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The People’s Mujahedin Organisation of Iran is set to be taken off the UK terrorism blacklist. It’s a mistake - this is a violent, criminal group

We are now used to seeing British newspapers and commentators look to the US in amazement and at times with more than a bit of smugness. Perhaps it’s difficult not to be smug when the leader of the so-called free world carries out torture at Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay, and secret CIA prisons.

The phrase "land of the free and home of the brave" rings hollow when set alongside extraordinary rendition as well as the curtailing of civil rights in the US after the atrocities on September 11 2001. America has lost its moral compass, they say, rather self-righteously at times, implying that these things just do not happen in the UK.

Well, many unfortunate things have happened in the UK during the past few years, but one of the most disgraceful of them all was yesterday’s court of appeal ruling that the people’s Mujahedin Organisation of Iran (PMOI - also known as a the Mujahedin-e Khalq organisation, MeK or MKO) should be removed from the government’s blacklist of terrorist organisations.

The Home Office has argued that the temporary cessation of terrorist acts by this organisation was quite possibly for pragmatic reasons and that these attacks might be resumed in the future. Of course, one could ask the government why it has allowed this terrorist organisation and its affiliated bodies to carry their activities - including organising, propaganda, and fundraising - with impunity in this country over the last two and a half decades.

The British government said that it is opposed to the removal of the PMOI from the blacklist, in order to protect the public. Its stance, in other words, has nothing to do with protecting the people of Iran or Iraq from this ruthless organisation.

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Quiet US Confession

CASMII Press Release

12/05/08 "ICH" — - In a sharp reversal of its longstanding accusations against Iran arming militants in Iraq , the US military has made an unprecedented albeit quiet confession: the weapons they had recently found in Iraq were not made in Iran at all.

According to a report by the LA Times correspondent Tina Susman in Baghdad: "A plan to show some alleged Iranian-supplied explosives to journalists last week in Karbala and then destroy them was cancelled after the United States realized none of them was from Iran. A U.S. military spokesman attributed the confusion to a misunderstanding that emerged after an Iraqi Army general in Karbala erroneously reported the items were of Iranian origin. When U.S. explosives experts went to investigate, they discovered they were not Iranian after all."

The US, which until two weeks ago had never provided any proof for its allegations, finally handed over its "evidence" of the Iranian origin of these weapons to the Iraqi government. Last week, an Iraqi delegation to Iran presented the US "evidence" to Iranian officials. According to Al-Abadi, a parliament member from the ruling United Iraqi Alliance who was on the delegation, the Iranian officials totally refuted "training, financing and arming" militant groups in Iraq . Consequently the Iraqi government announced that there is no hard evidence against Iran.

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Asia Times

By Gareth Porter 
WASHINGTON - The George W Bush administration has long pushed the "laptop documents" - 1,000 pages of technical documents supposedly from a stolen Iranian laptop - as hard evidence of Iranian intentions to build a nuclear weapon. Now charges based on those documents pose the only remaining obstacles to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) declaring that Iran has resolved all unanswered questions about its nuclear program.

But those documents have also been regarded with great suspicion by US and foreign analysts. German officials identified the source of the laptop documents in November 2004 as the Mujahideen e-Khalq (MEK), which along with its political arm, the National Council of Resistance in Iran (NCRI), is listed by the US

State Department as a terrorist organization.

There are some indications, moreover, that the MEK obtained the documents not from an Iranian source but from Israel’s Mossad.

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An Iranian envoy also addressed the council, accusing the United States of supporting the Iraq-based People’s Mujahideen (MKO) guerrilla group. The MKO is banned as a terrorist group in Iran, the United States and the European Union.
"Its elements and members continue to enjoy support and receive safe haven in the U.S. and some European countries, including some member states of the EU," the envoy said.

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… In spring 2003, Iran declared that it was holding senior members of al Qaeda but refused to divulge their identities and proposed to exchange information on its al Qaeda detainees in return for the U.S. providing Iran with information on the anti-Iran terrorist group Mujihidden e Khalk (MEK) which had surrendered to U.S. troops in Iraq. But hardliners in the Bush administration rejected such a deal, on the grounds that MEK should be protected from Iran.

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