DLA Piper - terrorist organizations - MEK group - law vs terrorism

Source: nationaljournal.com; Julie Kosterlitz

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Lobbying & Law - Touting 'Terrorists'

Sat. Jan. 19, 2008

On paper, the Mujahedeen-e Khalq sounds like the sort of group the United States government might like to cultivate: well-organized Iranian exiles concentrated in Europe and Iraq who share Washington's antipathy to the theocracy in Iran. The group -- whose name translates as "warriors (or freedom fighters) for the people of Iran" -- has its own "parliament in exile," the National Council of Resistance of Iran, and says it supports a secular government, democracy, human rights, and women's rights in Iran.

In practice, however, the Iranian group has some major shortcomings in the ally department. For the past decade, the State Department has listed the MEK as a "foreign terrorist organization," and more recently has argued that the group displays "cult-like characteristics."

The MEK has been waging a spirited campaign to persuade the U.S. to drop the terrorist designation -- which would require either the secretary of State's say-so or an act of Congress.

Although the group can't make its own case directly, in the past several years two prominent former U.S. government officials have been publicly touting the MEK's virtues and arguing that the United States should remove it from the terrorist list.

At the moment, the more high-profile and influential of these advocates is former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, R-Texas, a senior policy adviser at the global law and lobbying firm DLA Piper. Last year, Armey wrote two op-eds for Washington newspapers urging the State Department to drop the MEK's terrorist designation.

"Never has the old adage 'The enemy of my enemy is my friend' been more true than in the case of the MEK," he wrote in The Hill in July. And in The Washington Times in December, Armey wrote, "With a stroke of the pen, the secretary of State could, and should, remove the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq and the National Council of Resistance of Iran from the list of foreign terrorist organizations."

In 2006, DLA Piper and Global Options, a crisis-management company, issued a 232-page report with a foreword by Armey and Neil C. Livingstone, then-CEO of Global Options, aimed at refuting the U.S. government's allegations against the MEK and calling for an end to its terrorist designation.

Another public advocate for the MEK is Raymond Tanter, who was a senior staff member at the National Security Council in the Reagan administration and is now an adjunct professor at Georgetown University. In 2005, Tanter co-founded the nonprofit Iran Policy Committee, which lists as directors or advisers a half-dozen former executive branch, military, and intelligence officials and describes its mission as promoting a "central role for the Iranian opposition" in bringing about "democratic change" in Iran. The committee's publications, conferences, and congressional briefings routinely urge the U.S. to take the MEK off its terrorist list, as well as to meet with and fund the group.

The MEK began as an anti-shah leftist group in the 1960s. It got on the wrong side of the United States when members assassinated several of the shah's American advisers in the 1970s. In the three decades since Iran became an Islamic regime, the State Department says, the MEK has waged violent attacks inside that country, and it maintains the "capacity and will to commit terrorist acts in Europe, the Middle East, the United States, Canada, and beyond." Over the years, the MEK has periodically reinvented its ideology, which today blends elements of Marxism, Islam, and feminism.

A charismatic husband-and-wife team leads the group: Massoud Rajavi, whose whereabouts are unknown, is the military leader, and Maryam Rajavi heads the political wing from France. The MEK's size is also unknown, but the Council on Foreign Relations estimates that it could have as many as 10,000 members worldwide.

In 2005, Human Rights Watch issued a report detailing complaints from a dozen former MEK members that they suffered physical and psychological abuse while they were in the group. The State Department says that members undergo indoctrination and weekly "ideological cleansings," are separated from their young children, and must vow "eternal divorce" -- that is, to remain unmarried or to divorce their spouse.

The U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 took a toll on the MEK, which had set up operations there after being driven out of Iran and, later, France in the 1980s. Because Saddam Hussein had been providing the bulk of its military and financial support, the State Department says, the MEK subsequently began to use "front organizations" to solicit contributions from expatriate Iranian communities.

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