America’s failure to keep its promise to protect Iranian dissidents in Camp Liberty is putting its credibility in the world at risk, top foreign policy and military leaders have told President Barack Obama.
In a letter to The White House, the US dignitaries reminded Mr Obama that America had pledged to protect the Iranian MEK members if they surrendered their weapons and renounced violence.
In 2011, Mr Obama’s envoy Ambassador Daniel Fried also vowed that US staff would make regular checks on the dissidents and expedite their relocation to other nations, the letter revealed on the Breitbart News website reads.
It adds: “Contrary to repeated US assurances, American officials have not visited the camp to ensure a reasonable quality of life, or even physical safety.
The truth is that the residents of Camp Liberty have fulfilled every assurance requested and received by the United States Government, while the United States, for its part, has failed to fulfil every important assurance it has extended to the residents.”
The letter is signed by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Hugh Shelton, the former head of the NSA and CIA General Michael Hayden and General James Jones, the former head of NATO and commandant of the Marine Corps, and also Obama’s own White House national security adviser.
Republican signatories include former Speakers Newt Gingrich and Dennis Hastert, Attorney General Michael Mukasey, Governor and Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, former UN Ambassador John Bolton and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani.
Leading Democrats including Governor and UN Ambassador Bill Richardson, Senator Robert Torricelli, Governor and former DNC Chairman Ed Rendell and Governor and former DNC Chairman Howard Dean also signed the letter.
It reads: “Over the past three years, while your Administration was committed to keeping the residents secure and facilitating the UN’s effort to process and resettle them in willing countries, a total of one-hundred and thirty-five MEK residents have either been murdered in these staged attacks or died while being denied access to medical treatment by the Iraqi security forces controlling Camp Liberty.
“In the possession of each deceased resident was a Protected Person Status identity card issued in 2004 by the United States.”
And it strongly criticizes Obama’s State Department for officially finding that ‘there is no evidence the Iraqi government was involved’.
Former UN Ambassador Ken Blackwell, who signed an updated version of the letter on July 1, 2014, told Breitbart News: “The leading US generals and intelligence chiefs I met with explained that part of America’s former assessment of MEK as a terrorist organization resulted from the limited intelligence we obtained through the fog of war.
Now we see much more clearly, and it’s clear that US foreign policy toward MEK should change.”
Ambassador Blackwell compared the conditions in Camp Liberty to a Bosnian ‘concentration camps’ during the Balkans war of the 1990s.
He added: “And conditions are not improving. Multiple sources go on in detail regarding weekly developments, such as Iraqi military personnel turning away shipments of medical supplies and fuel from the entrance of Camp Liberty. All this is irreconcilable with Obama’s promises that if the Iranians disarmed and relocated, the United States would guarantee their safety and well-being.
“America made a promise to these people, and so US credibility and resolve in the world is at stake.”
