NCRI – In an international conference held in Paris on Friday, January 6, at the invitation of the CFID (French Committee for Democracy and Human Rights in Iran), dozens of distinguished American and European dignitaries warned of obstructions and non-cooperation by the Iranian regime and Government of Iraq in guaranteeing a peaceful solution for Camp Ashraf, where members of the Iranian opposition reside in Iraq.
The conference speakers were Maryam Rajavi, President-elect of the Iranian Resistance; Gov. Howard Dean, former Governor Vermont, Chair of the Democratic National Committee (2005-2009) and US presidential candidate (2004); Gov. Tom Ridge, former Governor of Pennsylvania and the first US Homeland Security Secretary (2003-2005); Louis Freeh, Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (1993-2001); Gov. Ed Rendell, Chair of the Democratic National Committee (1999-2001) and Governor of Pennsylvania (2002-2011); Judge Michael Mukasey, US Attorney General in the Bush Administration (2007-2009); Ambassador Mitchell Reiss, former Director of Policy Planning at the US Department of State; General James Conway, Commandant of the US Marine Corps (2006-2010); Rep. Patrick Kennedy, Member of US House of Representatives (1995-2011); Gen. Chuck Wald, former Deputy Commander of US European Command; Gen. David Phillips, Commander of U.S. Military Police (2008-2011); Prof. Alan Dershowitz, one of the most prominent advocates of individual rights and the most well-known lawyer in criminal cases in the world; Ambassador Dell Dailey, Head of the State Department’s counterterrorism office (2007-09); Col. Wesley Martin, former Senior Anti-terrorism Force Protection Officer for all Coalition Forces in Iraq and Commander of Forward Operation Base in Ashraf; Prof. Ruth Wedgwood, Chair of International Law and Diplomacy at Johns Hopkins University; Philippe Douste-Blazy, Former French Foreign Minister and to the UN Secretary General; Alain Vivien, former French Minister of State for European Affairs; Rita Süssmuth, former President of German Bundestag; Günter Verheugen, European Commissioner (1999-2010) and former Advisory Minister in German Foreign Ministry; and Sen. Lucio Malan, Member of Italian Senate.
Below is speech by Col. Wesley Martin:
No one you despises war more than the warrior. No one despises the breaking of a surrender treaty or a cease fire agreement more than the warrior who worked on it. I noticed that my good friend Dave Phillips choked up a little bit when he was talking about the surrender of weapons agreement being violated and you have seen me on the stage or other stages doing the same thing and that comes out of passion and love for our fellow people of Ashraf. They do not have weapons anymore but they are the finest soldiers for democracy in the world and they are covering the front lines for democracy today.
Many months have elapsed since the U.S. Court of Appeals told the State Department it was wrong and told them to fix it. Secretary Clinton and Amb. Fried have assured Congressman Rohrabacher and his committee that they are aggressively working on this. State Department has trouble understanding the term “aggressive.” The United States spent equal amount of time entering and completing World War I than has taken State Department to resolve one question and acknowledge that it was wrong and that MEK is not a terrorist organization.
We have an element of a crime, as Dave and I and the former prosecutors and lawyers have always had to work with. To be a terrorist organization on the U.S. list, you must be foreign, you must be a threat to the United States, and you must have that capability. We all know that the MEK has no intent to do harm to the United States and since the former NLA has surrendered their weapons, they don’t have any capability to harm anybody else. Yet the State Department is trying to say this is a terrorist organization. That designation is in violation of the law.
Today, the situation may not appear as serious at Camp Ashraf as a month ago. In truth the situation is getting more desperate. Maliki did not provide extension for the deadline because he is a good person. He is far from that. If Maliki really wanted to do the best thing for Iraq, he needs to go back to Damascus and become a street vendor again.
The extension came from pressure from the United Nations, the European Union, the European and Canadian parliaments, and the United States Congress backed by the judicial branches of government. The extension also came from attention by international media’s reporting in bringing awareness to the rest of the world about what is going on in Ashraf.
Who are the real heroes? We have two groups. One, the residents of Ashraf. In those 2009 and 2011 attacks, not one person broke ranks and left. They have stayed in the frontline of democracy in the Middle East. The second group is you. I have always noticed whenever we’ve had these presentations the supporters have come out in the thousands. When I was testifying before Congress on December 8, I looked behind me and there was a sea of yellow shirts, saying “Save Ashraf,” “Delist MEK,” and I turned to Julie Norman, and said, “You have got to look behind us, this is worth seeing.” You are heroes as well. So do me a favor and give yourselves a full round of applause.
If you want to talk about terrorist organization, the real terrorists were outside the fence in 2009 and 2011. But we also have the Iranian regime, which our State Department fails to effectively address. It is a terrorist regime. Three hikers were literally kidnapped off the Iran-Iraq border and then the court said you can have them back for half a million dollars each. That is hostage taking and that is ransom. The State Department never figured out how it would handle the plot to kill the Saudi ambassador on American soil in a restaurant. Mr. Louis Freeh turned to me when that happened and said, State Department is talking about increased diplomatic isolation; what is increased diplomatic isolation? And I remembered the old movie National Lampoon’s Animal House, and I said somebody at the State Department spent their life watching Animal House because they want “double secret probation.” The words sound good but they mean nothing. Thank you, State Department for nothing. The Iranian regime are conducting exercises to close off the Strait of Hormuz. We all know that if the Iranian navy and the U.S. navy went head to head together, there would no question as to who would win. But, again, it is just antagonizing. They are continuing their nuclear research and as they get closer to the nuclear weapon, it is not only going to be the Iranian regime who gets it but the boy leader in North Korea, Kim Jong-un, 28 years old, they have been working closely together. We will have problems in two different parts of the world.
The sad part is the amount of energy and resources that is going in to get the folks at Camp Ashraf protected, which they rightfully deserve, could well be used to address the problems in the Middle East and the problems with the Iranian regime. Unfortunately, the State Department is playing right into Ahmadinejad’s and Khamenei’s hands in allowing this to happen so the attention is being kept off them. They have pretty well captured the slander, that the “cult” is being kept against their will, in hiding arms, and we also remember the accusation of killing of Americans. These did not happen and unfortunately, we are wasting a lot of time, which should be used elsewhere. State Department claims intelligence specialists have gathered info on the PMOI. Let us remember, that this is the same Sate Department intelligence organization that paid Chalabi $33 million to go ahead and provide false information that sent the United States into war. The State Department is serving Hillary Clinton no better than they served Colin Powell. The result: 4,500 Americans dead, tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis dead, 47 PMOI dead, and yet the State Department still remains stuck on stupid and they refuse to do the harder right over the easy wrong. When I testified before Congress, I put together a packet I knew in my ten minutes I wasn’t going to cover, but please take a look at it, it will be posted on the web, and it also goes into the despicable behavior that we had at Camp Ashraf with the State Department advisor Deborah Johnson and the way she acted towards the people and the misinformation she continually fed.
There may be a concentration camp at Camp Liberty. The residents will be under total Iraqi control at the bidding of the Iranian regime and they will be dependent upon the Iraqis for everything, even further psychological abuses than they have been going through. Maliki is no good friend. The rocket attacks show that the same exact tactics were used at Tahrir Square last year when demonstrations were being broken up. The Iraqi security forces pulled back and allowed adversaries to come in and attack the demonstrators. It was intentional that on the very night that the MOU was signed, he began the first of three rocket attacks. The Iraqis were not sleeping on duty, they intentionally cleared the area. And I have seen them do that and the folks at Ashraf saw them do that northeast of Baghdad when the Iraqi police cleared the area so that when one of my convoys got through, it got ambushed, supported by the Iraqi police and executed by Moqtada al-Sadr’s army, who recently bragged about how his Mahdi army conducted thousands of operations against the United States and they have killed hundreds of Americans. Moqtada wants a holiday for the day the American forces left. Yet the State Department has not declared Sadr and his army a terrorist and a terrorist organization. Hypocrisy has no end at the State Department.
We have also seen Maliki determined that he is going to go ahead and consolidate his power. A friend of Camp Ashraf, Tariq Hashemi, has been accused of running terrorist operations. Tariq, myself and his staff were working close to see to it that detainees released were not being picked up by Moqtada’s Mahdi army and death squads and taken for execution. He was just as concerned about the Shiite as he was about the Sunnis and yet Maliki has the audacity to say that Tariq was running hit teams. He was doing far from that.
What is the way ahead? First, let’s get the MEK off the list, they never should have been on the list in the first place. It was wrong. Second, let’s move them out of Iraq. Seven Airbuses could come in to Baghdad international airport at Balad and everybody at Camp Ashraf would have a seat. It would be just like a Dunkirk operation. Bring them to the Untied States, we have the facilities in the United States to house them.
Two days ago, I went by the reserves in Albuquerque, which is fenced in, it has got water, kitchen, showers everything that could easily house 500 people. Let the United Nations come to the United States to do the processing in a safe and secure environment for the UN and for the residents of Ashraf.
The United States needs to be part of the solution, not part of the problem. President Reagan said Mr. Gorbachev tear down this wall. I say President Obama bring the residents of Ashraf out and bring them out now.
