Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

People's Mojahedin Organization of Iran

gained as i wasn't sure so checked, MEK = MKO .. People's Mujahedin of Iran

The People's Mujahedin of Iran (PMOI, also MEK, MKO) Persian [...] is a terrorist
militant organization that advocates the overthrow of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

excerpts

Founded in 1965 by a group of leftist Iranian college students as an Islamic and Marxist political mass movement
MEK was originally devoted to armed struggle against the Shah of Iran, capitalism, and 'Western imperialism'.
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The group claims to have renounced violence in 2001 and today it is the main component organization
of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), an "umbrella coalition" calling itself
the "parliament-in-exile dedicated to a democratic, secular and coalition government in Iran.
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The PMOI and the NCRI claim to have provided the United States with intelligence on Iran's nuclear program in 2002 and 2008 ..

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INSERT: i'm not sure if they were part of the so-called "Soviet weapons scientist help Iran to build a device to build a nuclear weapon ... a half-truth or less of a half-truth" .. new IAEA evidence mentioned by Gareth Porter here .. the guy was Ukranian to start and "never a nuclear weapons specialist" .. hmmm, maybe not as the MEK are not a "member state" .. anyway ..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8vY7PxyAaI

it was prompted as i thought of Chalabi's group and their unintelligent (manufactured?) intelligence before Bush's God mission.

================= .. excerpts from Wiki... continued ..

Schism

In October 1975 the PMOI underwent an ideological split. While the remaining primary members of MEK were imprisoned, some of the original low-level members of MEK formed a new organization that followed Marxist, not Islamic, ideals; these members appropriated the MEK name to establish and enhance their own legitimacy. This was expressed in a book entitled Manifesto on Ideological Issues, in which the central leadership declared "that after ten years of secret existence, four years of armed struggle, and two years of intense ideological rethinking, they had reached the conclusion that Marxism, not Islam, was the true revolutionary philosophy." Mujtaba Taleqani, son of Ayatallah Taleqani, was one of these converts to Marxism. Thus after May 1975 there were two rival Mujahedin, each with its own publication, its own organization, and its own activities. A few months before the Iranian Revolution the majority of the Marxist Mujahedin renamed themselves "Peykar", on December 7, 1978 (16 Azar, 1357), the full name is: Organization of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class.This name was after the "St. Petersburg League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class", which was a left wing group in St. Petersburg, Russia. It was founded by Lenin in the autumn of 1895

Anti-American Campaign
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After the revolution

In more recent years under the guidance of Maryam Rajavi the organization has adopted strong principles in favor of women. Women have now assumed some senior positions of responsibility within the ranks of the PMOI and although women make up only a third of fighters, two-thirds of its commanders are women. Rajavi ultimately believes that women should enjoy equal rights with men.

In 1981, the PMOI formed the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) with the stated goal of uniting the opposition to the Iranian government under one umbrella organization. The PMOI claims that in the past 25 years, the NCRI has evolved into a 540-member parliament-in-exile, with a specific platform that emphasizes free elections, gender equality and equal rights for ethnic and religious minorities. The PMOI claims that it also advocates a free-market economy and supports peace in the Middle East. However, the FBI claims that the NCRI "is not a separate organization, but is instead, and has been, an integral part of the [PMOI] at all relevant times" and that the NCRI is "the political branch" of the PMOI, rather than vice versa. Although the PMOI is today the main organization of the NCRI, the latter previously hosted other organizations, such as the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran.

According to the publicly stated ideology of the PMI, elections and public suffrage are the sole indicators of political legitimacy. According to their publications, the Word of God and Islam are meaningless without freedom and respect for individual volition and choice. Their interpretation of Islam the Quran says that the most important characteristic distinguishing man from animals is his free will. It is on this basis that human beings are held accountable. Without freedom, no society can develop or progress. Although its leaders presents themselves as Muslims, the PMOI describes itself as a secular organization: "The National Council of Resistance believes in the separation of Church and State."
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1988 executions of Iranian political prisoners

A large number of prisoners from the PMOI, and a lesser number from other leftist opposition groups (somewhere between 1,400 and 30,000), were executed in 1988, following Operation Eternal Light. Dissident Ayatollah Montazeri has written in his memoirs that this massacre, deemed a crime against humanity, was ordered by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and carried out by several high-ranking members of Iran's current government. Recently The UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon appointed a Special Rapporteur on Human Rights violations for Iran, to take action on such actions since 1988.
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Post-war

According to presentations of the PMOI by the U.S. Department of State and the Foreign Affairs group of the Australian Parliament, the PMOI assisted the Iraqi Republican Guard in suppressing the Kurdish and Shiite uprisings in Iraq after the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Maryam Rajavi, who assumed the leadership role of the PMOI after a series of years as co-leader alongside her husband Massoud Rajavi, has been reported by former members of the PMOI as having said: "Take the Kurds under your tanks, and save your bullets for the Iranian Revolutionary Guards."

In the following years the PMOI conducted several high-profile assassinations of political and military figures inside Iran, including Asadollah Lajevardi, the former warden of the Evin prison, in 1998 and deputy chief of the Iranian Armed Forces General Staff, Brigadier General Ali Sayyad Shirazi, who was assassinated on the doorsteps of his house on April 10, 1999.
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In Iraq after the 2003 invasion

After a four-month investigation by several U.S. agencies, including the State Department, only a handful of charges under U.S. criminal law were brought against PMOI members, all American citizens. The PMOI remains listed as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) by the Department of State. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld declared PMOI personnel in Ashraf protected persons under the Fourth Geneva Convention. They are currently under the guard of US Military. Defectors from this group are housed separately in a refugee camp within Camp Ashraf, and protected by U.S. Army military police (2003-current), U.S. Marines (2005–2007), and the Bulgarian Army(2006-current).

On January 1, 2009 the U.S. military transferred control of Camp Ashraf to the Iraqi government. On the same day, Prime
Minister Nuri al-Maliki announced that the militant group would not be allowed to base its operations from Iraqi soil.
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A "bargaining chip" between Tehran and Washington?

During the Iraq war, U.S. troops disarmed the PMOI and posted guards at its bases. The U.S. military also protected and gave logistical support to the MEK as U.S. officials viewed the group as a high value source of intelligence on Iran. The PMOI is credited with revealing Iran's nuclear program in 2003 and alerting Americans to Iranian advancements in nuclear technology.

The same year that the French police raided the PMOI's properties in France (2003), Tehran attempted to negotiate with Washington. Iranian officials offered to withdraw military backing for Hamas and Hezbollah, and to give open access to their nuclear facilities in return for Western action in disbanding the PMOI, which was revealed by Newsnight, a BBC current affairs program, in 2007. The BBC uncovered a letter written after the invasion of Iraq in 2003 where Tehran made this offer The proposition was done in a secret letter to Washington via Switzerland. According to the BBC, the U.S. State Department received the letter from the highest levels of the Iranian government[citation needed]. According to Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff of Secretary of State Colin Powell, interviewed by the BBC, the State Department initially considered the offer, but it was ultimately rejected by the office of Vice President Dick Cheney.

Nuclear issue

The PMOI and the NCRI claim to be the first entities that revealed Iran's nuclear activities in 2002, which has turned to be a major concern for the US and some of its allies today.[18] Recently on Feb 20, 2008, the NCRI claimed to have revealed another nuclear site of Islamic Republic. This claim has never been independently verified.
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According to Mohsen Kadivar and Ahmad Sadri writing Salon.com,

Countless first-rate analysts, scholars and human rights organizations -- including Human Rights Watch -- have determined that the MEK is an undemocratic, cultlike organization whose modus operandi vitiates its claim to be a vehicle for democratic change.

much more .. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Mujahedin_of_Iran