NCRI – On Saturday, September, 17, 2011, a senior panel of former Secretaries, Generals, and Governors, as well as State and Justice Departments officials denounced the presence of the Iranian regime’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at the United Nations, and urged the removal of Iran’s main opposition, the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), from the State Department’s list of Foreign Terrorist Organization, according to Human Rights and Democracy International.
The panel of former senior officials included Attorney General Michael Mukasey, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham, Governor Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania, Commandant of the Marine Corps General James Conway, Deputy Commander of United States European Command General Charles Wald, Ambassador John Bolton, and FBI Director Louis Freeh. The continuing designation of the MEK was acting as a license for genocide at Camp Ashraf, Iraq, the officials said.
Below Remarks by Director Louis Freeh
Thank you very much Alan. Good morning ladies and gentlemen. It’s a privilege to be here particularly with some of the panel members who are longtime friends and colleagues, Judge Mukasey particularly thank you for your eloquence. Governor, thank you for your insights. You know we know that the residents of Camp Ashraf watch this. I don’t know whether, Ali Reza, they are watching it live today or will get it soon, but we want to say couple things to them this morning. We are not operating in a vacuum here. We want to tell them that we’re very proud of them and that we are very amazed by their sacrifice, and that we want them not to give up hope and to never, never, never, never give up.
We are frustrated. We speak here this morning with some obvious degree of frustration because as you’ve heard whether it’s on the legal merits or on the factual merits, we can’t seem to get our State Department to make a decision. And as Judge Mukasey said, a Court of Appeals, United States Court of Appeals for this Circuit in August of 2010 said a couple of phenomenal things. One thing the Court said to the Secretary of State was that she had violated the constitutional rights of the MEK, violated the constitutional rights of the MEK and said secondly “we’ve looked at the record and we don’t know how you made your factual designation,” because even the State Department in its pleadings said in many cases they had no idea about the credibility of the witnesses and sources that were being used to support this now 14-year-old designation. So they sent it back to the Secretary with a very clear instruction to review and report and decide. And for months, over a year, we have gotten nothing but silence and delay from the State Department. And look you’ve got some very knowledgeable people in this room who understand how this town works. Washington is not a mysterious place. If a Secretary or a Department or individual wants to get information out to the public, it’s not a very difficult thing.
We have heard not one word, not one single word, whether in a legal filing, whether in a congressional presentation, whether in a leak that this organization has any terrorist capacity or intention whatsoever. We have heard nothing. That, as the governor pointed out is reason itself to think that there was a huge vacuum, a huge hole in the Secretary of State’s position. Which is precisely why we have gotten neither a decision nor report. And you’ve heard also some of the people who have become involved at this. I just got my box score here, which I’ll go over for a moment; you know who is saying that this organization is not a terrorist organization? Not a reporter, not somebody on a reality show, not some anonymous source. I mean, let’s just look; I don’t even think I’ve captured them all. We’ve got a former National Security Advisor to the President of United States, Attorney General, two CIA directors, an NSA director, a DHS secretary, an assistant Secretary of State for counter-terrorism, a NATO commander, a Centcom Commander, Ambassadors, two marine corps commandants, a chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Do you think for a moment that any of these who include FBI director, do you think for a moment any of these people would be saying this group is not a terrorist organization if there was a scant piece of evidence that it was? Let me tell you how else this town works. You know, my colleagues, I have thousands of colleagues who stay in the FBI. Judge Mukasey has hundreds of colleagues who are at the Department of Justice. Do you think if there was a scant teller of evidence that this was a terrorist group we would’ve all got those phone calls from our friends saying, “you know, Louis, General, Governor, this is really not something you want to be involved in.” We have not heard anything like that. In fact nobody has heard anything at all except the hollow noise of the State Department.
But it’s not the certification in a passive sense and this is the key point. The maintenance of this organization, contrary to all the facts, and the law as you’ve heard from two splendid lawyers, is not just passivity. It is the basis by which we provide a license to kill to the Iranian regime and unfortunately to the Prime Minister of Iraq, who was there by the sacrifice of young American women and men. And this license to kill is used on a frequent basis, whether it’s the kangaroo courts in Iran, arresting, torturing and killing people, or the atrocities that you saw in this video from April 8th. You know this is not averting a humanitarian crisis, with all due respect. This is averting genocide and war crimes, which are graphically depicted and reported by multiple witnesses. So time here is not of the essence. Time is critical. Lives have been lost, 36 alone on that horrific day. But as the Governor said we’re here this morning and we will be here this afternoon and tomorrow to talk about preventing the third attack on Camp Ashraf.
So we’ve tried some legal arguments. We’ve tried some factual arguments. We’ve gotten nothing from the State Department either on the record or over the transom, or leaked out to the world, and that’s because ladies and gentlemen, honestly and irrefutably, this is not a terrorist organization. There is no evidence of this. And in 1967 – sorry, 1997, when it was put on the list. It was put on the list for political purposes. The Iranian Regime held out “normalization” with a new moderate President of Iran, which was something, to its credit, a democratic administration said “we got to try this; it makes sense.” And as the Attorney General said, “it made absolutely no sense.” They came back in 2004 to a Republican Administration, same offer: “you’ll see less IED’s killing young Americans in Iraq if you maintain this organization on the foreign terrorist organization list.” We’ve done that. There has been a proliferation of devices. So I’m going to try maybe another approach, we would tried on the law, we tried on the facts. Let me try another approach here for a moment and see whether this may have some resonance.
I give our President a lot of credit for his handling of the Libyan Crisis and I think we should give him credit, however long it took the administration to come to bat. Finally when it was done in the White House has celebrated publicly what it calls two key principles for United States direct intervention in similar situations.
They told us in the New York Times principle number one: America has a responsibility to stop the looming genocide. Principle number two: America will not act alone when the safety of U.S. persons is not directly threatened. So let’s ask the administration to apply these two principles to the crisis and to prevent the genocide that we don’t have to speculate may happen at Camp Ashraf because the genocide has happened twice and there is no reason to believe that it won’t happen again unless the United States, which is the only power on earth capable of stopping that, with all due respect to the United Nations. It is the United States of America that has the power and the legal and moral responsibility to prevent a “looming genocide”–let’s use their own words –at Camp Ashraf. Principle number two, America will not act alone when the safety of U.S. persons is not directly threatened.
Well the United States does not have to act alone here, as you’ve heard, the United Nations, United Kingdom, European Union, thousands of Parliamentarians, dozens of experts from all over the world have said the same thing – genocide can happen, and genocide will happen again, and something has to be done and has to be done quickly. As the U.S. forces draw down in Iraq, the 3500 men, women, and children are at grave risk and everybody in this room knows that. It’s not necessary to speculate about what the end game is here, what the regime in Tehran wants and what their ally, Al –Maliki, is not just apparently, but is actively conspiring to achieve which is the elimination and the genocide of the only organized group or resistance to the terror regime in Tehran. Look at Al Maliki’s ally, his main political coalition partner is Al Satyr, who just by the way last week called for the cessation of killing American forces. And their neighbor and friend, Al-Assad, has been killing for six months the freedom fighters in Syria.
So this is a group that doesn’t need any roadmap for us to understand what their objectives are and what the short-term as well as long-term goals will be. The European Union just condemned Iran’s own Qods military force for giving technical and material support to Al-Assad’s efforts to crush the courageous uprising against his rule. Their allies, their friends, are the two people who most affect the safety and well-being of these 3,400 people. Ironically it’s only the Secretary of State and Khomeini who are arguing today that the MEK belongs on the foreign terrorist organization list. We know that the Iranian regime acting through its MOIS, actively promotes propaganda in the United States and regularly spews out misinformation and falsities aimed at painting the MEK as a terrorist organization, as a cult organization, you can pick the flavor of the day that is the particular aim of this Regime.
The MOIS is actively involved in this campaign at the same moment when the organization was placed on the foreign terrorist organization by the State Department. By the way, we asked in the FBI at the time why the IRA was not put on the list as they were blowing up young soldiers and police offices all over Northern Ireland.
The answer, of course, is that this is a political process and sometimes it’s a logical political process and sometimes it’s not. But in any case it can’t be a process that’s unsupported by the facts and contrary to the law, which is the case here. So in 1997, I got a call from the Secretary of State and the complaint was the FBI were fingerprinting the Iranian wrestling teams who were newly invited into the United States. And it was a big outrage at Foggy Bottom why we were fingerprinting Iranian wrestlers. And we said “well on the wrestling team beyond the athletes there’s usually an MOIS agent. It’s the wrestler who looks like a little bit out of shape.
And the reason we take all their fingerprints is this discourages them from using this conveyance to bring in MOIS officers who actively exploit and operate the networks here in the United States. They have been doing that now with respect to MEK, and the response from the State Department to this degree has been negligible.
When this group was put on the FTO list in 1997, we saw it for what it was in the FBI: a political determination – none of our business. But from an operational point of view, we didn’t assign any resources to look at this organization because we didn’t believe it was any factual basis by which the organization could be classified as a terrorist organization. So it is essential that the Secretary of State make a decision. You heard about the facts from General Mukasey
You read that legal opinion, which again is over year old now, the judges were very clear that they could not understand the factual basis by which this determination was made and that the secretary’s reliance on sources, who our own lawyers said were not credible because nobody had determined their credibility or accuracy, undercut the whole fact-finding process. Delaying a decision is not going to prevent genocide from occurring at Camp Ashraf. So, in addition to asking our State Department to make a decision this week as General Mukasey said, an incredible opportunity for the United States to assert an advocate the principles of freedom that are so essential to our life and our history and the future of the world, it’s absolutely critical that a decision be made if a decision is not made and there is another genocide, a mass genocide or massacre at Camp Ashraf, we believe that this administration in the State Department in particular will be responsible for that. We cannot stand by silently. We cannot delay and obfuscate by asking inane questions that have no factual basis or relevance to this determination. If there were any facts classified or not that maintain this justification, ladies and gentlemen, we would’ve heard about them, we would’ve seen a court filing even if it had the, you know, the stereotypical blackouts somebody would be leaking something to the Washington Post. Somebody would be before the Congress saying we can’t describe the details but this is a terrorist organization. We’ve heard none of that, not in the filings and not in the transom and the reason is there is no factual basis.
So we would like to perhaps suggest another approach today. The facts haven’t worked, the laws haven’t worked, so why don’t we ask the administration to apply the two principles, which it has been celebrating in the media for the last few weeks with respect to Libya. One, prevent the looming genocide. Two act, but don’t act alone.
There is ample, irrevocable evidence that genocide will recur at Camp Ashraf unless the United States fulfills not only its legal obligations which were talking about today, but its moral obligations to each one of these individuals who, as you heard the FBI, not on my watch but the FBI interviewed all these people interviewed all these people asking the questions doing the logics doing the corroboration to see whether there was any tendency, intention, capacity to engage in terrorist activities everybody, Camp Ashraf. And the report card said, “no, there is nobody here as best we can determine who has that tendency or who has that capability.” So those are the facts, those are the facts, and with respect the principle too, the secretary doesn’t have to act alone here. The president doesn’t have to act alone.
It can be, unfortunately, the last person aboard the train but you know on momentum on a group that includes, as you’ve heard, the United Kingdom, the European Union, the United Nations, we have a duty to act even if we weren’t acting with these other players. But if we apply these two principles, we ought have the de-listing immediately it should be done this week. And the U.S. more than just the listing has to take active measures to protect, to protect the people of Camp Ashraf whether they stay in that location or move somewhere else the U.S. has this obligation and the obligation must be fulfilled.
