All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
And so last week I interviewed a young man named Sean Amui from the Huffington Post about the Mujahideen-e-Khalq and they didn't like it at all.
They came and they threatened him on my anti-war radio blog.
And that made me angry.
So this week I'm going to do at least one interview every day about the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, which Hillary Clinton is about to make a decision.
It looks like all sources seem to indicate delisting them from the state department's list of officially designated terrorist organizations.
And that seems like a bad idea to me.
So we're going to do our part here on anti-war radio to get a real understanding of who these people are, as opposed to what their K Street lobbyists would like to pay people to portray in various comment sections and so forth.
To that end, I now would like to welcome Trita Parsi to the show.
He's the author of the book Treacherous Alliance, and he is the founder and the president of the National Iranian American Council.
Welcome to the show, Trita.
How are you doing?
Good, good.
Thank you so much for having me.
Always a pleasure to be on your show, Scott.
Well, I'm really happy to have you here.
And I thought, you know, immediately these M.E.K. types in the comment section were talking about how I work for the Ayatollah.
And I thought, really?
That's funny.
And then they said, yeah, Trita Parsi works for the Ayatollah, too.
And that's why Sean Amawi says the things he says.
So I was wondering, maybe for our first question, I would ask you, is it any more true that you work for the Ayatollah than that I do?
Obviously, both statements are completely false.
I clearly do not work for the Ayatollah.
In fact, a lot of the work my organization does in Washington, D.C. has been aimed at the human rights abuses of the regime in Tehran, for instance.
But unfortunately, and this is actually documented by the FBI, the Mujahideen Haq has one kind of a strategy and one kind alone, and that is to attack, defame, characterize, and anyone who dares to question them.
And they do so by accusing that person of being a collaborator or working for the regime in Tehran, regardless of how ridiculous that claim would be.
They do that.
And they've done against me and my organization for quite some time.
And I also see now how when a larger number of American journalists with no connection to Iranian culture or anything like that have written about them, they've also gotten the same accusations.
And apparently you did as well, Scott.
Yeah, well, if I work for any state, I want my pay increased.
I mean, if they have tax money at their disposal, I want my share of the dividends here.
No, I'm just kidding.
So listen, here's the thing.
Sean was on the show, Sean Amowie, saying that basically what you just said, the MEK hurts the moderate opposition.
Anyone who wants reform, whether in the diaspora or inside Iran, anyone who is against the regime there is weakened by the MEK, one, because the regime there gets to conflate any dissent with MEK-like terrorists and backed by foreign states and so forth.
And two, because they spend the rest of their free time and they're not funneling bogus Israeli intelligence about Iran's nuclear program into the Sunday Times or something.
They sit around attacking every dissident group that isn't them.
I think what Sean is saying is very much true, and perhaps I can give a little bit of a historic context to this also as to why they are such a threat to the democratic opposition.
First of all, the regime really needs the MEK, just as much as the regime needs an American enemy or some sort of external enemy in order to be able to securitize the atmosphere inside of Iran and essentially dismiss all arguments against the regime by saying, well, look, we're under the threat of war.
And as a result, we don't have time for freedoms and things like that.
Right now, we all have to focus on this external threat just as much as they need not.
And when they don't have it, they invent it.
They also need to have a violent opposition.
And this is why the Green Movement was such a potent threat to the regime, because it was a nonviolent movement.
It was not going into Iran with tanks and grenades.
It was actually asking for its votes to be counted.
It was protesting peacefully.
The peaceful, nonviolent opposition to the regime has three significant benefits vis-a-vis the regime.
First of all, by pursuing a nonviolent campaign, you keep the moral higher ground.
On a tactical level, it's also beneficial to pursue a nonviolent campaign because even if violence can overthrow a government, it cannot establish a democracy.
And we saw that very clearly in Iran in 1979.
The revolution was violent.
It was undemocratic.
It was very radical.
And as a result, what's replaced the dictatorship of the Shah was another dictatorship.
Only through a nonviolent campaign will there be greater control of any change in government that ensures that it's actually not the radical people that come to power, but the moderate people.
And here, the Mujahideen has actually played an extremely negative role.
The Mujahideen was the first organization in Iran back in the 1960s to start using violence against the regime of the Shah.
They were the first group to introduce suicide bombings into Iran, blowing themselves up and trying to kill as many people from the government as possible.
So they've had this effect of constantly radicalizing the political discourse, as well as making it more violent, which only have been to the detriment of the pro-democracy movement.
That's part of the reason why you will see today in the Financial Times a list of, I believe, 37 prominent experts on Iran, as well as people from the Green Movement and pro-democracy movement and human rights defenders, signing an expert statement against the Mujahideen and calling them a threat to the democratization process in Iran.
That's in the Financial Times today.
That's in the Financial Times today, or it will be out tomorrow.
I think I got a Google ticket to say that it's out today, actually.
OK, now, and this is extremely important because Hillary Clinton, as mentioned, is considering delisting the MEK from the officially designated terrorist groups list.
There's a piece today which you guys highlight at your website in the Huffington Post about these, most of them Republicans and neocons, of course, Bill Richardson, Howard Dean in there, too, are getting paid a lot of money to go around propagandizing for the MEK.
And I wanted to talk with you about what people in the audience can do to actually stop the MEK from being delisted in the next 10 days or so.
I think that article that you mentioned in the Huffington Post by Christina Wilkie is a tremendous good start for people just to educate themselves about what is happening.
It's probably the most thorough article so far on what appears to be the illegal lobbying activities of this organization through various financial acrobatics.
They are giving six figure sums to former U.S. officials ranging from John Bolton to Howard Dean to come out and speak on their favor and muster an amazing lobbying campaign to get off the list.
Now, personally, I would have to say I think there absolutely needs to exist a legal recourse for any group that ends up on the terrorist list to be able to challenge it or to be able to question it.
But those recourses cannot include illegal lobbying activities, which is what we're seeing right here.
And as a result, it really puts the significant question on how we're dealing with all of these issues of terrorist organizations, etc.
Because as I wrote early on in the Huffington Post, I've been in Washington for 10 years.
I've never seen any lobbyists for Al-Qaeda.
I've never seen Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad host fundraisers on Capitol Hill.
I've never seen Hamas do conferences on Capitol Hill and calling for the U.S. government to finance it.
But when it comes to the Mujahideen, an organization that is on the exact same list as these other organizations, who has a history of not only violence in Iran, but also having killed several Americans, having called for the U.S. hostages in Iran to be executed and who also celebrated the 9-11 attacks with them.
Strangely enough, you see them hold fundraisers in Washington, D.C.
You see them hold conferences on Capitol Hill and you see their lobbyists everywhere on Capitol Hill as you go there.
And it's just absolutely bizarre why this is being permitted.
Wow, the MEK celebrated the September 11th attacks because they were still working for Saddam Hussein back then?
Back then they were still working for Saddam Hussein.
I also remember that as the talk about war with Iraq began in 2002, the MEK was actually lobbying against it and lobbying for the U.S. to instead bomb Iran.
Well, you know, it's just amazing that we're even having this discussion about these guys may be delisted from the terrorist list when at the State Department website it says, despite U.S. efforts, MEK members have never been brought to justice for the group's role in these illegal acts.
That is killing American military personnel and civilians in Tehran and supporting the overthrow of the U.S. embassy in Tehran.
I mean, wouldn't it be hilarious if the Republican voters of America knew that this is the group that all these Republican politicians are going around backing right now, trying to get delisted?
Well, that's what I think some of these articles in The Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Barbara Slavin wrote a great piece on IPS a couple of months ago.
And this piece in Huffington today goes a long way for people just to find out about this, because part of the reason why this has been able to occur is because even though it was open and people in D.C. all could see it, the big question mark was, why isn't anyone writing about this?
Now they are.
And now the truth is starting to come out.
And we will see if it will have an impact or not.
I suspect it will.
If voters decide to make this an issue, something will happen.
If people start calling their members of Congress and saying, I'm unemployed, I don't have any money right now.
How come it is so that former members of Congress, former officials get fifty thousand, seventy thousand dollars to give a ten minute speech for an organization that is on the U.S. list of terrorist organizations?
How is it that members of Congress sign on to their resolutions in favor of this organization?
And lo and behold, two weeks later, they get a check of a donation from someone who is openly associated with that organization?
Well, I got an idea, too.
I heard a congressman say this years ago, that calls are one thing, but actually telegrams and faxes really make a lot more of a difference, especially when there's a lot of them because they take up actual physical space in the office and the staffer has to pick up the stack and say, Congressman, we got all these today.
And I was thinking, wouldn't it be great if somebody out there still has a fax machine would just fax every congressman's office, the State Department report on the Mujahedini caulk and say, listen, we demand that you call the State Department because that's who has sway at the State Department.
If, you know, if anyone would be angry, congresspeople and have them call and say absolutely not to this because and I need you to explain to about what difference this will really make in D.C. if they are removed from the list.
I mean, this will really put them in the position, put the neocons, the war party in the position of having these guys to serve as an Iraqi National Congress of sorts, much more so than they do now to help lie us into a war with Iran.
Well, the plan clearly seems to be, and in fact, has been confirmed to us that once you take them off the list, they will be eligible for funding and potentially also receiving other type of material support.
And the plan apparently is to follow the model of the Charlie Wilson's war of getting the Mujahedin to be some sort of a guerrilla group that the U.S. would support to essentially start a proxy war with Iran on Iranian territory.
Part of the reason why I'm very skeptical about how this would work out is because I don't see this at all being able to be contained to some sort of a guerrilla war.
It will most likely escalate into a full blown war, even if that may not be the actual intent right now by some of the backers of the Mujahedin.
I believe that will be the most likely outcome.
Well, and there are people in the U.S. and in Israel who have never stopped pushing for a war with Iran, have never stopped lying about their nuclear program, their support for our friends, which they pretend are our enemies in Iraq, et cetera.
And of course, there were all those quotes in the Israeli papers a couple of months ago about Meir Dagan, the former head of Mossad, saying he thinks Netanyahu's crazy and that he might just do it this September in order to avoid a general assembly debate on a Palestinian state.
It's important to also be a little bit careful and not necessarily linking this entirely to some of these conversations about the nuclear issue.
I think there are some legitimate concerns about what's happening in Iran when it comes to the nuclear issue.
But at the same time, the question that consistently needs to be asked, and I think you ask it all the time, is even if there's a significant problem there, what is the evidence?
What is the empirical support to believe that a military campaign is the answer to that question?
This is why I get so frustrated when I hear people talk about a military option, a military solution, you know, just a term, a military solution that assumes that success is 100 percent guaranteed because it is a solution.
It's just an option and it's most likely a disastrous option.
Let's not call it a solution.
Yeah, just look at the success of the air war in Libya right now.
I mean, come on, you can't just get what you want from the air.
I guess the only way to take out Natanz with its ceiling, 85 feet of granite that their ceiling is made out of there is probably with nukes.
So, I mean, just right there, there's no reason to think if they bombed Natanz all day, they'd be able to destroy it without, you know, using some super weapons there.
And even if they could, this is where the big problem lies, is that it's not a program that seems to be confined just to Natanz and moreover, the Iranian know how the nuclear fuel cycle is to the level right now that even if it's destroyed, even if you successfully manage to destroy some of the facilities, doesn't mean that the knowledge gets killed.
So, there really doesn't seem to be any...
Can I give you one more segment here, Trita?
Sure.
OK, great.
Hang tight right there.
Everybody, it's Trita Parsi from the National American Iranian Council.
Or the other way around.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Trita Parsi from the National Iranian American Council.
And now, Trita, I just want to say real quick, as far as Iran's nuclear program goes, there's certainly no emergency, whatever concerns there might be as the IAEA has continued to verify the non-diversion of Iran's declared nuclear material to any military or other special purpose.
In other words, every atom of it is accounted for.
And whatever concerns people have, certainly, as you say, could be negotiated away.
Nobody's about to nuke Americans in their jammies in the middle of the night or any such thing like Frank Gaffney and the Kooks would like us to believe.
But I was hoping that you could help me understand where the MEK gets all their money from.
Because there are guys in Iraq who are stranded at this Camp Ashraf, right?
And but apparently they have millions of dollars to spend on full page newspaper ads to pay Republicans and Democrats to go around saying how they should be delisted from the terrorist list.
Who's bankrolling the Mujahideen at Kalk?
No one actually knows right now.
What seems increasingly, however, is that the money that they're spending right now is tenfold what they usually spend and type of money most likely could not have been raised by the, you know, the handful of Mujahideen supporters that exist in the United States or in Europe.
Rather, the rumor is, and I want to be very clear, these are rumors.
I've not seen any particular evidence in favor of any of them.
But there are the plausible rumors, I guess, that people are entertaining in Washington is that they're either getting some support from Israel or from hawkish Israeli organizations, not necessarily the government there, and or from the Saudis.
And then again, it could be how the individuals, just as much as the Saudi individuals were supporting the insurgents in Iraq during the war, whereas it may not have come from the Saudi government.
It was still a Saudi source for it.
I want to emphasize these are the speculations that you hear in this town.
I don't know if either one of them are true, but absent any evidence, this is what people seem to be thinking right now.
All right.
Now, the message board loons that came out for the comment section on Sean Amouy's anti-war radio interview from last week said that the MEK had nothing whatsoever to do with Saddam's suppression of the Kurdish and Shia uprising in Iraq in 1991.
And I was wondering whether you could clear that up.
On the contrary, the CIA itself has documented and has had others, including former members who have spoken about their campaign.
This was not just in 1991, but was throughout the 1990s in which after the war, the first Persian Gulf War, it was increasing movements both by the Shiites and the Kurds to try to create greater autonomy or perhaps even separation from the Saddam regime.
And Saddam used the Mujahideen as his most trusted troops, the ones that would have no reason to say no to him, because without his support, they simply would not be existing.
So this has been very well documented to the extent that it's almost unnecessary to respond to some of those claims on the message board.
Well, they say documented by the CIA.
You can quote a Kurdish politician denying it.
They quote a Kurdish politician saying, oh, no, the MEK are our butts.
Yeah, I don't know what that Kurdish politician is, but you can read the human rights report, the RAND report, the CIA report from the 1990s that talk about this.
In fact, when George Bush was making the case for a war against Iraq, he even mentioned, referred to the Mujahideen as evidence of Saddam's ties to terrorists.
And so I think that says a lot.
Yeah, right.
My evidence of his ties to terrorists.
Great.
Well, and, you know, my wife Larissa Alexandrovna reported at Raw Story back in 2006 that MEK were being used to, you know, her sources were saying that they were being used to set off bombs inside Iran.
I'm, you know, to be frank with you again, I've not seen any evidence myself, but I would not be surprised at all if some of these recent assassinations of scientists in Iran have been conducted by the MEK with some sort of a support from other governments.
Scott Rader back in 2005 wrote in Al Jazeera that they were responsible for some bombings.
I know how he's now disgraced, but I don't know why he should be on that point of fact, you know?
Yeah, I do know that some of the folks in D.C. who tend to support this organization seem to be doing so because they view them as an attractive way of conducting covert military action inside of Iran because it's less risky, less costly than it would be if it was done by the U.S. itself or if it was done by the Israelis.
Well, you know, that brings up an important question, I think, about their marginalization of the moderates.
You know, back to Scott Rader, he said in his book Target Iran that the MEK were well known for being used by the Mossad to launder intelligence into the American intel stream and so forth.
And I wonder whether the purpose of American and or Israeli support for the MEK is really in order to marginalize the moderates, that they really are the enemy of the war part.
As long as there's a green movement there, it makes it harder for us to bomb them and reinstall the monarchists or these folks.
I think it's a very fair question and it makes me think about some of the quotes that came from the members of Congress during a hearing on July 7th about this organization, in which Dana Rohrabacher, a representative from California, said that the reason he actually is attracted, I think he said, about the majority is because they are willing to fight.
And throughout the hearing, they were kind of dismissing and belittling the green movement precisely because it's a nonviolent movement.
And you just think about it in the context of now seeing nonviolent movements in Egypt, in Tunisia, obviously, unfortunately not in the rest of the region, that, you know, there is a shift in the region in the sense that you see that the organizations that are fighting for democracy and human rights are increasingly going in the nonviolent direction.
And in the midst of that, having the U.S. delist and consecutively support a violent organization that has been using violence against the Kurds, the Shias, the Iranians and the United States, what a horrible signal that would be sending to the population in Iran, particularly to the pro-democracy movement that had chosen the nonviolent path.
And now you said at the beginning of the interview that the MEK really got their start fighting against the monarchy of the Shah Reza Pahlavi, but are the MEK and monarchists in the diaspora, are they all buds now?
Officially, I don't think they seem to be that, but when you see some of the attack dogs that the Mujahideen are using, you'd be surprised to see to the extent that the monarchist attack dogs, the Mujahideen attack dogs seem to be coordinating and seem to be on the exact same page.
And also some of the monarchists who wanted to be more accepted by the Greens ended up not being so, and some of them have definitely taken a very anti-Green movement position.
But I think it's more fair that when we talk about the monarchists, to talk about them not as a group, but as a large number of individuals who seem to share some ideas, but there's no real organization there, there's no real guidance there.
Whereas when it comes to the MEK, because it is a cult, because, you know, essentially you will not be able to see them have any divergence within them, at least visible from the outside.
It's much easier to talk to them as a movement that is pursuing a specific agenda.
The monarchists are not organized that way and are actually not particularly organized at all.
So it's more understandable why you would find fringe elements within the monarchists who think they may be speaking for all monarchists, but probably are not.
All right.
And now, yeah, I noticed, well, I asked Nima Shirazi from Why to Sleep in America about what was going on in the comments section there.
And he noticed that one of the comments was left by a guy who's the founder of an organization, he says is called the Pro-Democracy Movement of Iran.
And they have the Lion and the Sun symbol of the Iranian monarchy.
And here this is the guy that shows up to attack Sean Amouy for bashing the MEK.
Certainly, certainly, though, you know, the flag of the Lion and the Sun is actually the ancient Iranian flag.
It's now recently just been associated with the monarchists, but many other groups use that flag as well and recognize that flag to be the real flag of Iran.
All right.
So that might not hold that much water, but still.
All right.
Well, great.
Listen, I really appreciate your time on the show today and all your efforts against the Mujahideen caucus, especially in Washington, D.C.
Good luck keeping them on the terrorist list.
Thank you so much, Scott.
Thank you, Scott.
That's Trita Parsi, everyone from the National Iranian American Council, NIAC.org.
