conservative hawks that seem to really have a problem, you know, with cozying up to these guys.
I think that's what it is.
I mean, the left is one interesting example is is Voice of America has been running M.E.K. stuff.
And how that happened is pretty interesting.
I'm not quite sure why they were doing that or whether there's even an interesting story.
Maybe it's just the same as, you know, an op ed editor at a conservative Web site.
But they they're being given a level of credibility that I don't think they deserve.
Yeah.
Well, and part of it is because they have so much money, which they're getting from probably the Saudis and or the CIA at different times.
The Israelis, I know for some things, but in terms of their we don't really know who funds their American overall public relations campaigns, do we?
They are probably not generating a ton of money in the Albanian troll farm, I can tell you that.
Yeah.
And it's not like little old ladies in America are sending them envelopes full of cash either.
Right.
Well, and I've seen a couple of accounts.
I've heard stories about some of these M.E.K.
Twitter accounts that I've been looking at.
They they may be fake people, but they're fake people that are at least representing themselves as Iranians.
You know, I care about this because I am a Iranian who wishes they could go back in the Mullahs don't like me.
And that's fine.
That that's that's you know, that's the kind of speech that's good.
But when it's there's there's not a genuine person behind it or they're creating a bunch of fake accounts to give the appearance of of it being a large network, or I was told a story about an account today that is representing themselves as a U.S. Marine veteran on like conservative Teacott Twitter.
And that's the sort of thing that concerns me a little bit more that they're because, you know, when we the M.E.K. had come after attack about a week before we did the story and I was I was looking into this fake fake op ed writer before that.
But I saw a bunch of conservative Twitter people, a lot mostly around hawks, retweeting these guys.
And so I you know, you're retweeting attack an attack on our magazine.
I'm going to ask you what's up.
And the I think a lot of these people just don't know what they are.
And what's more concerning to me are the ones that do know and don't care that that's worse.
But but I do think there are a fair number that just don't know they have when they see op eds like this.
They assume it's on the up and up and, you know, there's nothing you can do about that except tell them the truth.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, because they have so much money they can get, as you mentioned in the article, Democrats like Joe Lieberman and Howard Dean, who long ago blocked me on Twitter for, you know, razzing them about this basically, Ed Rendell, I think was another one.
And so to a lot of people, you know, the politically interested class of Americans of whatever other station in life, mostly when you have a lot of responsible governors and senators and people of both parties saying that this is the good deal, that there's a lot of credibility that comes with that.
How else could you get Lieberman and Howard Dean to agree with Rudy Giuliani and John Bolton that this is really what's best for Iran and the world is if only we could put this group in power and apparently they're ready to go.
Yeah, that's right.
That's a pretty powerful narrative, you know.
If you call that into question, then you're, you know, a conspiracy theorist or something.
And then the thing that they, the MEK spokespeople have told me when I, you know, have been talking to some of them in the context of all of this is that, you know, we've been delisted from the Foreign Terrorist Organization's list, which was done under Hillary Clinton, by the way.
And so, you know, somebody must have facilitated that or decided it was a good idea, which, you know, I'd love to see the story there.
But, you know, if they have been delisted from the Foreign Terrorist Organization's list, there must be a good reason, right?
And who are you to call that into question?
But you know, the fact is that these decisions can be made for political reasons.
Yeah.
And of course, that one was a very high profile political decision at the time it was made.
They couldn't bury it.
It was a big question of whether they're going to go through with this thing or not.
You could read all about it at foreignpolicy.com and whatever at the time.
Yeah.
There's no way to ignore it.
It was such a big deal.
But yeah, so a couple of different things, I guess, as far as Twitter goes, and you're talking about the way that they pick and choose, the way that they enforce these things.
You know much about what's behind that and possibly in terms of, especially in terms of direct government influence over which narratives should stay or go?
Whether Twitter is making that decision, I don't have any knowledge or, you know, it's possible.
It's a site like Twitter definitely has national security implications.
Whether they're intervening on the MEK's behalf, I'm a little skeptical.
It is interesting to me that Paul Singer's hedge fund has a board seat at Twitter now.
I do sort of wonder about that.
But you know, I don't have any evidence to suggest that that impacted this decision.
Yeah.
Well, that'd be an interesting line of investigation, maybe.
And I guess I could see, too, why, for example, the people in charge of these decisions at Twitter would say, well, I don't know, how do you get Howard Dean and Giuliani to agree on something unless it's fine, right?
Like, what are they going to do, go and read all the Rand Corporation studies about this crazy group?
You know, they don't know.
They defer to the professionals.
And so they probably don't even, might not even know that there is a controversy on the other side of this.
Right.
It's the rational center that's in favor of the cult that does the decision.
Yep.
They're very moderate, the centrists, I've read.
Yeah.
Well, and I don't know.
I guess I've been waiting around for the MEK to launder some fake Israeli intelligence about Iran's nuclear program, although it's been a little while since they have.
That's something that we can look forward to, I guess, more of that from them.
Yeah, maybe.
It does seem like some of the reporting that I've seen that's on the hawkish side about Iran has been boosted by a lot of the MEK Twitter accounts, and I wouldn't speculate as to why.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I guess it really does come back to that money, and whose agents they actually are.
I mean, I guess the Americans inherited them from Saddam Hussein after the war, and then they figured out a way, as you said, to move them all to Albania.
Is anybody really in charge of them now?
What is the status of that thing, do you know?
That's a good question.
I don't really know.
But I think given the whole Russiagate narrative about trolls and all of this, it wouldn't surprise me if people that are not Russian information operations or whatever have decided, yeah, OK, this is a little bit dirty, but it's awfully useful having thousands of Twitter accounts boosting this narrative.
And corporations probably do this, too, and there are versions of this.
They're sold as basically web services.
People in Africa, you'll get you and 10 friends together and they'll run a network of a couple hundred accounts and they'll massively boost the profile of whatever you pay them to boost.
And so it's not just the MEK, but the MEK has a dedicated and ideological reason for being opposed to the Iranian regime.
And so they're useful for that.
And they're also in Albania.
They don't get a lot of, you know, we don't really have a good window into how they work, which, you know, so much the better, I think, maybe if you're just trying to, you know, increase the case for war with Iran, that makes these guys more useful rather than less.
Right.
Yeah, that's certainly true.
I guess I think I had read something that was saying that they were having a hard time maintaining the previous kind of control they had because they were sort of surrounded by enemies in Iraq and didn't really have anywhere to go, whereas once they're in Albania, they can, they're more free to leave anyway and comes harder to maintain your cult that way.
I think there's a good reason why it's only in the last year or two that we started seeing like really new reporting about how these information operations have worked.
And then also stories from defectors, things like that, all of that.
It does seem like the wheels are coming off over there a little bit.
Yeah.
Well, maybe they can get Rudy Giuliani to put him back together again.
That makes sense.
Right.
Right.
All right.
Well, listen, I really appreciate your time on the show, but I'm running late.
I got to interview your colleague, Josiah Lippincott.
Oh, very good.
Yeah.
I had a problem last week with the electricity cutting out in the middle of his interview.
So I'm going to make that up to him right now about the end of World War Two, because as always, there's such great work being done over at the American Conservative Magazine.
So great to meet you and appreciate your time on the show.
Glad to do it.
Talk to you later.
Bye.
All right, you guys.
That is Arthur Bloom, and he is now the online editor over there at TACC.
Check this one out.
Another opinion columnist pushing war with Iran, who doesn't actually exist.
The Scott Horton Show on anti-war radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA, APSradio.com, www.antiwar.com, scotthorton.org, and libertarianinstitute.org.
