For Pacifica Radio, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
Alright y'all, welcome to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio, here on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
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I'm Scott Horton.
I keep all my archives.
More than 2,000 interviews now at antiwar.com/radio.
And our guest tonight is Reza Marashi.
He is Research Director at NIAC, the National Iranian American Council.
He spent four years in the Office of Iranian Affairs at the U.S. Department of State.
And he's got a brand new article in the Huffington Post called Money vs.
Facts.
The Mujahideen e-calk is a terrorist organization.
Welcome to the show, Reza.
How are you doing?
I'm doing well.
Thanks for having me.
Well, you're welcome.
Thank you very much for joining us.
I appreciate having you on here.
And I really want you to win this fight.
It is a fight.
It's not just an article you wrote.
You are part of the National Iranian American Council, and it really is sort of you guys in mortal combat to see if you can keep the Mujahideen e-calk on the terrorism list, which would prevent, I'm not exactly sure what, but take it from there.
What's going on here?
Sure.
Well, you know, I'd like to think that my organization is definitely at the forefront of trying to provide information and fill an information gap.
And perhaps most importantly, say a lot of the things that my former colleagues think but can't say, my former government colleagues.
You know, this is not just a battle to ensure that the laws are upheld and properly enforced here in the United States, but it's also trying to separate back from fiction.
This is an organization that has been designated as a terrorist organization by the United States since the idea or the existence of a terrorist list existed.
So what do they do in response?
Just to give you an example, they put out information that's misleading and completely contradictory to the facts.
They say they designated a terrorist organization as an olive branch to the Iranian government in 1997.
Right.
They do say that.
Couldn't be further from the truth.
You talk to anybody that worked at the State Department in 1997, they say no, the terrorist list was created in 1997.
They were an inaugural member, and they've been a member ever since.
But again, when nobody's talking about this group except this group, it allows them to build a groundswell of support.
And the way that they build that groundswell of support, according to Obama administration officials in a recent NBC report, is through financial, military, and training support from the Israeli government.
And this is their word, not mine.
As a result of that, the money that they receive, they've been able to buy off very high-level former government officials, both Republican and Democrat, but they focus mostly on Democrat, because we have a Democratic administration right now, to try and exert political pressure and raise the cost of keeping this group on the list.
We've really never seen anything like it before.
So we're in uncharted waters.
And the last thing that I would add, and perhaps the most troubling, is they present themselves as a Democratic alternative to the Iranian regime.
This couldn't be further from the case.
From monarchist to mullah, everyone agrees.
This is one of maybe two or three things that everybody agrees on.
Nobody likes this group.
They have zero popularity inside of Iran, and they're perhaps the only group that Iranians hate more than the regime itself.
They're not the Democratic alternative to Iran.
They are a terrorist organization.
So putting out the proper information to inform not only the American people of what they are, but what they're trying to do, has been a task that has been not only Herculean, but also of the vital importance that my former colleagues in the U.S. government are quite appreciative of, not only what we've been doing, but also very hard-working journalists and other analysts in the Beltway as well.
Well, and you've got quite a battle on your hands, because it's not just the Mujahedin-e-Khalq speaking for themselves, or I guess it's a certain point of view, the way you define it, but they have found all sorts of prominent Republicans and Democrats, governors and heads of homeland security, and sometimes both, generals and America's mayor, and all of these people, to be their sock puppet.
That's right.
It's nothing short of astounding that former U.S. government officials, particularly New York's mayor during 9-11 of all people, are now shilling for a list of an organization that has been on America's terrorist list since 1997.
But this is the difference between money versus facts.
And they've been very savvy.
The M.E.K., as we call them for short, the Mujahedin-e-Khalq, or the M.E.K. for short, the M.E.K. has been very savvy about taking advantage of loopholes in America's political system, particularly on Capitol Hill, where oftentimes individuals are sold to the highest bidder and moving forward accordingly.
And as a result of that, we find ourselves in the position that we're in.
These high-level officials, very recently, within the last week, have started to get subpoenaed by the Department of Treasury in an office that's called the Office of Foreign Asset Control, because it is, in fact, illegal to provide coordination or receive financial support from a designated terrorist organization.
These people, if they didn't know this, only had to do a Google search that wouldn't take any longer than 30 seconds.
But these are former U.S. government officials.
They know people at the State Department that they can call.
And I know people personally that did call the State Department and were informed properly and turned down heavy sums of money.
Well, look, wait a minute.
When it's leaked or announced that the Treasury Department is investigating a former governor of a state for something like this, then that's not a matter of criminal law being enforced by the law.
That's political.
Somebody decided what?
That Ed Rendell is expendable enough that they can make a move against the Mujahideen by making a move against him?
No.
Who's doing this?
It's not like J. Edgar Hoover's up there and the FBI is independent of the rest of the state apparatus.
Well, it's actually a good question.
And, you know, if I was to look at this just at face value and see Rendell as the only person that's been named publicly so far, I might think the same.
But I've done a little bit of digging, and there was another NBC report that came out today that said he's not the only individual that's been subpoenaed.
Apparently, they have subpoenaed speaking agencies that these individuals work for, and as a result, subsequently, the subpoena applies to the individual like Rendell and others.
So they haven't targeted Rendell.
They've targeted the people that have taken the MEK's money through the speaking agencies, because they're trying to figure out how a designated terrorist organization is, A, getting money, and, B, how they're supplying money to these individuals, because this is all against the law.
Well, I think you already solved that puzzle.
They're getting the money from the Israelis.
That's their payment for the assassinations of all the scientists.
But I want to get back to that, actually.
And who knows?
I mean, maybe there's, you may know other sources of their funding.
But I think we kind of need to rewind just a little bit and catch people up.
Again, it's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Reza Marashi.
He's a former State Department official who's now at the National Iranian American Council.
And we're talking about the Mujahideen-e-Khalq communist terrorist cult.
They used to work for the Ayatollah in the revolution against the American sock puppet, the Shah Pahlavi, back in 1979.
And that's how they got the real designation in the first place was attacking and killing American State Department and military officials in Iran at the time.
But then the Ayatollah turned on them.
So they left to Iraq, where they were traitors against Iran and fought on the side of America and Saddam Hussein against Iran in the Iran-Iraq war.
And then after America finally invaded and conquered Baghdad in 2003, we took over.
America took over responsibility for this group and kept them at this place called Camp Ashraf.
And they were used in the mid last decade for at least intelligence missions inside Iran by American military and intelligence agencies.
My wife, Larissa Alexandrovna, reported that in 2006.
A couple of great articles at rawstory.com about that.
And then recently, as our guest was saying, they've been reported by NBC.
And this is political, too.
NBC doesn't do a report like this.
I'm the kind of thing that we've been talking about at antiwar.com for years and years.
It's never made NBC.
But all of a sudden it's on NBC that the M.E.K. are doing the assassinations for the Mossad inside Iran.
And Robert Baer came on TV, the former CIA officer, and said that, well, look, they're killing these junior people.
It's not like they're really degrading Iran's nuclear program with these assassinations.
They're trying to provoke a response.
They're trying to get Iran to think it's the United States and strike back against an American target in the region and get America into a war here.
That's who the Mujahedini caulk is.
They're the murderer, truck bomber, sock puppets of whoever's more brutal and has more money right now.
And they got former governors and generals representing them.
And you can read all about this, especially in the Christian Science Monitor, Scott Peterson's great work.
And I interviewed him about at the time where he just did this extended treatment of all the money being paid to people like Rudy Giuliani and General Michael Hayden, the guy that was torturing people and tapping your phone for George W. Bush and all of these guys.
Tom Ridge from Homeland Security and the former governor of Pennsylvania and Howard Dean, supposed anti-war candidate of 2004, representing the Mujahedini caulk.
And so that's who we're talking about now.
And so now I'm sorry for all of that, but I was hoping I could try to catch people up real quick.
Would that take three minutes or something?
Maybe a little more.
But so I'm talking with Reza Marashi from the National Iranian American Council.
And I guess you can correct me if I'm wrong or disagree with any of that.
I'll give you an opportunity for that before I ask you about the status of their PR campaign now that it's come out that there's this investigation by Treasury.
Does that mean that they're in real trouble?
Are there any indications of that yet?
You're asking two great questions.
I would say the most important thing that you said when you gave your summary is that these guys are the most unsavory of unsavory groups.
And they have been since their inception.
And they're at a point now where through the funding that they're receiving reportedly from U.S. government sources, this is not information I've seen.
I'm seeing the same reports in NBC that everybody else is.
But this is what it says.
They're receiving this money from the Israeli government.
They're able to attempt to beef up their credibility, since they don't have any, as a democratic alternative to the Iranian regime.
And they try to make it seem like keeping them on the terrorist list, which the facts of this case are indisputable that they should be on the terrorist list.
Keeping them on the terrorist list stunts democratic development in Iran, when in fact they are the antithesis of democratic development in Iran.
So that's the point that you highlighted that I think stands out above all else.
Now to your next question, which is how will recent developments affect their PR campaign, I think that it's going to force them to adjust.
The walls are closing in on this group.
They have their run.
It doesn't mean that the final nail has been put into their proverbial coffin.
But their wiggle room is slowly receding.
And the U.S. government, I think, is operating on a correct premise, which is twofold.
One, ensure that they don't have any wiggle room, that they can't get out of this.
They have made their bed, and now they are going to sleep in it.
And by methodically chipping away at the infrastructure that they've set up to accomplish what they've accomplished thus far in Washington, both on Capitol Hill and with former government officials, is a very important first step in that regard.
But I think the U.S. government also is cognizant of the fact that a significant majority of individuals that have been in Camp Ashraf were either tricked to come there and or are being held there against their will.
So ensuring that there is a humanitarian process put in place to independently interview these individuals with the Human Rights Organization or the International Red Cross, Red Crescent, to see are you being held there against your will, how can we best protect your human rights.
How do you relocate these people when no country really wants to take them in?
Well, that's really the emergency from the MEK leadership's point of view, right, is that these people who are stranded at Camp Ashraf there, now that the Americans have been kicked out, they're not really protected anymore.
They've got to make a transition here pretty quick.
But as long as they're terrorists, they're not really free to go as a group, as long as they're defined as terrorists.
They're not free to go as a group, only the people are being set free.
Basically, these cult captives are being set free one at a time, scattered to the wind, and out of control of Madam President.
Well, two important points there.
One, they've never been truly protected by the United States.
You know, there might have been some neoconservative officials that thought that they could be used as a pressure against the Iranian regime.
But the MEK says, with something that is incredibly false, it's a blatant lie, that they were granted protected person status under the Geneva Convention.
The State Department last year came out and very publicly on the record said that that is false.
They were never granted protected person status under the Geneva Convention.
It was basically the United States government telling the Iraqi government, you cannot forcibly kick them out, you cannot send them back to Iran against their will, we have to find some kind of peaceful solution to this crisis.
And I think that's reasonable.
Yes, we would prefer there to be a peaceful solution to the crisis, but it takes two to tango.
The MEK is not interested in a peaceful solution to this crisis.
There are serious concerns within the U.S. government that these guys are going to create a violent outcome to this situation, irrespective of what happens.
So if the MEK agrees to relocate and move out of Camp Ashraf into Camp Liberty, which they've tacitly agreed to do, the U.S. government is afraid that they're eventually going to cut off the amount of people they ship out and get violent.
Or, if they don't move out of Camp Ashraf and they stay, then they're afraid that the Iraqi government, and perhaps the Iranian government, might end up getting violent.
Or the MEK might get violent in a desire to draw in the Iraqis and create a violent situation.
Why?
Because what they want to do above all else is place the blame of their own situation, their own bed that they've made.
They want to make it seem like it's America's fault.
America didn't protect us.
America broke its promise.
America is violating human rights, when the fact of the matter is you're a terrorist organization.
The rules of the game change when you're talking about terrorists.
They just do.
And PR can only take you so far.
And finally, the United States government is starting to push back.
Finally, the United States government is starting to put out information that runs counter, and they're trying to win the battle of ideas.
They didn't think they'd have to.
It should have never come to this.
So does that mean Hillary Clinton doesn't want to delist them, but she's just under all this pressure?
Is that what you're trying to tell me?
I'm telling you that I don't know a single person at the State Department that wants to delist the MEK, because the facts are the facts.
But Hillary Clinton is a political appointee, and she not only has to take into consideration the facts, she has to take into consideration how to best implement the facts within the existing political context.
And that brings up the question of the influence of the Israel lobby, because of course if the MEK is really that useful as assassins for the Mossad, then they probably have a different agenda than it sounds like you're saying your former colleagues at the State Department have.
And so whatever the government of Israel's agenda is, particularly when it's run by the Likud party, that's also the agenda of the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee on Capitol Hill, no?
Well, I think it's safe to say that there are multiple functional issues within the broader Iran issue where the United States and Israel do not agree.
President Obama made that very clear, not only in his speech to AIPAC, but his subsequent comments over the last week or so.
But does that include their status as terrorists on the official designated terrorist list of the State Department?
It certainly seems to be the case, given their financial and logistical support for the MEK, whereas the United States has in fact kept them on the terrorist list up to this point.
I think it's very telling that senior-level Obama administration officials leaked that first story, two stories to NBC, but the first story is the one where they explicitly said that it was the Israelis that were providing the MEK with the means to carry out these politically motivated assassinations.
Which, coincidentally, is the definition of terrorism.
So, you know, if the MEK is saying, you know, we renounced violence starting in 2003, well, clearly not.
And unfortunately, this also fits the definition of state sponsorship of terrorism on the part of the Israeli government, if these reports from the Obama administration are true.
And, you know, that's, I mean, look, Israel prides itself on the fact that it is the only democracy in the Middle East.
And this kind of behavior is unbefitting of a country that considers itself to be the only democracy in the Middle East.
So Israel knows what the rules of the game are.
And if, in fact, they are funding, arming, and training the MEK, then they need to take a step back and realign themselves with what America's policy is.
Because, you know, like President Obama said, you know, nobody else has Israel's back except for us.
So if they get out too far in front, then they're actually hurting their own cause more than helping it.
Well, and, of course, this is the big complaint about Iran all the time that supposedly would justify this kind of thing, is that Iran backs Hezbollah.
Because, after all, even when it comes down to it, even Netanyahu says, oh, well, it's not that they're an existential threat.
It's just that we want to be able to start a war against Hezbollah whenever we want and not have to worry about what the Iranians might do.
That's why they can't have nukes.
It's not because we think they'll attack us.
Anything like that.
I've always said that, you know, there are so many things, whether it's the hostage crisis to Iran's state-sponsored terrorism, to its nuclear program now, that have been significant challenges to America's Iran policy, significant challenges to America's foreign policy and national security.
The MEK and its designation as a terrorist organization is one of the few clear issues about America's Iran policy.
So that's all the more reason for the Israelis to fall in line.
It's sort of tragedy and farce with the Iraqi National Congress, right?
Which was sponsored by the Ayatollah, I guess.
Their headquarters was in Iran, right?
But the MEK is basically trying to be like the INC, but they're just not pulling it off.
You're absolutely right on that point.
I firmly believe that the primary reason why the MEK has sought to get off the terrorist list is because once they do, then their bot supporters in Congress can create legislation that would fund them in much the same way that the Iraqi National Congress has created.
This is a script that the neoconservatives in Washington ran off to a T.
Ran off to a T on Iraq.
And I'm not sitting here and saying that's what the neoconservatives in Washington are trying to do, but somebody's trying to do it.
Where are these guys getting the money?
And now that we're starting to get a clearer idea of where the money's coming from, and rest assured, more information is going to come out now that the subpoenas have been issued, and the information has to be provided to the Treasury Department.
We're going to find out where this money is coming from.
And when we do, somebody or some country or some countries, it might not just be Israel.
It could be other countries, too.
The Saudi Arabians aren't getting along with the Iranians very well right now.
I'm not going to sit here and tell you that I've heard anything about the Saudis doing it.
I haven't.
But what if?
So, you know, we need to take a step back and figure out what we do know versus what we don't, but we also need to notice trends when they're happening.
And if we've seen this play out before, which we did on Iraq, then let's call a spade a spade and nip it in the bud before we make the same mistake twice.
Well, and I think you kind of got to hand it to them or to whoever's helping them, and maybe this is one of those paths we can follow.
They seem to know what they're doing when they get Howard Dean and Tom Ridge, when they get General Wesley Clark and Mayor Giuliani to all be their front men.
They've bought bipartisan legitimacy.
And, yeah, I don't know.
It doesn't sound like that sophisticated of a plan, but in terms of American politics, that's pretty sophisticated, trying to get out ahead of everybody's parade like that and make friends with everybody with the most power all at once like that.
And I don't know.
Do you think that is an angle that can be followed toward, you know, who exactly is running their PR firms or that kind of question?
I think that, you know, they know how Congress works and they have money.
And anybody that knows how Congress works and has the money can do what they've done on this issue or any issue, really.
I mean, they must have some real powerful friends from before they hired all these people because they're allowed on Capitol Hill in the first place.
Well, it's a good question.
You know, there have been FBI reports that have been leaked out to the Internet from the 90s and early 2000s that have done serious investigative work tracking the various front groups and what their activities have been.
And then when Colin Powell was Secretary of State, their offices in Washington as the NCRI got shut down.
This was under the Bush administration, which had an openly stated policy of regime change on Iran.
So then what did they end up doing?
Then they ended up creating these shell organizations out of the blue that oftentimes coincidentally have the same address for, you know, the MEK's office in Paris or the same address as, you know, the MEK's shell groups in Washington.
They didn't even move offices in Washington.
They kept the same offices with a different name, but they were so irrelevant that nobody spent any time trying to push back.
Because at the end of the day, if you're the U.S. government, you've got to put out so many different fires.
So what requires your attention the most, that's what you're going to focus on.
So until a critical mass was established, until this became an issue that they couldn't ignore anymore, you know, beyond a reasonable doubt, it just wasn't a top priority.
And as a result of the information campaign that was put forward by a coalition of forces, NIAC, including others, we made it an issue that they couldn't ignore anymore.
And, you know, they've taken the ball and they've ran with it.
And they deserve credit for what they've been doing up to this point, the administration does.
Well, you know, one of the reasons that they've always drawn our attention at Antiwar.com is because our business is debunking war propaganda.
And they're always at the forefront of it.
For years and years, we've been able to read ridiculous lies in the Sunday Times that always come from the MEK and always are about, you don't set off a nuclear bomb that way.
Or always about, come on, the CIA has known about those tunnels outside of Tehran for years and years.
And there's nothing secret and nuclear going on in there.
And it's always a bunch of war propaganda, you know, as in it's never true.
But it's steady.
And they really have helped to provide the background of lies, just like the INC did, in fact, back in Iraq ten years ago.
You know, the narrative, they've helped to establish the narrative of Iran's nuclear perfidy, even where American intelligence agencies and Israeli intelligence agencies now admit they can't find it.
Yeah, well, I agree with you on everything you said except for the very last point.
They don't have the infrastructure in place or the capabilities to acquire this information about Iran on their own.
It's widely understood within the U.S. government that a foreign government is providing them with this information because it will be digested in Washington better if it comes from an Iranian base, quote-unquote, as opposed to a foreign government.
But no, they don't have the capability.
Any intelligence that they're providing, any information that they're breaking, things like that, it's coming from a foreign government that says this will be taken more seriously if it doesn't come from us.
Right, and a foreign government meaning Israel.
Well, that's what the NBC report states.
That's what senior Obama administration officials are telling NBC.
Well, and it is always just a bunch of bogus war propaganda.
Like, I remember one in the Sunday Times was about a test for how to cut these grooves in a sphere of enriched uranium and then just line it with det cord, and you can set off a nuke that way, that kind of thing.
Our nuclear scientist at antiwar.com, Dr. Gordon Prather, had a good guffaw about that one.
And it's always war propaganda of that nature, but as long as there's a steady drumbeat, people get the issue nice and confused, and I guess that's all that really counts.
But I'm sorry, we're all out of time for tonight.
I want to thank you very much for your time on the show, Reza.
Thank you so much for having me.
Hope to do it again soon.
And everybody, that is Reza Marashi from the National Iranian American Council.
He's their research director after spending four years at the Office of Iranian Affairs at the U.S. Department of State.
The article is Money vs.
Facts.
The Mujahideen-e-Khalq is a terrorist organization.
This has been Antiwar Radio for March 16, 2012.
Thanks, everybody, for listening.
We're here every Friday on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA from 6.30 to 7.
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