Bolton and Rajavi make common cause

So the crazy raving lunatic Bolton has joined Maryam Rajavi, the self-appointed "President Elect" terrorist cult leader, in calling for democracy in Iran.

Yay!

LOL! Seriously, what can I say on the MKO/MEK/PMOI/NCR or whatever they're calling themselves today which I haven't said in the past? Picking on these people is like picking on the mentally-disturbed.

Anyway, let me set the record straight -- again -- on the claim that the MEK was placed on the US terrorist list in 1997 only as a "gesture to Khatami." That's incorrect. The list, which was created pursuant to the Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, only came into existence in 1997. The MKO was a charter member. It wasn't added to it later, it was there from the start. The reason it was added in 1997 was simply because the list came into existence then.

Furthermore, the MKO had been labelled as a terrorist organization by the US State Department prior to 1997 too, in other publications such as their annual Patterns of Global Terrorism report -- and of course there's the FBI open source review that Sen. John McCain (before be went crazy) entered into the Congressional Record as a warning to fellow members of Congress to avoid the MKO lobbyists which I posted previously.

So, in short, the MKO has always been considered a terrorist group, even prior to Khatami's presidency and outreach to the US.

In fact, at the time, I noted on Gulf2000 that the listing for the MKO seemed to not include its other name -- the NCRI or "National COuncil of Resistance". This was deemed by some to be a simple oversight at the time and the NCRI was added as a psuedonym for the MKO later -- but there were people who seriously tried to contend that the MKO and the NCRI were not the same thing, even though the Congressional Research Service report clearly says otherwise:

It has clear control over the twenty-two member umbrella group called the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCR), which was established in 1981 to give the appearance of a broad-based opposition coalition.

Comments

[k_w]

If I'm not mistaken, the MEK helped Saddam slaughter the Kurds during Operation Morvarid in March 1991. It was them and their NCRI who held a press conference at the Willard Hotel on August 14, 2002 to complain about Iran's alleged nuclear weapons program. Pahlavi Jr. had refused to come out with this crap, so it had to be their turn. BTW, was Ileana Ros-Lehtinen around? She likes those guys ...