09/21/12 – Jeremiah Goulka – The Scott Horton Show

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For KPFK 90.7 FM in Los Angeles, September 21, 2012.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
All right, everybody, welcome to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
My website is ScottHorton.org.
I keep all my interview archives there, more than 2,500 of them now, going back to 2003.
And the big news of the day is that the State Department has delisted the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, M-E-K, Communist Terrorist Cult, from the State Department's list of officially designated terrorist organizations.
Well, our guest is Jeremiah Gulka.
He's the co-author of this Rand Corporation study, the Mujahideen-e-Khalq in Iraq, a policy conundrum, and has examined their group up close and written about them at length, also for Salon.com and the American Prospect as well.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
Thanks, Scott.
Thanks for having me on again.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
And I want to turn to today's New York Times right here.
Iranian dissidents convince U.S. to drop terror label.
What they say here is that, yes, it's true that the M-E-K carried out terrorist attacks in the 70s and the 1980s, first against the Shah and then later against the Ayatollahs, including against Americans there.
And yes, they allied with Saddam Hussein.
But by most accounts, reads the New York Times, the M-E-K has not carried out violent attacks for many years.
Is that correct?
Well, that's certainly what most accounts are.
It's an interesting situation here where I think it's agreed that on a confirmed attack level, that they haven't done confirmed attacks since 2001 or 2002.
The stuff that's been reported in the last couple of years, like what Seymour Hersh reported in The New Yorker about them being trained by some American special forces folks, or the M-E-K working in conjunction with the Israelis to assassinate Iranian nuclear weapons scientists, that we've talked about on the show, it's been discussed a lot.
I don't think it's the same level of confirmation for what that's worth.
So it's an interesting thing here with the State Department announcing, well, with a sort of pre-announcement that the State Department is intending to officially remove them, the M-E-K, from the Foreign Terrorist Organization list.
I haven't had personal access to classified materials or anything, and if I did, I couldn't talk about them, but if I did, I would have known.
I might have been able to see whether there's some smoking gun here or not that we don't know about.
But basically, all the observers have assumed that this was a done deal.
And as you and I discussed before, we're kind of wondering whether, if they were going to indeed be removed, if the state would do it officially, or just wait for the clock to run out from the court decision and then just let it happen.
The court decision saying that the State Department had to hurry up and decide whether they were going to keep them on or not, which was kind of strange.
Is there some kind of automatic sunset?
You have to be renewed as a terrorist by the State Department, or how does that work anyway?
Yeah, the statute originally was the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996.
That was the whole process, and it's been changed a couple of times over the years.
But basically what happens is when the government puts a group on the list, Congress put in an option to both reflect change in circumstances as well as to give an incentive for terrorist groups to give up violence.
And the groups can, after two years, petition the court to get the State Department to reevaluate.
And the law has changed at various times, and the MEK basically followed the law in the sense of each time they had a legal opportunity to ask for a change, they did so.
The difference in this last bunch was that the MEK managed to persuade a court to say that the last time that they were renewed on the list, which was actually done at the end of the Bush administration, the very tail end, that the process involved wasn't adequate from a legal point of view, and so the process needed to be done again.
And the State Department and this administration basically took their time, and the MEK had another petition saying, essentially asking the court to say chop, chop, or make a decision, and if you don't make a decision within a certain amount of time, the court will just automatically remove them, and that's what happened.
It's a little bit of procedurally convoluted.
All right, now, well, it is, but I guess I see what you're saying, though, that what that means, in effect, is the State Department has to recertify them, and since there's all this political pressure to not, it sort of has expired.
Rather than they've been designated terror-free, they just haven't been relisted.
Is that basically correct?
Yeah, it's sort of the way Congress votes themselves a race.
It's automatic unless they pass a bill saying we don't want to raise this year.
Yeah, I think it's basically it puts the pressure onto a group to say, look, we've changed our ways, and the MEK is such an interesting group.
They are truly a fringe, small-potatoes group in terms of their actual support in Iran is minuscule, but they seem to have access to significant resources, and they've mounted this huge lobbying campaign, and one of the things that I'm really wondering, and maybe sometime I'll be able to have an answer on this, this is one of those things you kind of wish you were a fly on the wall in the various rooms, to know how much of the decision to take them off the list is truly about the lobbying, how much of it is about the lack of confirmed or sufficiently confirmed violence, or maybe there is more violence that we don't even know about, and the State made a political decision, who knows.
But one of the things that is a factor here is the issue of getting the folks and the MEK out of Camp Ashraf and down to the old Camp Liberty to have a process to have people go through a proper international process.
All right, now wait a minute.
You've got to stop and give them a little bit of background there.
Camp Ashraf is the camp where Saddam Hussein kept them very well for, what, 30 years?
Yes, sorry to make that jump.
So when the MEK, after they were exiled from Iran right after the revolution in the early 80s, in 1986, Saddam welcomed the MEK into Iraq in exchange for help in the Iran-Iraq war.
And so the MEK, which once upon a time had some real support in Iran, decides to join forces with the enemy, the aggressor of the Iran-Iraq war, and fight against Iranian troops.
And this has demolished the MEK's credibility in Iran.
It just ended it.
But since then, during the rest of Saddam's reign, he provided war materials, several camps, money to the MEK.
Oh, the MEK denies a lot of that.
They made Iraq their home.
They had various camps, and then in 2003, when the U.S. invasion happened, the U.S. consolidated the MEK's people in Iraq at the biggest of the camps, Camp Ashraf.
And so they were there until, well, now very recently.
But the desire was, Iraq was very clear that it did not want the MEK, that the new government of Iraq did not want the MEK within Iraq, that they were there illegally, that they had participated in the suppression of the Shia and Kurdish uprisings after the 1991 Gulf War, and they were persona non grata.
And of course, the Iraq government is very close to the Iran government, and the Iranian regime really hates the MEK.
So they want the MEK out.
But to do that...
Well, plus, and they had helped Saddam crush the Great Bay of Pigs in the desert in 1991, when George Bush Sr. had encouraged the Shiites and the Kurds to rise up against Saddam, and had promised to help them, and then did not help them, and sat back and watched Saddam Hussein use the MEK to waste them all by at least 100,000 killed.
It's interesting how the MEK, of course, totally denies that, but the perception is widely held in Iraq that they worked very closely with Saddam in the suppression of those uprisings, and it's appalling.
And so, in order to have any hope of resettling the members of the MEK in some other country, they need to go through a process, their international processes, and the perception of at least the international folks who want to do this is that they couldn't happen at Camp Ashraf, which I think is probably true.
So, in order to get everyone to move from Camp Ashraf to the camps on the former American military base of Camp Liberty, the State Department seemed to think that it was necessary to basically offer this carrot, and in the end, with time running short, they finally got everybody out of Camp Ashraf.
And I think one of the things that's, you know, it's a complicated story, but I think it bears mentioning that there is a humanitarian element to this.
The MEK turned into a cult after the Iran-Iraq war, and since then, they've had a very hard time recruiting new members, and a lot of the new members, at least some significant quantity of them, were recruited through deceptive means.
And these folks have, some of them were able to leave after the 2003 invasion, but many have stayed, and whether it's, the MEK will make it sound like it was a voluntary decision to stay, but when you're talking about people in cults, you really have to wonder how voluntary it is, and the only chance that people have of getting out of a cult, should they actually want to, of course, is for them to get out of the cult complete, you know, under control and geographic control.
And so, if people, if the MEK members are now, now have a chance of getting resettled somewhere, there is that humanitarian benefit here, and no country other than Iran was willing to take anybody, as long as the MEK was on the U.S. Foreign Terrorist Organization list.
And they may, you know, a lot of countries may still not want to, but at least that was one big legitimate stumbling block for anyone wanting to admit MEK members into their country.
When talking about the cult, it is the kids.
The kids are not with them.
So, when the transition of the group into a cult started in, basically, the first hints of it are 1985, and then it starts happening in earnest at the end of the Iran-Iraq War, when the war is over, and then the MEK decides to, its leader, Massoud Rajavi, decides to have their own invasion of Iran, in the hope that they would, basically, rally Iranians to join them, and not all go on to Tehran and take the government.
And, you know, this was just, it's one of those decisions that is amazing that it could possibly have happened, because, clearly, they had lost so much support in Iran by having already fought with Saddam.
So, it completely backfires.
They lose, like, a third of their people in the process.
And what Rajavi does is, he says that part of the reason that they lost in this invasion, which was called Operation Eternal Light, was not that it was, you know, an insane invasion in the first place.
It was because they lacked proper military discipline, and they had uniforms, and they called themselves the National Liberation Army, and had lots of military material from Saddam.
But they said that they lacked military discipline, and the reason why was because of love, because they had too many families there, they had too many friends, they had too many men and women together.
And so, what Rajavi does is, he turns, he forces everyone to get divorced, and adopt celibacy.
They would claim that this is just normal military procedures, but, you know, we know that they don't actually mandate divorce, for instance, in our military.
So, they mandate divorce, they mandate celibacy, they take the children and send them to Europe.
Actually, the sending of children to Europe happened around the 1991 invasion.
And these were just first steps of turning the group into a cult.
Now, they'll deny it, when I've spoken with, you know, for instance, one of the spokesmen for the MEK said, well, the desert of Iraq just can't support family life.
Well, I'm sure if you asked any Iraqi family who lives in the desert of Iraq whether it can, I think they'd disagree.
So, no one wants to be called a cult, and so, of course, they deny it.
So, other things that the group did, they have what's called an emotional isolation.
This is a term in cult studies where it's disconnecting people from friends, family, relatives.
They limited access to media, mostly focusing on their own MEK-created media, sleep deprivation, food deprivation.
Make work.
Make work projects can be done to glorify the cult.
And so, you can see that all across Camp Ashraf, which is this little town in the middle of the desert that just pops up in the middle of the desert and has these beautiful fountains everywhere, monuments.
And so, a lot of make work projects were just to support their own sense of grandeur.
And then they have these things called sessions.
And so, one of the things that the cults do is a lot of social cruelty.
So, one of the things that MEK does is they're called sessions, and they're in small, large, different size groups, different frequencies of time.
Bring people together, and one of the things that they do is ask people to record and then report their sexual thoughts.
Again, this is in a world of forced celibacy.
They then require people to admit to their sexual thoughts and then get jeered for having sexual thoughts.
But then if someone denies sexual thoughts, they get jeered, too, because obviously they're lying.
These are the types of practices.
I've heard lots of reports from former members of people being detained for some period of time.
Some of the more extreme stories, I'm not always sure what to trust, of course.
When I was there at Camp Ashraf in 2007, I saw, for instance, how the gas station has segregated hours, how men and women are not allowed to actually have physical contact.
It turns out that people, if they want to talk to each other, had to get permission through their commander.
The individual places where people slept were mini-camps that were fenced in to keep people in, and there were lots of people who escaped to the American facility nearby.
When they escaped, it was like a jailbreak kind of escape.
It was exciting stories of running away through the night to avoid MEK guards.
It was like fleeing from East Germany or something back in the 80s, right?
Yeah, it was really the stuff of high adventure.
Is it possible, then, that the plan of the U.S. government here in moving them from Camp Ashraf to Camp Liberty and then eventually out of Iraq before Maliki kills them all, is it maybe the plan is to kick them out a few at a time and to sort of break up the group and to set these people free?
Am I just lost in the fantasy that Hillary Clinton cares at all, or what?
No, I think this is one of those situations where actually the likelihood probably matches with the best outcome.
It may be possible that some country will decide that they really want to have 3,000 members of a cult group that was on a terrorist list.
Maybe they have sufficient resources.
Maybe some country's leaders will be bribed into giving passports to 3,000 people or 1,000 people or 500 people.
I suppose that's in the realm of possibility.
I'd be surprised.
I expect that when countries raise their hands, they will raise their hands for like three people, five people, maybe 20 people.
Just a small number.
Then the possibility of folks branching out onto their own and maybe getting some cult deprogramming becomes possible.
I also think that the State Department wants what it has wanted for a very long time, which is to have this issue off its plate, which is pretty understandable.
As far as how violent they aren't anymore and all that, where we started this conversation, you referred to that NBC report from February of this year about the Mossad using the MEK to assassinate nuclear scientists and others inside Iran.
The thing about that story was, I think Seymour Hersh probably knew what he was talking about.
In fact, I think Scott Ritter probably knew what he was talking about when he wrote in 2005 that MEK was working for Donald Rumsfeld and setting off bombs in Iran.
My own wife, Larissa Alexandrovna, reported in 2006, I believe it was, in two different reports about the Defense Department using them for at least intelligence missions inside Iran, although I don't think she could confirm violent acts at that time.
But anyway, the thing about that NBC piece from February is that it came from the White House.
This was clearly an extremely authorized leak.
This wasn't Bradley Manning heroically liberated this truth and uploaded it to WikiLeaks.
This was Barack Obama was trying to put off Benjamin Netanyahu, and this was one of the pawns that he played in his chess game.
Hey, did I ever tell you all about that time that Netanyahu used the MEK to kill all those scientists?
And that shut him up for a couple of weeks, right?
That was the context in which that report came out.
It came from the White House.
I don't know the specifics of exactly how it came out, but I think that what you said is totally plausible.
Well, at least it was clear, wasn't it, that it was one of those very authorized stories in the news rather than something that was wrung out of a mid-level source somewhere?
Yeah, it absolutely smelled like it.
It's really interesting to see how that goes.
I do wonder if the lawyers were involved in saying, well, are we talking about terrorism or are we talking about violence?
And if we're talking about if it's terrorism, does terrorism count when it's against a government target?
Does that terrorism have to be against the public?
Because there is, of course, that whole dialogue and debate about what counts.
Wouldn't it be hilarious if they ever had to ask themselves, would it be terrorism if the Iranians hired a communist terrorist cult to shoot American nuclear scientists on their way to work at Los Alamos, for example?
Yeah, it would be like, that's not terrorism, that's just an act of war.
We'd be dropping hydrogen bombs on them in a day.
Yeah, reversing the hypotheticals on what we've done regarding Iran and then get mad when they get mad at us is kind of ridiculous.
There's a bunch of interesting looks at that.
Tom Englehart had one on Tom Dispatch and I've seen some others elsewhere that look at the long list of it, add the sanctions, add the greater naval presence in the Persian Gulf, and the fact that we have contracts developing to build new naval vessels, that at least their public sales pitch is that we need them in order to have close-in patrolling of the Iranian coast.
It's pretty intense.
One of the things I find interesting here is that at least in years past, people would talk about the effect that removing the MEK from the list would have on the Iranian government and on the Iranian people.
Would it annoy the government too much?
And from what we're talking about now, it shows it's a drop in the bucket from the things that we do if we are concerned about how we press the Iranian regime up against the wall and what might be ramifications of that.
The other one I find kind of interesting is the people.
We wonder are we going to have any greater or lesser legitimacy as people dedicated to democracy among the Iranian people.
But with the sanctions and with a lot of other both actual and perceived American policies in the Middle East, I can't really imagine that the Iranian people would have really seen us as saviors or sort of even honest brokers.
That said, I'm sure that the regime will make a lot of hay among the Iranian people just to say that taking them off the list somehow shows that we're not honest brokers.
One thing I think the State Department does need to do.
But yeah, we're not.
That's the whole thing.
The leverets, Flint and Hillary Mann leveret, both of them former National Security Council level people, different jobs but that kind of level, in the Bush years, they keep the blog Race for Rent and they say this is the ultimate in the moral and strategic bankruptcy of the American policy.
They're not just how wrong it is but how completely stupid it is to back the MEK like this.
And I think what the State needs to do, I don't know if it kind of will do or even if it kind of can, is blow the horn again and again and again and again to say that this is not about supporting the MEK.
This is just removing a group from the terrorist list doesn't mean you like the group.
But the Iranian regime will probably make it sound like we do and the MEK I think will try to make it sound like we do.
General McInerney, the Air Force guy, Fox News watchers might know who I'm talking about.
A real warmonger.
He was cited I think at the Foreign Policy Initiative at a pro-MEK rally and the guys at NIAC, the National Iranian American Council, had quoted him talking about we need to delist these guys so that we can use them as terrorists without breaking the law.
Right now it's against the law to use them but once we delist them then we can use them in what he called tit-for-tat attacks against Iran which he didn't explain what attacks Iran has been committing but still.
One of the things I found really interesting when doing the research for the report I did when I was at RAND was the mixtures of opinion among military officers and some intelligence officials about the value of the MEK of what it can do and you had some people who thought that it would be really useful and most thought that they were pretty useless and a few were very cold-minded and thought that they would be useful as bullet catchers so that there would be less American dead, more of them.
But in the event of what conflict, right?
Yeah, there are some people who seem to really like the idea of an invasion of Iran.
Boy, oh boy.
Well, you know, I talked one time long ago with Wayne White, a former State Department guy and it was supposed to be an Iran interview but it ended up so much about the beginning of the Iran-Iraq war and how Saddam Hussein thought he was going to roll right in and that, you know, just like you talked about, MEK believed at the end of the Iran-Iraq war that they were going to somehow be able to stroll right in where Saddam had failed and, you know, well, the point being it didn't work out very well for either of them.
No, no, and, you know, for people who think about us invading Iran and if they're thinking about the first couple of months of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, well, I mean, yeah, we probably with our vastly overwhelming force could roll right in but then, you know, what next?
What will the next many years be of many years of violence and sectarian strife and insurgency and terrorism and there's no way it could be any better than, even if it was better planned, I think there's no way it could actually be a better outcome than what happened in Iraq or even Afghanistan except expect it would be terrible.
But then I think people have a tendency to look at things in rosy, that'll be better this time, ways.
All right, we're way over time.
I've got to go.
Thank you so much for your time, Jeremiah.
I appreciate it.
Thanks for having me, Scott.
Everybody, this is Jeremiah Gulka.
His website is jeremiahgulka.com and you can find his writing at Tom Dispatch and especially you can find his MEK work at rand.org, the Mujahideen e-calk in Iraq.
That's it for the radio show tonight.
Thanks, everybody, for listening.
I'm Scott Horton.
My website is scotthorton.org.
My full archive of interviews, more than 2,500 going back to 2003, are available there.
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