Update On The MeK's Day In Court

The other day I wondered if this story would get any play from the corporate media and now the Washington Post has stepped up to give it some national attention.

For three years, thousands of members of a militant group dedicated to overthrowing Iran's theocracy have lived in a sprawling compound north of Baghdad under the protection of the U.S. military.

American soldiers chauffeur top leaders of the group, known as the Mujaheddin-e Khalq, or MEK, to and from their compound, where they have hosted dozens of visitors in an energetic campaign to persuade the State Department to stop designating the group as a terrorist organization.

Now the Iraqi government is intensifying its efforts to evict the 3,800 or so members of the group who live in Iraq, although U.S. officials say they are in no hurry to change their policy toward the MEK, which has been a prime source of information about Iran's nuclear program.

Information, I would note, that has been all wrong - made up to help the US along the path to war with Iran so that the MeK's messianic leader can make his attempt at being Iran's new religious-nut-in-charge. Leading the US intelligence community around by the nose is something the MeK are proud of, boasting:

"All the important things that are talked about are things revealed by us," said Mohammad Mohaddessin chairman of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, the MEK's political arm, referring to information about Iran's nuclear ambitions and, more recently, the roadside bombs the United States says Iran has made available to insurgents in Iraq.

So waht kind of aorganistation is the Bush administration pinning its trust on when it comes to intelligence that could eventually lead to war?

The Iraqi government announced this week that roughly 100 members would face prosecution for human rights violations, a move MEK officials contend comes at the request of the Iranian government.

"We have documents, witnesses," Jaafar al-Moussawi, a top Iraqi prosecutor, said Monday, alleging that the MEK aided President Saddam Hussein's campaign to crush Shiite and Kurdish opposition movements at the end of the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Moussawi said the criminal complaint would implicate MEK members in "killing, torture, [wrongful] imprisonment and displacement."

Nice. No wonder the administration is keeping to a strict "no comment" policy about its support for these folks. It is probably even worse than that, as Larisa Alexandrova has previously reported at Raw Story that the Bush administration may be using the MeK as a proxy force for attacks on Iran already. She reprises some of her work in a post at the HuffPo today:

"As previously reported by Raw Story, a terrorist organization known as Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK) is being used on the ground in Iran by the Pentegon, bypassing US intelligence channels. The report was subsequently covered by the Asia Times (Article).

Military and intelligence sources now say no Presidential finding exists on MEK ops. Without a presidential finding, the operation circumvents the oversight of the House and Senate Intelligence committees.

Congressional aides for the relevant oversight committees would not confirm or deny allegations that no Presidential finding had been done. One Democratic aide, however, wishing to remain anonymous for this article, did say that any use of the MEK would be illegal.

In addition, sources say that a March attack that killed 22 Iranian officials in the province of Sistan va Baluchistan was carried out by the MEK.

According to a report by Iran Focus filed Mar. 23, the twenty-two people killed in the ambush included high ranking officials, including the governor of Zahedan."

and concludes by saying that the use of US soldiers acting as "servants to terrorists and former Saddam police contractors" is "outrageous". I have to agree.