NCRI – A bi-partisan panel of members of U.S. Congress and senior former public officials and national security experts entitled “U.S. Policy, Iran and Camp Ashraf: The panel, held at the U.S. House of Representatives to make it the policy of the United States to “prevent the forcible relocation of Camp Ashraf residents inside Iraq and facilitate the robust presence of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq in Camp Ashraf.”
The House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairwoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL); Rep. Bob Filner, (D-CA), Co-Chair, Iran Human Rights and Democracy Caucus; Representatives “Judge” Ted Poe (R-TX); Judy Chu (D-CA); Dan Lungren (R-CA); Trent Franks (R-AZ); Sheila Jackson-Lee (D-TX); and Roscoe Bartlett (R-MD) were joined by John Bolton, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations; Andrew Card, former White House Chief of Staff; Michael Mukasey, former Attorney General of the United States; John Sano, former Deputy Director of CIA for National Clandestine Service; Robert Torricelli, former United States Senator; and Professor Steven Schneebaum, Counsel for U.S. families of Camp Ashraf Residents were in the Panel.
Below is an excerpt of the speech by Hon. Michael Mukasey. Judge Mukasey was confirmed by the United States Senate on November 8, 2007 as the United States’ 81st Attorney General and served until January 2009:
Thank you Senator Torricelli. You know in looking around and listening to the people that you’ve been listening to, people with the credentials of an Andy Card or Ambassador Bolton and others on this panel, Sheila Jackson-Lee and then Congressman Bartlett and seeing the array of people here and looking at the possibilities that we’re looking at in Iran and elsewhere, it really kind of recalls the opening line of the Charles Dickens novel The Tail of Two Cities. It was the best of times, it was the world worse of ties.
In a way it’s the best of times. The possibilities for human freedom today are greater than they’ve ever been probably in the history of the world. Freedom is breaking out all over in some very unlikely places. There’s reason for hope.
People in Ashraf are holding together and are standing up for what they believe is what you believe, which is simply the cause of human freedom and human dignity, and yet we see at spectacle like the one we saw back in March when Iraqi troops — these are our, first of all, allies — go in with weapons supplied by us, with vehicles supplied by us, applying training supplied by us, and kill defenseless men and women.
We see the spectacle of an American ambassador representing his country by saying that the people of Ashraf have to deal with me. I’m running this. This guy could have sold beer for Al Capone. He missed his calling.
So it’s the best of times and it’s the worst of times. How is it that the Iraqis could be so emboldened to do what they did and how is it that an American ambassador could be so — it’s hard to think of the adjective — wrong headed, so reckless as to do and say what he did.
I would suggest to you what permits those things to happen is the continuation of MEK on the list of foreign terrorist organizations. That’s what emboldens the Iraqis. That’s what sets off people who have weak temperament like the ambassador to do what they did and say what they say.
The cure for this is to remove the MEK from the list of foreign terrorist organizations, and that cure is not difficult to administer. The legal case is there. They don’t fulfill the requirements of the statute. They have not been a danger to anybody for well over the last 10 or 20 years. They have renounced violence. They want only the creation of a democratic nuclear free Iraq in which rights are respected, and when they are removed from that list then the worst of times really will be transformed into the best of times; but it won’t happen until that designation has change.
And so it is enormously important for you to here to keep up the pressure, keep up the pressure on Congress, keep up the pressure on the State Department because this is a town in which people respond to what are called forcing and events.
Things should be done here based on what’s right, but it often happens that it takes forcing events to make things happen, and you should continue to be forceful and create forcing events like this and like other conferences that you’ve held so that the Congress and the State Department understand that everybody’s eyes are on them, that this decision has to be made. It has to be made soon and it has to be made right, and when it is then this country will be what Abraham Lincoln said it was, the last best of hope of earth.
Thank you very much for your attention.
