Ashraf City via the Deseret News

U.S. decision on dissidents will affect relationship with Iran

9/12/2009 3:25:58 PM

By John Hughes
Deseret News , Sept. 11, 2009

syndicated by Christian Science Monitor

reprinted by The People's Mohajhedeen

at english.mojahadeen.org

The Obama administration is facing a difficult foreign policy and humanitarian challenge that could have serious implications for its relationship with Iran. It concerns 36 Iranian dissidents, promised protection by the United States, held captive in Iraq by Iraqi soldiers. Without American intercession, they may be returned to Iran, where they face dire retribution from a regime that has shown how brutal it can be to those who defy it.

The decision the United States must take is whether to stand aloof from the disposition of the 36 dissidents, risking criticism on humanitarian grounds, or to intervene, irritating the sovereign government of Iraq and infuriating Iran.

The 36 dissidents are part of a force of more than 3,400 members of the People’s Mujahedeen Organization of Iran who once mounted military operations against the Tehran regime from sanctuary in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. During the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, the U.S. military surrounded the PMOI’s Camp Ashraf, some 60 miles north of Baghdad. The PMOI surrendered their weapons and the Americans pledged protection of the camp and its inhabitants.

The Mujahedeen have been credited with supplying U.S. authorities accurate information about clandestine Iranian nuclear facilities and other intelligence.

With the signing of a Status of Forces Agreement and the beginning withdrawal this year of American forces to their bases, the United States ceded sovereignty over Camp Ashraf to the Iraqis. The United States sought, and received, promises from the Iraqi government that Camp Ashraf’s population would be protected after the handover.

But Iran has been pressuring sympathetic Iraqi politicians to close the camp and expel the PMOI members. On July 28, Iraqi forces, saying they were establishing a police presence in the camp, launched an attack, killing 11 dissidents, wounding 450 and taking 36 hostages. U.S. forces nearby remained aloof.

An Iraqi judge ruled that the 36 dissidents, who went on a hunger strike in captivity, should be released. But Iraqi Interior Ministry officials, using new tactics, have argued that the dissidents entered the country illegally and should be expelled - obviously to Iran. If this tactic is successful, it could be applied to the 3,400 or so PMOI members remaining in Camp Ashraf.

One bizarre complication is that the PMOI is listed by the U.S. State Department as a terrorist organization, mainly on grounds of guerrilla action it took earlier against the present Iranian regime. The U.S. army was directed in 2003 to protect an organization banned by the State Department as terrorist, but which has provided helpful information to the United States.

Iranian exiles in the United States and the free world have been demonstrating for some time in support of the dissidents. Various entities have raised their concerns. In reply to a petition on behalf of a majority of British Members of Parliament and 200 members of the House of Lords, a senior State Department official, ’responding on the president’s behalf,’ declared the United States is doing its utmost to ensure that residents of Ashraf ’will not be transferred to any country where there are substantial grounds to believe they would be subject to persecution … or to torture.’

One solution to the Iranian dissidents’ problem would be for the United States to give them asylum as political refugees. However, the United States can hardly accept them as such while it continues to brand them members of a terrorist organization. Nor would that sit well with the Tehran regime, with which the United States seeks engagement on Iran’s suspected pursuit of nuclear weaponry. In view of the political implications, an asylum decision would need to take place at the highest official level, at least the secretary of state, if not the president.

The PMOI has raised the prospect of the United Nations dispatching a monitoring force to Camp Ashraf. That is even less likely while such Iranian friends as Russia and China sit on the U.N. Security Council that would have to authorize it.

Clearly, the Ashraf dissidents should not be sent back to Iran against their will. That requires that the United States exerts enough pressure on the Iraqi government to keep its word.

John Hughes teaches journalism at Brigham Young University. He is a former editor and chief operating officer of the Deseret News and a former editor of the Christian Science Monitor, which syndicates this column.

Special news available to servicemen and women in Churches harassed by the Christian Right who may be more serious about International Law and are less likely to commit any sort of rape or proselytize where the Government does not want it. They had an office on most US bases to deal with the legal problems of religiously persecuted servicemen and women last checked.

Ashraf City does need a return to the Geneva Convention and to good faith promised in individual contracts signed by the US with each Ashraf resident when they were disarmed. The good faith promised and not respected has caused us immense distrust in Europe and the world.. If anyone reading this can think of an acceptable way of assisting, please do.

Mrs.Rajavi and dignitaries before the French Press Club

Paris, August 11, 2009,

Madame Marianne Rajavi spoke at the French Press Club

on the Crimes Against Humanity in Ashraf City.

also speaking (unfinished list) were:

The Head of the International Committee of Jurists, consisting of 8,500 European and American Jurists and Lawyers, also speaking were the Eve Bonèt Head, of the French Counter-Intelligence, Ann Mario Lizanne Aliceè Bomedan, Jurist and First Lady during the Algerian Presidency under Houari Bomedan, Member and former Speaker of the Belgium Senate, Professor David Mitres of the Canadian Jurists, Eric Dauvitt President of the Center of International Law at the Belgium Free University, Mario Stazi former President of the Paris Bar, the Head of the Lavalas Bar in France.

My Note, June 11, 2010

Ashraf City was built on the site of Camp Ashraf. There, members of the Iranian Resistance took refuge after losing all tolled as many as 120,000 Mujahadeen meaning in Farsi, young people lost their lives after joining the Iranian Resistance

by as simple an action as writing a Resistance slogan on a junior high school wall or forgetting to adjust their Chadors properly. We have seen the return of these times, and rue their return.

Since it is illegal to execute a virgin under the Koran, after torture, girls and women are hastily temporarily married to their torturers and raped. Marital rape is not recognized by the Quoran as it is recognized by the Torah and in Mormonism. Two of Mrs. Rajavi were executed in this way and the only way of surviving is, as survival of any other abduction or forced marriage anywhere else, forming a bond with one's captor is the only way out because of the extreme power of the abductor or, colluding abductress or abductresees. (I can discuss the FLDS Yearning for Zion raid and marital age and sexual abuse among ordinary young women in the SOuth WEst and MExico with anyone with a serious interest in the matter via You Tube, but will delete any anti-Mormon or anti-Muslim queries I receive and block the sender.)

In the case of the Taliban, and Al Queda, our propaganda against Islam is ubiquitous,

and unending war which continued long after 911 and after all military objectives, such as detonating the armaments we had sold to Afganistan when they were at war with the Russians during the latest Cold War period.

I am not commenting on the prudence or any justification of American Military objectives, currently or in the past.

After 911, which had a profound effect on Americans of every political stripe, the newly appointed and very green Bush took a general term for a common Farsi and Arab expression and in our propaganda and subsequent military actions we created probably fictional political or military forces with fictional names. Then we asked trick questions under the most heinous torture of abducted and interned citizens, some taken to foreign countries where they would be out of the glare of scrutiny by the American and International Communities for even more barbarous torture.

What did we ask? We asked if they were taliban, normally translated as students of the Quoran. Did they belong to Al Queda? I don't know what this means but I have heard it in common speech often enough to know that it is a term of common speech. What were they trying to prove? According to recent Press accounts, they were trying to prove that Al Queda existed at all by finding people to admit what? That they were members of young students of the Quoran. Obviously all devout Muslims are students of the Quoran for life. Gitmo torture had the same objective, as did Cheney's personal

interrogations of Gitmo detainees in his basement. Whether all that is implied by the removal of Cheney's House from Google Earth, I can't say. There is satire in the American Centrist Media just as propaganda drives the right/Republican Media.

At present most propaganda is DOD driven and written by hastily schooled private writers and journalist.

You used to have to have been referred by someone who knew something about contacting the CIA to know where to send one's resume, but now they advertise on Google, working by keywords, the same way they present you with recommended

videos on You Tube. Where does privacy give way to commercialism in a Depression?

At every turn and I am beset by friendly ads that seek to recruit me into the CIA.

What the 36 Ashraf abductees were presented with, in their own city jail, sounded by

what the People's Mujahadin of Iran [PMOI] were able to ascertain, similar. They were handed confessions to sign written in Arabic. Like many Muslims, most in

Ashraf read the Quoran translated into the vernacular. To defend themselves from misinterpretation of the Quoran, most do use Arabic words and an Arabic dictionary in their own tongue. This is a involved process and is not given to any method of interrogation, whether pain inducing or not, and the risk of a misinterpretation or mistranslation are extreme.

I'll try to have at least a long summary of Mrs. Rajavi's French Press club speech for those who do not want to get the French version with English subtitles from the PMOI website.

Maybe M-J can freeze the frames and read the English subtitles for me. My eye muscles are far too uncontrolled for me to read all of themselves myself. It has been three weeks since the press club speeches and Iranian hunger strikers all over the world are in their 42nd day of their uninterrupted fast. They will not stop until the specter of return to Iran is removed from their lives and those of Ashraf friends and family members. Force feeding of hunger strikers or those unable to feed themselves is contrary to International law though countries involved in the INternational BLack Market for organs impose thus to maintain the conditions of organs. Those damaged by starvation or hunger strike would be easily recognized by any but the most cursory examination by physicians.

It is estimated that one in ten transplants in America are obtained from the complex black market, particularly kidney transplants. This reduction in price may expand insurance coverage of transplants creating a monstrous feedback loop that will tear the moral fabric of international medical ethics to shreds.

The administrator of the clinic I must be rid of by a September 15th, 2009 deadline refused a urinalysis for infection despite my Diabetes and infection and removal of a kidney. The infection was massive and involved both the kidney abscess and a massive abscess that filled the small of my back when they began to drain it. She cheerily praised the reduction in the price of kidneys and said that because of it, despite my badly damaged immune system, that urinalysis wasn't cost effective.

This has taken my entire working day--I used to do this for a living, and in contrast to my pre-1979 infection, this would have taken me an hour and I would have fussed about how much I hated doing transcriptions because I just wasn't any good at it.

Curiously, I could have transcribed a speech of Governor Matheson of Utah almost as he spoke and produced a final copy in 15 minutes. I worked under a Grant from The San Francisco Youth Project and was administered by the Western branch of the American Friends Service Committee. I think it was because I was so entrained to the speech patterns of my Californian Mormon Community and to those of my Matheson Mother, whose father was a Cousin of the Governor's father.

When he announced his bid for the Governorship, he was asked if he taught anyone would vote for him. Quoth he, As I recall, "My I think my family will, and that's half the State."