Newt Gingrich at MEK gathering in Paris, MEK Removed From Blacklist.

[AngryCanadian]

MEK are Now the New Iranian Opposition to Shia presence. The MEK would prefer Saudi relations.

The MEK are living inside Camp Liberty, also receiving military training.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I95R9VUlxfM


However, after exile, Rajavi toned down the issues of imperialism, social revolution, and classless society. Instead he stressed on human rights and respect for 'personal property'.[
We can see that is working so well for the Libyans and Iraqis..


Removal from blacklist.

The United States put MEK on the U.S. State Department list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations in 1997. However, since 2004 the United States also has considered the group as "noncombatants" and "protected persons" under the Geneva Conventions because most members have been located in a refugee camp in Iraq for more than 25 years.


MEK leaders then began a lobbying campaign to be removed from the list by promoting itself as a viable opposition to the mullahs in Tehran. In 2008 US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice denied MEK its request to be delisted, despite its lobbying the State Department



In 2011, several former senior U.S. officials, including Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, three former chairmen of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, two former directors of the CIA, former commander of NATO Wesley Clark (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RC1Mepk_Sw), two former U.S. Ambassadors to the United Nations, the former U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey, a former White House Chief of Staff, a former commander of the United States Marine Corps, former U.S. National Security Advisor Frances Townsend, and U.S. President Barack Obama's retired National Security Adviser General James L. Jones called for the MEK to be removed from its official State Department foreign terrorist listing on the grounds that they constituted a viable opposition to the Iranian government.

In April 2012, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh reported that the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command had trained MEK operatives at a secret site in Nevada from 2005 to 2009. According to Hersh, MEK members were trained in intercepting communications, cryptography, weaponry and small unit tactics at the Nevada site up until President Barack Obama took office in 2009. Hersh also reported additional names of former U.S. officials paid to speak in support of MEK, including former CIA directors James Woolsey and Porter Goss; New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani; former Vermont Governor Howard Dean; former Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation Louis Freeh and former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton.


The MEK is largely opposed by the majority of the Iranian Shia population. Only Sunni Kurds support the MEK. The MEK are also supported by the Turkish government.

If the regime change plans do fail in Syria they would start and try to restart the so called the Green Iranian revolution 2.0 again the first Green Iranian color revolution failed because the Iranians and the majority of the Iranians knew something was going to happen. When it comes to the destabilization efforts.

America's gov only knows how to destabilize countries not stability. Should the MEK come into power they would ignore the needs of all Shia and minorities dispute their claims of bringing.
human rights and respect for 'personal property'.

Enough of this left vs Right Nonsense.
Both Political parties the left and right have a lot to answer for the destabilization and war crimes that they are committing. Both Political parties are continuing the foreign policy of destabilization under false pretexts.

[goldenequity]

Good insights, nice post AC :)
Do you have a link for this analysis?

imo, the hegemonists are now back-footed.
In 2012, destabilization of Iran was a 'possibility' and MEK a viable NGO proxy.
2015 is not 2012.
The growth of Iranian nationalism has swept away any chance for destabilizing Tehran using subversions such as MEK.
All Western focus is now transferred to KRG/Barzani/Peshmerga to betray Baghdad and thwart Shi'ite momentum.
The hegemons are scrambling and are off balance.

There are no 'smooth moves' left on the table and THAT'S what worries me.
Only vulgar, clumsy, blunt moves are left as options vs watching YEARS of statecraft go down the toilet.
These are perilous, hair-trigger times.
The ONLY consolation, is that Barry doesn't have the stomach for it.

[Zippyjuan]

The Gingrich meeting and delisting occurred in 2012. http://www.cnn.com/2012/09/28/politics/mek-terror-delisting/


Mujahedin-e-Khalq leaders have been reluctant to complete the move from Camp Ashraf to Camp Hurriya, formerly an American facility known as Camp Liberty. They complained about conditions at the new camp, calling it more a prison than a home after the first convoy arrived in February.


http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/30/more-than-20-dead-missile-attack-iranian-refugee-camp-baghdad 10/29/15


More than 20 dead after missile attack on Iranian exiles camp in Baghdad

No claim of responsibility for attack that hit former military base near Iraqi airport, which houses exiles of Iranian opposition group Mujahedin of Iran.

More than 20 people are reported to have been killed after a barrage of rockets slammed into a former military base near Baghdad international airport that houses a group of Iranian exiles.

Officials said three Iraqi soldiers were killed, and Iranian exiles said at least 20 of their people died in the attack late on Thursday.

Iraqi police said 16 rockets hit Camp Liberty, a former US base that now houses the exiled Iranian opposition group known as the Mujahedin of Iran (MEK). They said at least 16 soldiers guarding the camp were also wounded while MEK said dozens of Iranian refugees were wounded as well.

No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attack.

The statement from MEK said that “due to darkness of the night, the exact number of dead and wounded has not been established”.

Police said that there may be casualties among the exiled group, but said numbers had not been reported to the local authorities so they could not determine how many civilians were hit in the attack.

The MEK statement on casualty figures could not be independently verified because of the late hour of the attack and the camp’s inaccessibility to media.

A police official added that the rockets landed far enough from the airport that they did not disrupt commercial traffic. A hospital official confirmed the casualty figures. Both officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to speak to the media.

This was not the first attack since Camp Liberty became home to the Iranian group, which is strongly opposed to Iran’s clerical regime. Last year, the Islamic State group was said to have fired rockets near to Baghdad International Airport as it attempted to destabilise the capital.

Maryam Rajavi, president-elect of the Paris-based National Council of Resistance of Iran, the parent organisation of MEK, blamed the attack on Iran.

“The Iranian regime’s agents within the Iraqi government are responsible for the latest assault,” she said in a statement. “The United States and the United Nations are fully aware of this reality.”

[Zippyjuan]

http://www.cfr.org/iran/mujahadeen-e-khalq-mek/p9158


In 1986, the government of Jacques Chirac expelled Rajavi and much of the MEK as part of a deal with Tehran that freed French hostages held by pro-Iranian groups in Lebanon. According to the U.S. State Department, the MEK was then welcomed into Iraq, where it supported Saddam Hussein's war against Iran (1980-88) and reportedly helped quash Kurdish uprisings in the north and Shia unrest in the south (1991). Saddam armed the MEK near the end of the Iran conflict "with heavy military equipment and deployed thousands of MEK fighters in suicidal, mass wave attacks against Iranian forces." Iran's Revolutionary Guards killed some two thousand MEK in the ill-fated assault known as Operation Eternal Light. (The MEK denies any role in the suppression of Kurdish and Shiite unrest in Iraq in 1991.)

The MEK's campaign against the Islamic Republic, including multiple targeted attacks on high-ranking officials, continued throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. The group demonstrated its global reach in April 1992 with coordinated raids on diplomatic missions in ten countries, including the Iranian Mission to the United Nations in New York. (The MEK said that the attacks were retaliation for Iranian air strikes on the group's base outside Baghdad.) In 2003, French police arrested more than 150 MEK members for allegedly plotting and financing terrorist attacks. The EU had labeled the MEK a terrorist organization the prior year (it was delisted in 2009). The Iranian government blames the MEK for the deaths of more than 12,000 Iranians over the past three decades.

Searching For a New Home
As part of the 2003 invasion, U.S. forces initially attacked MEK military targets in Iraq despite the group's claims of neutrality. The two sides eventually negotiated a cease-fire that disarmed MEK members and confined them to Camp Ashraf, a 14-square-mile former Iraqi military base in the country's northeast. In 2004, U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld designated the group as civilian "protected persons" under the Geneva Convention—a designation that ran against the recommendations of the U.S. Department of State, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and the International Committee of the Red Cross.

According to a 2009 RAND report, the decision was "extremely controversial because it appeared that the United States selectively chose to apply the Geneva Conventions to a designated terrorist organization and, further, to grant it special status." That designation expired after Iraq regained full sovereignty in January 2009.

The MEK had long feared that a transition to Iraqi control of Ashraf (PDF) would result in their eviction. As U.S. forces pulled out of Ashraf in April 2011, violence broke out between the Iraqi military and camp residents. Thirty-five MEK were killed, according to the UN. After the incident, Iraq reiterated its vow to close Ashraf following full U.S. withdrawal at the end of 2011.

Iraq and the UN reached an agreement with MEK in December of that year that would relocate Ashraf residents to Camp Liberty outside Baghdad, a "temporary transit station" from which group members could eventually be taken in by other countries. As of May 2014, approximately 3,000 MEK members resided at Camp Hurriya (Liberty), near Baghdad, awaiting resettlement to third countries.

Leadership & Ideology
The MEK has long been led jointly by husband-and-wife team Massoud and Maryam Rajavi, and is reputedly the largest militant Iranian opposition group committed to the overthrow of the Islamic Republic. It is also "the only army in the world with a commander corps composed mostly of women," said former CFR press fellow Elizabeth Rubin. Maryam Rajavi joined the resistance as a student in Tehran in the early 1970s and, at the behest of her husband, assumed joint control of the group in 1985. Feminism and allegiance to the Rajavi family are pillars of MEK ideology, which was founded on both Islam and Marxism—though the group has denied its affiliation with the latter.

Many analysts, including Rubin, have characterized the MEK as a cult, citing the group's fealty to the Rajavis. Older women were reportedly required to divorce their husbands in the late 1980s, and younger girls cannot marry or have children.

More history at the link.

[Zippyjuan]

Camp Liberty Images:

http://www.ncr-iran.org/en/images/stories/2013/liberty/hungerstrike/camp-liberty-81.jpg

http://www.usccar.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/CampLiberty07.jpg

https://campashrafmassacre.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/201425212410974103491_camp-liberty-in-iraq.jpg?w=430&h=210&crop=1

These are Iraqi police guarding it.
http://media.washtimes.com.s3.amazonaws.com/media/image/2011/12/26/iraq-camp-ashraf_lea.jpg

[AngryCanadian]

http://www.cfr.org/iran/mujahadeen-e-khalq-mek/p9158



More history at the link.

Ah Yes the Council on Foreign Relations the most reablie arent they? seeing how you support the MEK and you use CFR as your source your quite unreliable.

As for those photos they are meant for the photo op. Showing the good side of the camp do you honestly believe American military bases let journalists take pictures of their bases from the inside?

[Zippyjuan]

If the information is unreliable perhaps you can refute its content. Camp Liberty is no longer a US military post.