NATO and America’s amoral hypocrisy.

 In October 2011 rhetoric for war with Iran was being spewed by Israeli and American leaders, and the corporate media, in many western countries. A plot to frame Iran for the attempted assassination of a Saudi ambassador was uncovered, and was linked to the US funded terrorists group Mujahidin-e Khalq (MEK). MEK is listed as a terrorist organization by the State Department, yet it is a US funded organization.  Strangely, (MEK) is a Marxist terrorist organization, yet the US continues to fund it, as a means to their goal of, destroying Iran.

In 2009 the Brookings Institute issued a report titled which path to Persia?, in which it documented ways in which the US can influence regime change in Iran. The following is an absolutely devastating, array of documented evidence that is simply mind boggling to say the least; the headers above the following are taken directly from the Brookings Institute Report:

• US Sponsored Terrorism (Page 113)

“The United States could work with groups like the Iraq-based National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) and its military wing, the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), helping the thousands of its members who, under Saddam Husayn’s regime, were armed and had conducted guerrilla and terrorist operations against the clerical regime. Although the NCRI is supposedly disarmed today, that could quickly be changed.

• Mujahedin-e Khalq & Armed Insurgency (Page 117 – 118 & 121)

Perhaps the most prominent (and certainly the most controversial) opposition group that has attracted attention as a potential U.S. proxy is the NCRI (National Council of Resistance of Iran), the political movement established by the MEK (Mujahedin-e Khalq). Critics believe the group to be undemocratic and unpopular, and indeed anti-American. In contrast, the group’s champions contend that the movement’s long-standing opposition to the Iranian regime and record of successful attacks on and    

Intelligence-gathering operations against the regime make it worthy of U.S. support.

They also argue that the group is no longer anti-American and question the merit of earlier accusations. Raymond Tanter, one of the group’s supporters in the United States, contends that the MEK and the NCRI are allies for regime change in Tehran and also act as a useful proxy for gathering intelligence. The MEK’s greatest intelligence in Iran for enriching uranium.

Despite its defenders’ claims, the MEK remains on the U.S. government list of foreign terrorist organizations. In the 1970s, the group killed three U.S. officers and three civilian contractors in Iran. During the 1979-1980 hostage crisis, the group praised the decision to take American hostages and Elaine Sciolino reported that, while group leaders publicly condemned the 9/11 attacks, within the group celebrations were widespread. Undeniably, the group has conducted terrorist attacks—often excused by the MEK’s advocates because they are directed against the Iranian government. For example, in 1981, the group bombed the headquarters of the Islamic Republic Party, which was then the clerical leadership’s main political organization, killing an estimated 70 senior officials. More recently, the group has claimed credit for over a dozen mortar attacks, assassinations, and other assaults on Iranian civilian and military targets between 1998 and 2001. At the very least, to work more closely with the group (at least in an overt manner), Washington would need to remove it from the list of foreign terrorist organizations”.  

           

A New Yorker published article by journalist Seymour Hersh titled: “Our Men in Iran?”, documents how members of Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK), an Iranian dissident group and US State Department-listed terrorist organization, were trained in communications, cryptography, small-unit tactics and weaponry by the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) at a base in Nevada starting in 2005.   

The group was involved in the assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists; it was also responsible for planting the Stuxnet malware that sabotaged the Iranian nuclear facility in Natanz. MEK was founded in 1965 as a Marxist Islamist political movement aimed at the overthrow of the US backed regime of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. MEK sided with the revolutionary clerics allied to Ayatollah Khomeini during the 1979 revolution, by 1981the group had broken with the clerical regime in Iran and was waging guerilla warfare against the Iranian Red Guard. Saddam Hussein offered the group a safe haven in Iraq, from Iraq the MEK continued to mount attacks against Iran killing 17000 Iranians in the process.

Giuliani publicly in 2011 pushed for regime change in Iran and Syria, at an MEK gathering: “how about we follow an Arab Spring with a Persian Summer?” He would also famously mouth the following:  “We need regime change in Iran, more than we do in Egypt or Libya, and just as we need it in Syria”. McCain was unable to attend the conference instead he addressed the gathering via video, so did Congressman Edward Royce, chair of the US House Foreign Affairs Committee, so did Senator Carl Levin and Senator Robert Menendez.

Present at the MEK gathering in Villipinte were the following notables. Newt Gingrich is number 1, already named as well as Giulliani and Kouchner.

2. John Dennis Hastert; another former speaker of the House of Representatives;

3. George William Casey Jr., who commanded the multinational military force that invaded and occupied Iraq;

4. Hugh Shelton, a computer software executive and former chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff;

5. James Conway, the former chief of the US Marine Corps

6. Louis Freeh, the former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI);

7. Lloyd Poe, the US Representative who sits on (1) the US House Subcommittee on Europe, Eurasia, and Emerging Threats and chairs (2) the US House Subcommittee on Terrorism, Non‐proliferation and Trade;

8. Daniel Davis, a US Representative from Illinois;

9. Loretta Sánchez, a US Representative from California;

10. Michael B. Mukasey, a former attorney-general of the US;

11. Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont;

12. William Richardson, the former secretary of the US Department of Energy;

13. Robert Torricelli, a former legislator in the US House of Representatives and the US Senate senator who is the legally representative of the MEK in Iraq;

14. Francis Townsend, former Homeland Security advisor to George W. Bush Jr.;

15. Linda Chavez, a former chief White House director;

16. Robert Joseph, the former US undersecretary that ran the (1) Bureau of Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance, (2) the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation, and the (3) Bureau of Political-Military Affairs;

17. Philip Crowley, the former assistant-secretary of state responsible for public affairs;

18. David Phillips, the military police commander who restructured the Iraqi police and was responsible for guarding Camp Ashraf and Saddam Hussein as a prisoner;

19. Marc Ginsberg, the senior vice-president of the public relations firm APCO Worldwide and former US ambassador and US presidential adviser for Middle East policy.

Like the US presence, the French presence included officials. Aside from Bernard Kouchner, from France some of the notable attendees were the following individuals:

1. Michèle Alliot-Marie, a French politician who among her cabinet portfolios was responsible for the military and foreign affairs at different times;

2. Rama Yade, vice president of the conservative Radical Party of France;

3. Gilbert Mitterrand, the president of the human rights foundation France Libertés, which has focused on ethnic groups such as Kurds, Chechens, and Tibetans;

4. Martin Vallton, the mayor of Villepinte.

From Spain the notable attendees were the following:

1. Pedro Agramunt Font de Mora, the Spanish chair of the European People’s Party (EPP) and its allies in the Council of Europe;

2. Jordi Xucla, the Spanish chair of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE) Group in the Council of Europe;

3. Alejo Vidal-Quadras, a Spanish politician and one of the fourteen vice-presidents of the European Union’s European Parliament;

4. José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, the former prime minister of Spain (who was also visibly accompanied by his wife Sonsoles Espinosa Díaz).

Other notable attendees from other Euro-Atlantic countries included:

1. Pandli Majko, the former prime minster of Albania;

2. Kim Campbell, the former prime minister of Canada

3. Geir Haarde, the former prime minister of Iceland;

4. Ingrid Betancourt, a former Colombian senator;

5. Alexander Carile, a member of the British House of Lords, the upper house of the British Parliament

6. Giulio Maria Terzi, the former foreign minister of Italy;

7. Adrianus Melkert, a former Dutch cabinet minister, a former World Bank executive, and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s former special envoy to Iraq.

All of the above person’s have vested personal financial and political interests in seeing regime change brought about in the Middle East and particularly in Iraq and Syria. In violation of and contravention of the UN charter, not to mention that the US led airstrikes in Syria do not have the support of the UN Security Council. The term Syraq is now being used to describe Iraq and Syria, indicating an attempt to lump both countries into a loose confederation based on the promulgation of US interest’s, it is strange how IS’ goals and the stated objectives and those of the US seem almost one and the same. The broader US objective in the region and beyond is the disruption of Eurasian integration. As a Europe and Asia through for example the rebuilding of the Silk Road and the planned railway linking Turkey, China and Russia.  The completion of the Kazakhstan-Turkmenistan-Iran railway, which will create a north-south transit route, is being awaited. Cooperation between Tehran and the Eurasian Union was also discussed by the two presidents. On the other western side of the Caspian Sea, a parallel north-south corridor running from Russia to Iran through the Republic of Azerbaijan has been in the works. Moscow has already launched the construction of its mega natural gas Yakutia–Khabarovsk–Vladivostok pipeline (also known as the Power of Siberia pipeline) to deliver gas to China while BRICS partner South Africa has signed a historic deal on nuclear energy with Rosatom.An alternative to US and EU sanctions are emerging in Eurasia, excluding the oil for goods deal that Moscow and Tehran were party to Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak announced that Iran and Russia had made several new agreements worth seventy billion euros. US sanctions will eventually only serve to isolate America and the EU. The Iranians have announced that they are working with, Russia and China to overcome the US sanctions regime. America’s Asia-Pacific pivot cannot be implemented until; it has hegemony in the Middle East and Eastern Europe against the Russians, Syrians, Iranians and their allies.