US Continues to Train Terrorists on its Own Terror List: Report
New report reveals evidence that the US trains, funds Iranian insurgents
- Common Dreams staff
Seymour Hersh, writing for the New Yorker, has released a report today
showing that the US has trained and funded a 'terrorist' organization
in a bid to weaken the Iranian regime. The report uses an array of
sources showing that the US has trained and funded members of the
group know as Mujahideen-e-Khalq (M.E.K), who has become a prominent
insurgent force in Iran.
The Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) conducted training,
beginning in 2005, for M.E.K., in Nevada.
The group's brutal tactics had landed it on the US State Department’s
list of foreign terrorist organizations; however, the report shows
that the US continued to actively support them, and most likely still
maintains close ties.
As Glenn Greenwald points out today, "Worse, this reportedly happened
at the very same time that the U.S. aggressively prosecuted and
imprisoned numerous Muslims for providing material support for groups
on that list even though many of those prosecuted provided support
that was far, far less than what the U.S. Government itself was
providing to MEK."
* * *
Our Men in Iran? (Seymour Hersh/New Yorker):
The M.E.K. had its beginnings as a Marxist-Islamist student-led group
and, in the nineteen-seventies, it was linked to the assassination of
six American citizens. It was initially part of the broad-based
revolution that led to the 1979 overthrow of the Shah of Iran. But,
within a few years, the group was waging a bloody internal war with
the ruling clerics, and, in 1997, it was listed as a foreign terrorist
organization by the State Department. In 2002, the M.E.K. earned some
international credibility by publicly revealing—accurately—that Iran
had begun enriching uranium at a secret underground location. [...]
The M.E.K.’s ties with Western intelligence deepened after the fall of
the Iraqi regime in 2003, and JSOC began operating inside Iran in an
effort to substantiate the Bush Administration’s fears that Iran was
building the bomb at one or more secret underground locations. Funds
were covertly passed to a number of dissident organizations, for
intelligence collection and, ultimately, for anti-regime terrorist
activities. Directly, or indirectly, the M.E.K. ended up with
resources like arms and intelligence. Some American-supported covert
operations continue in Iran today, according to past and present
intelligence officials and military consultants.
Despite the growing ties, and a much-intensified lobbying effort
organized by its advocates, M.E.K. has remained on the State
Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations—which meant that
secrecy was essential in the Nevada training. “We did train them here,
and washed them through the Energy Department because the D.O.E. owns
all this land in southern Nevada,” a former senior American
intelligence official told me. [...]
Allan Gerson, a Washington attorney for the M.E.K., notes that the
M.E.K. has publicly and repeatedly renounced terror. Gerson said he
would not comment on the alleged training in Nevada. But such
training, if true, he said, would be “especially incongruent with the
State Department’s decision to continue to maintain the M.E.K. on the
terrorist list. How can the U.S. train those on State’s foreign
terrorist list, when others face criminal penalties for providing a
nickel to the same organization?” [...]
Five Iranian nuclear scientists have been assassinated since 2007.
M.E.K. spokesmen have denied any involvement in the killings, but
early last month NBC News quoted two senior Obama Administration
officials as confirming that the attacks were carried out by M.E.K.
units that were financed and trained by Mossad, the Israeli secret
service. [...]
An adviser to the special-operations community told me that the links
between the United States and M.E.K. activities inside Iran had been
long-standing. “Everything being done inside Iran now is being done
with surrogates,” he said.
* * *
Report: U.S. trained terror group (Salon):
When the U.S. wants to fund, train, arm or otherwise align itself with
a Terrorist group or state sponsor of Terror — as it often does — it
at least usually has the tact to first remove them from its formal
terrorist list (as the U.S. did when it wanted to support Saddam in
1982 and work with Libya in 2006), or it just keeps them off the list
altogether despite what former Council on Foreign Relations writer
Lionel Beehner described as “mounds of evidence that [they] at one
time or another abetted terrorists” (as it has done with close U.S.
allies in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, along with the El Salvadoran
death squads and Nicaraguan contras armed and funded in the 1980s by
the Reagan administration). But according to a new, multi-sourced
report from The New Yorker‘s Seymour Hersh, the U.S. did not even
bother going through those motions when, during the Bush years, it
trained the Iranian dissident group Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK) at a
secretive Department of Energy site in Nevada [...]
In February, NBC News‘ Richard Engel and Robert Windrem reported,
based on two anonymous “senior U.S. officials,” that MEK was the group
perpetrating a series of “sophisticated” assassinations of Iranian
nuclear scientists (using bombs and rifles). NBC also reported that
Israel — specifically its Mossad intelligence service — is “
financing, training and arming” MEK: in other words, that Israel is a
state sponsor of this designated Terrorist group. Various reports have
also indicated that the MEK, with Israeli support, was responsible for
a string of explosions on Iranian soil. Hersh obtained independent
confirmation of all these claims. [...]
That alone compels serious DOJ and Congressional investigations into
these claims. Worse, this reportedly happened at the very same time
that the U.S. aggressively prosecuted and imprisoned numerous Muslims
for providing material support for groups on that list even though
many of those prosecuted provided support that was far, far less than
what the U.S. Government itself was providing to MEK.
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Received on Sat Apr 07 2012 - 10:36:24 EDT
