Top US Officials Paid to Endorse Iranian Terror Group

MeK Aims to Buy Its Way Off Terror List

by Jason Ditz, August 08, 2011

The Christian Science Monitor has released an enormous new article today detailing the results of their investigation into the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MeK), the Islamist-Marxist group currently trying to buy its way off of the US State Department’s list of international terrorist organizations.

The article details how a large number of top US officials past and present have been paid tens of thousands of dollars to give public endorsements of the MeK, with high profile national security officials from both parties loudly championing the organization as a force for “democratic change” in Iran.

One US official is quoted by CSM as saying that “top-level national security officials never heard about the MEK; it never rose to their level until now,” and that when they are presented the political platform and a contract for $20,000 for a 20 minute speech, it “looks pretty compelling.”

Yet the group’s history is one of decades of violent attacks not just against the Iranian government, but also against the United States, and the group’s claims of having abandoned violence have not been supported by US intelligence reports.

Long an ally of the Ba’athist regime in Iraq, the MeK was quickly embraced by a number of hawks as a good way of promoting a war against Iran. This put its status as a terrorist organization outside of the world of fact, and into the world of political expediency.

But if there’s one thing top Democrat and Republican political leaders like more than war, its cash, and the millions of dollars in “speech” payments is likely another reason the State Department will be under intense pressure to quietly remove them from the list.

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