“The Security Council can act, let them act and whether they act or not, the United States put the residents of Liberty in a position they are in,” he said.
Excerpts of speech by Judge Micheal Mukasey in a conference in Washington on February 9, 2013:
At the time this conference was called, as you’ve heard, I thought the main challenge before us was how do we settle the residents of Camp Liberty, how to go about making those arrangements. We thought we had already passed the main obstacle that was placed in the way of resettlement by the U.S. Government with ending the unjustified listing of the MeK as a foreign terrorist organization and then we woke up this morning and found out that we were wrong. How did we get here? How did it come to this? Let’s do what lawyers do, what I do, look at the record.
Unjustified listing of MEK
It began sadly in the 1990s with the unjustified listing of MeK as a foreign terrorist organization. Not because it was, not because there was any basis for it, but because it was hoped that that would begin a dialogue with the Mullahs. Obviously that didn’t work.
Invasion of Iraq, US gives written guarantees
Then came the 2003 invasion of Iraq and as you’ve heard the residents of Camp Ashraf handed their weapons to the United States military and they were given a guaranty in writing, signed by a United States general that they would get the protections of the 4th Geneva Convention, they would be treated as protected persons. And each of them was issued an identity card with the telephone number of the United States Forces so that they could use it to call for help if trouble came. That was how solemn the guarantee was. The United States government gave its word. .
2009 and 2011 attacks on Ashraf
Then came 2009 and 2011 and Iraqi troops using weapons and vehicles supplied by the United States attacked and killed residents of Ashraf and we have video of that. Shot them in cold blood and at will. And the suggestion was made by the United Nations that somehow there was a fight, they thought they were in combat. Take a look at those videos. The Iraqi troops weren’t even wearing helmets. They knew they were not in danger. They were shooting people in cold blood and they knew it. And they were using U.S. supplied weapons and U.S. supplied vehicles and we knew it. And we washed our hands.
US pressured residents to leave Ashraf
At the Iraqi insistence, at the behest of Iran, the Ashraf be abandoned, the United States pressured the residents of Ashraf to abandon the safety of that camp. And the U.S. Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, testified before Congress that she would consider, and it was in her gift to remove that designation. She would consider the willingness of MeK to leave Ashraf and to move to an abandoned military base that had been eluded by Iraqis, she would consider that in a decision to remove MeK from that list even though that had nothing whatsoever to do with whether the group was a terrorist organization or not.
Martin Kobler’s duplicitous lying
And Mayor Giuliani and I traveled to Paris and met with Mrs. Rajavi and with Martin Kobler and with his assurance, his two-faced duplicitous lying assurance that the residents of Ashraf as they then were would be protected if they moved to Camp Liberty. We urged — I feel terribly guilty about this — we urged her to please, please ask the residents of Ashraf to move peacefully to Camp Liberty because we were told by Martin Kobler that’s where the UN High Commissioner for Refugees could conduct interviews in aide of getting people out. And so she did, and so they did and nothing happened. Well, UNHCR has done whatever interviewing it has to do and everybody, other than the people who have died in the interim, are still at Camp Liberty.
The attack on Camp Liberty
What did Martin Kobler say this morning when he heard about this attack? He said that explosions had occurred in the camp as if it were spontaneous and then he said that Iraqi policeman had been injured in the attack as if to suggest somehow the Iraqis weren’t responsible for it.
UN Security Council must act
The United Nations is the organization that opposed attacks, opposed belligerency all over the world, in Korea, elsewhere. You mean to say United Nations can’t oppose this? Nonsense.
The Security Council can act, let them act and whether they act or not, the United States put the residents of Liberty in a position they are in. We have a moral responsibility to get them out of it and get them out of it now.