The Neocon And The Terrorists

By Cernig

Last night, I saw via War And Piece that Ken Timmerman has a new article up at extremely rightwing newsite NewsMax extolling the virtues of the PJAK Kurdish terror group, who have been attacking targets in Iran just as their parent group the PKK have been attacking Turkey.

Timmerman has been hob-nobbing with the PJAK in their mnountain retreat in Iraq - in an area totally controlled by the PKK - and understandably, given current events and Timmerman's love for anything anti-Iranian, doesn't mention their clear ties to the PKK. Nor does he mention, despite PJAK claims in his article that they only target the Iranian military, that PJAK have claimed responsibility for bomb attacks on Iranian government buildings which have killed civilians.

Timmerman's presence among the PJAK should be some cause for concern - because Ken Timmerman is not just a rightwing hack.

Timmerman is Executive Director of the Foundation for Democracy in Iran, an organisation which he co-founded with PNAC founding member Peter Rodman, formerly United States Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs and now a Brookings fellow. He is on the Advisory Board of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) - an honor he currently shares with Rep. Eric Cantor, Michael Ledeen, Jack Kemp and Richard Perle. Past Board members include Dick Cheney, John Bolton, and Douglas Feith. A heady and powerful grouping. JINSA, it has been alleged, is closely allied to neoconservative advocates of pre-emptive regime change in Iran. Timmerman isn't above bending the facts all out of shape in service to his regime-change agenda - an agenda which would place his own foundation in a Chalibi-like position were it successful.

He's also well connected with other highly dubious Iranian regime-change outfits such as the Mujahideen E-Khalq, who like the PKK are a State Dept. proscribed terrorist outfit. It was Timmerman who confirmed, back in April, that the U.S. was using the services of an "intelligence expert" from the MeK to lead interrogations of arrested Iranians suspected of ties to the Quods Group.

Thus, Timmerman's presence among the PJAK should lend at least circumstantial credence to claims made by Seymour Hersh and others that the U.S. government is using designated terrorist groups as proxies and advisors for a series of covert actions against Iran - in exactly the same way as Iran is accused of doing against U.S. interests in Iraq - as part of a long term plan for regime change.

That these groups were being used as proxies was confirmed by no less a figure than the current head of the PJAK, in an interview on German television in June.

Abdel Rahman Haj-Ahmedi, who lives in Cologne, told German ARD television: “Big powers help our military stations and American army generals completely overlook our activities.” Moreover, according to Haj-Ahmedi, “some US generals even visit Pejak’s military camps and have good ties with Pejak…. Haj-Ahmadi in a similar interview with the Kurdish newspaper Media had acknowledged that some US senators and generals had met with Pejak leaders in Iraq’s Qandil.”

Given the involvement of neoconservative regime change advocates and - apparently - U.S. officers, in liason with the PJAK and MeK then the U.S. military and the Bush administration must now answer pointed questions about these reports of proxy conflict with Iran by dint of known terrorist groups. If not by the press, then perhaps these questions should be asked by a Congressional panel.