Obama moves to ‘full-on’ covert war against Iran

The move by Washington last week is, in effect, giving full approval to the MEK’s terror and assassination campaign in Iran. It is a stark reminder of Washington’s unwavering warpath towards Iran.

US Sponsored Covert War on Iran: Washington Gives Full Approval to Terrorist Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK)
By Finian Cunningham – Global Research – 26 September, 2012

Here’s a thought experiment: imagine that there is a terrorist network in the USA that has been responsible for hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths over several decades.

The group declares itself dedicated to destroying the US government and has been involved in car bombing urban centres, kidnapping and murdering members of the country’s security forces, and assassinating government scientists, as well as perpetrating countless random murders on businessmen and ordinary families.

Now imagine that the Iranian government announces a new policy in which it does not consider the above clandestine group a terrorist entity. That policy means that the network is free to raise money in Iran to fund its terror campaign against US citizens and to lobby for political support among Iranian lawmakers and ambassadors.

We can safely conclude that in such a far-fetched scenario, the US government would immediately declare war on Iran and proceed to carpet bomb that country mercilessly – with the Western corporate news media blasting righteous endorsements of vengeance.

Yet this scenario of aiding and abetting terrorism is far from far-fetched when it comes to actual US policy towards Iran. Just last week, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton officially de-listed the Iranian Mujahideen e-Khalq (MEK) from its official terror watch list.

That the MEK is a terror group is beyond dispute, despite the US government’s apparent change of opinion. The term “terror group” applies objectively and accurately. It is not just a pejorative propaganda label used by the Iranian government to blacken some dissident group. Since the 1980s, the MEK network itself claims that it has killed 40,000 Iranians whom it considers legitimate targets because they are “loyal” to, that is because they are citizens of, the Islamic Republic. Lower estimates of fatalities are put at around 17,000. Proportionate to its population that would give an upper equivalent of 150,000 dead Americans – a death toll suffered by Iran which is 50 times greater than that ascribed to 9/11.

The MEK, also known as MKO, has colluded with foreign powers for the stated goal of destroying the Islamic Republic of Iran. Most notably, between 1980 and 1988 when Iran was facing a US-backed war of aggression by Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, the MEK functioned as subversives and shock troops operating “behind enemy lines” to betray their own people.

For that reason, the group has negligible, if any, popular support within Iran. It cannot claim the slightest modicum of popular mandate that might otherwise serve to give its activities a veneer of legitimacy as an “insurgency” or “freedom struggle.” Indeed, it is more accurate to call the group a sort of terrorist cult rather than a political movement. Since 2003, the MEK has not even had a base within Iran, operating clandestinely out of Iraq.

Such is the organisation’s fringe status, that even Iranian political opponents of the government in Tehran deprecated the US government move to officially de-list it as a terror group. That indicates how extreme the network is viewed by the Iranian population.

The Western mainstream media claim that Washington’s clearance of the MEK was given because the group “has renounced violence.” That renunciation was officially made 10 years ago. That is also allegedly why the European Union and the British government removed the network from their terror lists in 2009 and 2008.

How these Western governments can maintain this charade with a straight face is rather astounding. The MEK and other Iranian terror gangs, such as the al-Qaeda-linked Jundallah, have been actively plying violence unabated against the citizenry over the past decade. Even Washington officials admit it. Following the murder of Iranian nuclear scientist Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan on 11 January earlier this year with a magnetic bomb attached to his car in northern Tehran, anonymous US officials disclosed to American mainstream media that the killing was the work of the MEK in collusion with Israel’s Mossad.

Since 2007, five Iranian nuclear scientists have been assassinated. The MEK and Mossad are strongly implicated in all these murders and much worse.

Why US officials should have authoritative knowledge of such MEK activities is quite simple. It is because the US government and its military intelligence support these very terrorist activities, along with Mossad and Britain’s MI6. During the George W Bush presidency, congressional leaders secretly approved a budget of $400 million to arm and fund the MEK and Jundallah. According to investigative American journalist Seymour Hersh, US Joint Special Operations Command trained members of the MEK at a secret site in Nevada between 2005 and 2009. Training included use of weapons and explosives in the black arts of sabotage, or, in short, terrorism. During the American illegal occupation of Iraq following 2003, the MEK was given protection and immunity at a dedicated facility, known as Camp Ashraf, in Iraq from where they would launch operations into Iran. The camp has since been closed down following the large-scale American troop withdrawal from the country. …more