While you would expect the State Department’s decision to de-list the Mujahadeen-e-Khalq as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) would elicit cheers from anti-Iran neo-conservatives, the MEK has, in fact, been one of a number of issue — including former Israeli Prime Minister Sharon’s decision to unilaterally withdraw from Gaza and [...]]]>
While you would expect the State Department’s decision to de-list the Mujahadeen-e-Khalq as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) would elicit cheers from anti-Iran neo-conservatives, the MEK has, in fact, been one of a number of issue — including former Israeli Prime Minister Sharon’s decision to unilaterally withdraw from Gaza and Washington’s engagement with the Muslim Brotherhood — that has been the source of considerable division among the neo-cons.
Strong opposition to de-listing the MEK, let alone providing it with U.S. (or even Israeli) support has been based mostly among those most ardent Iraq hawks closely associated with the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), particularly Michael Rubin; Danielle Pletka, and Michael Ledeen, who moved over to the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy (FDD) a couple of years ago and, of all people, should know a con when he sees one. Their opposition is based on the conviction (shared by many critics on the left and among realists or anyone who has ever actually been to Iran) that the MEK is largely hated in Iran itself and thus that any perceived U.S. support for — or complicity with — it will prove entirely counter-productive to their goal of regime change.
Or, as Rubin put it last March:
The problem with those who would embrace the MEK is that it would undercut the chance for regime collapse.
…Iranians living under the regime’s yoke hate the MEK. That is not regime propaganda; it is fact, one to which any honest analyst who has ever visited Iran testify. Ordinary Iranians deeply resent the MEK’s terrorism, which has targeted not only regime officials, but also led to the deaths of scores of civilians. During the Iran-Iraq War — a conflict that decimated cities and led to tens of thousands of civilian deaths — the MEK sided with Saddam Hussein.
…If the MEK is delisted, let the MEK celebrate. But whether listed as a terrorist group or not, it would be wrong and counterproductive to embrace the group unless, of course, the goal of those for officials on the group’s payroll is simply to aid the current regime in its efforts to rally its subjugated masses around the flag.
The last reference, of course, was to the legion of high-profile former Republican and Democratic administration officials and military officers (useful idiots and/or mercenaries, so far as MEK foes are concerned) who have been speaking out in favor of the MEK, most, if not all of them, in return for tens of thousands of dollars paid out by the MEK’s multitudinous front groups and p.r. consultants. (The Washington Post covered a good lot of them last July when the FBI started looking into their lobbying activities.
Pletka, whose blog post this week about Obama “hat[ing] Israel” can only be described as truly bizarre, nonetheless raised some good questions last year about the morality of those who support the MEK and the application of double standards regarding Washington’s enforcement of its terrorism laws:
If this is an enemy/enemy/friend thing, let’s consider whether we wish to replace the creepy, Islamist, dictatorial mullahs with the creepy, Islamist, dictatorial cult. Seems a bad trade to me. The United States should be supporting democracy in Iran, not a one-for-one swap among murderers and thugs.
And here’s another question: Where’s the FBI and the Justice Department? A terrorist group is lobbying in the United States. It’s paying top political fixers to make its case. It’s paying speaking fees to former government officials. Where’s the money from? How’s it being transferred? And would it be okay for Hezbollah to do this? Al Qaeda?
Unfortunately, these arguments didn’t get very far with more prominent associates and colleagues at AEI, although Richard Perle, such as Newt Gingrich, who spoke at a MEK rally in Paris last July (Bowing before a recognized cult leader in a foreign country must be particularly humiliating for someone like Gingrich, but I guess Sheldon Adelson’s $10m didn’t cover all his campaign debts); John Bolton, Allan Gerson, who was one of the MEK’s attorneys; and the former (and mercifully briefly) CIA director under Bill Clinton, James Woolsey. Richard Perle, who appeared at an Iranian-American “charity event” in Virginia in 2004 but then claimed he had no idea that it was a fund-raiser for the MEK has since wisely kept his silence.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the neo-con critics of the MEK sceptics (besides the big-name endorsers noted above) have been, of course, the Iran Policy Committee (IPC) headed by Raymond Tanter, as well as a number of writers and think tankers, including contributors to the Weekly Standard, the National Review, and Commentary (notably Jonathan Tobin), and Daniel Pipes, the director of the Middle East Forum. Unlike the IPC, which has always insisted that the MEK got a bad rap and is truly a deeply pro-American group dedicated to all the principles and values that have made this country great, the latter have basically propounded “the-enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend” argument disdained by Pletka.
Rubin and Tobin grappled last February on Commentary’s Contentions blog on the practicality of backing the MEK in the wake of reports that Israel had used the MEK to assassinate an Iranian scientist the previous month — reports that, in Tobin’s view, were “difficult to doubt.” Tobin:
The MEK are allies of convenience and, just like many wartime allies in other conflicts, share only a common enemy with Israel. But however nasty they may be, Israel need not blush about using them. For a democracy at war, the only truly immoral thing to do would be to let totalitarian Islamists like those in Tehran triumph.
To which Rubin responded:
Jonathan is correct that Israel cannot ignore the Iranian regime’s genocidal intent, and he is also correct that there is no moral equivalence between alleged Israeli targeting of Iranian nuclear scientists and Iranian assassination attempts upon Israeli diplomats.
…By utilizing the MEK—a group which Iranians view in the same way Americans see John Walker Lindh, the American convicted of aiding the Taliban—the Israelis risk winning some short-term gain at the tremendous expense of rallying Iranians around the regime’s flag. A far better strategy would be to facilitate regime change. Not only would the MEK be incapable of that mission, but involving them even cursorily would set the goal back years.
The Weekly Standard has generally avoided the controversy, but last May, Lee Smith, who is also associated with FDD, penned a generally sympathetic article entitled “Terrorists or Fall Guys” in which he quoted, among others, his FDD colleague and AEI alum, Reuel Marc Gerecht, as asserting, “If the PLO can be rehabilitated, so can the MEK.” The article featured at some length statements by Brig. Gen. David Phillips, the retired commandant of the U.S. Army Military Police, whose job was to disarm the MEK after the 2003 invasion and who opposed transferring the MEK from Camp Ashraf to Camp Liberty on the grounds that the Iraqi government would probably hand its members over to Tehran. The final sentence of the piece:
American credibility and prestige are on the line, says Phillips, not only in how we treat people under our protection but also in how we deal with Iran. “We’re afraid of sending the Iranians a strong message and getting them mad. But that’s exactly the message we want to send them.”
That’s apparently Smith’s bottom line on the question.
Pipes, who, unlike almost all other neo-cons, opposes U.S. intervention in Syria, has come out in clear support of the MEK, which, in a 2011 article entitled “Empower Iranians Vs. Tehran,” he called “the most prominent Iranian opposition group.”
He apparently disagrees with Rubin, a long-time senior editor of MEF’s Middle East Quarterly — and someone who has actually spent some time in Iran — about the MEK’s popularity inside Iran, arguing that:
…([J]ust as the MeK’s organizational and leadership skills helped bring down the shah in 1979, these skills can again facilitate regime change. The number of street protestors arrested for association with the MeK points to its role in demonstrations, as do slogans echoing MeK chants, e.g., calling Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei a “henchman,” Pres. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a “dictator,” and shouting “down with the principle of Velayat-e Faqih” (that a religious figure heads the government).
From which we might fairly conclude that Pipes thinks that the MEK organized the Green Movement, or, better yet, that he takes Tehran’s for word it.
In any event, this is where Pipes comes out:
“Following a court-mandated review of the MeK’s terrorist designation, the secretary of tate must soon decide whether to maintain this listing. With one simple signature, the Obama administration can help empower Iranians to seize control over their destiny — and perhaps end the mullahs’ mad nuclear dash.”
Just last week, it came out that The Legal Project, yet another arm in Pipes’ empire, had “coordinated and financed the defense” of Seid Hassan Daioleslam in a defamation lawsuit filed in 2008 by the National Iranian American Council (NIAC) and its president, Trita Parsi. The lawsuit was dismissed earlier this month by Federal District Court Judge John Bates on a summary judgment motion by the defense that the plaintiffs had failed to provide sufficient evidence that Daioleslam’s allegations that NIAC and Parsi were agents of the Iranian regime were malicious; that is, that the defendant knew at the time that he made those accusations that they were untrue. (The judge made no finding as to whether the accusations were in fact true, and you can read NIAC’s reaction here.)
While Diaoleslam has long denied charges by Parsi and others that he is himself associated with the MEK, our own Daniel Luban wrote a series of posts back in 2009 that provided evidence of such a link and of the rather nefarious purposes that Diaoleslam and his editor at the time, Kenneth Timmerman, were entertaining when the article that was the subject of the lawsuit was published. (See here and here for additional background and information.) In the course of his own inquiry, Daniel asked how it was that Diaoleslam, “whose professional activities are mostly limited to writing occasional pieces for obscure right-wing websites, is getting the money to devote himself full-time to research — not to mention how he can afford the likes of Sidley Austin LLP, the white-shoe law firm that is defending him in his lawsuit with NIAC.” So now we have at least a partial answer to that question; Pipes was helping him out. (Incidentally, for those of you who are interested in Obama-hatred and Islamophobia, don’t miss Pipes’ <a href=", whose professional activities are mostly limited to writing occasional pieces for obscure right-wing websites, is getting the money to devote himself full-time to research — not to mention how he can afford the likes of Sidley Austin LLP, the white-shoe law firm that is defending him in his lawsuit with NIAC." So now we have at least a partial answer to that question — Pipes, who believes that the MEK can lead the Iranian masses to overthrow the regime. It may be worth noting that Timmerman, who published Daioleslam's original report on NIAC, appears to believe that the MEK is indeed a terrorist group, as noted in an article he wrote for his Foundation for Democracy in Iran last year.
(Incidentally, for those of you interested in Pipes’ Islamophobia, don’t miss his <a href=”>recent five-part series in the Washington Times on Obama’s alleged early Muslim identity. It amasses an enormous amount of material to prove that Obama “has specifically and repeatedly lied about his Muslim identity” — except that the evidence marshaled by Pipes in support of that conclusion proves no such thing. Indeed, if there were a motion for summary judgment based on Pipes’ evidence, I would imagine that Judge Bates would throw the case out.)
]]>via IPS News
In a move certain to ratchet up already-high tensions with Iran, the administration of President Barack Obama will remove a militant anti-regime group from the State Department’s terrorism list, U.S. officials told reporters here Friday.
The decision, which is expected to be formally announced before Oct. [...]]]>
via IPS News
In a move certain to ratchet up already-high tensions with Iran, the administration of President Barack Obama will remove a militant anti-regime group from the State Department’s terrorism list, U.S. officials told reporters here Friday.
The decision, which is expected to be formally announced before Oct. 1, the deadline set earlier this year by a federal court to make a determination, was in the process of being transmitted in a classified report to Congress, according to the Department’s spokeswoman, Victoria Nuland.
The decision came several days after some 680 members of the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (MEK), or People’s Mojahedin, were transferred from their long-time home at Camp Ashraf in eastern Iraq close to the Iranian to a former U.S. base in at Baghdad’s airport in compliance with Washington’s demands that the group move. The transfer leaves only 200 militants at Camp Ashraf out of the roughly 3,200 who were there before the transfers began.
Most analysts here predicted that the administration’s decision to remove the MEK from the terrorism list would only worsen already abysmal relations with Iran and possibly make any effort to defuse the gathering crisis over its nuclear programme yet more difficult.
“Delisting will be seen not only by the Iranian regime, but also by most Iranian citizens, as a hostile act by the United States,” Paul Pillar, a former top CIA analyst who served as the National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005, told IPS.
“The MEK has almost no popular support within Iran, where it is despised as a group of traitors, especially given its history of joining forces with Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War,” Pillar, who now teaches at George Washington University, added.
“Any effect of the delisting on nuclear negotiations will be negative; Tehran will read it as one more indication that the United States is interested only in hostility and pressure toward the Islamic Republic, rather than coming to terms with it.”
The decision followed a high-profile multi-year campaign by the group and its sympathisers that featured almost-daily demonstrations at the State Department, full-page ads in major newspapers, and the participation of former high-level U.S. officials, some of whom were paid tens of thousands of dollars to make public appearances on behalf of the MEK.
Officials included Obama’s first national security adviser, Gen. James Jones, former FBI chief Louis Freeh, and a number of senior officials in the George W. Bush administration, including his White House chief of staff, Andrew Card, attorney general Michael Mukasey, and former U.N. ambassador John Bolton.
Created in the mid-1960s by Islamo-Marxist university students, the MEK played a key role in the 1979 ouster of the Shah only to lose a bloody power struggle with the more-conservative clerical factions close to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
The group went into exile; many members fled to Iraq, which they used as a base from which they mounted military and terrorist attacks inside Iran during the eight-year war between the two countries. Its forces were also reportedly used to crush popular rebellions against President Saddam Hussein that followed the 1991 Gulf War.
During a brief period of détente between Washington and Tehran, the administration of President Bill Clinton designated the group as a Foreign Terrorist Organisation (FTO) in 1997 based in part on its murder of several U.S. military officials and contractors in the 1970s and its part in the 1979 U.S. Embassy takeover, as well as its alliance with Saddam Hussein.
When U.S. forces invaded Iraq in 2001, the MEK declared its neutrality and eventually agreed to disarm in exchange for Washington’s agreement that its members could remain at Camp Ashraf as “protected persons” under the Geneva Convention, an arrangement that expired in 2009.
The government of President Nour Al-Maliki, however, has been hostile to the MEK’s continued presence in Iraq. Two violent clashes since 2009 between Iraqi security forces and camp residents resulted in the deaths of at least 45 MEK members.
Last December, the UN reached a U.S.-mediated accord with the MEK to re-locate the residents to “Camp Liberty” at Baghdad’s airport, which would serve as a “temporary transit station” for residents to resettle in third countries or in Iran, if they so chose, after interviews with the UN High Commission on Refugees.
Until quite recently, however, the group — which Human Rights Watch (HRW) and a significant number of defectors, among others, have described as a cult built around its long-unaccounted-for founder, Massoud Rajavi, and his Paris-based spouse, Maryam — has resisted its wholesale removal from Ashraf. Some observers believe Massoud may be based there.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s increasingly blunt suggestions that the MEK’s failure to co-operate would jeopardise its chances of being removed from the terrorism list, however, appear to have brought it around.
The MEK claims that it halted all military actions in 2001 and has lacked the intent or the capability of carrying out any armed activity since 2003, an assertion reportedly backed up by the State Department.
Earlier this year, however, NBC News quoted one U.S. official as confirming Iran’s charges that Israel has used MEK militants in recent years to carry out sabotage operations, including the assassination of Iranian scientists associated with Tehran’s nuclear programme.
“The Iranian security establishment’s assessment has long believed that foreign intelligence agencies, specifically the CIA, Israeli Mossad, and the UK’s MI6 utilise the MEK for terror attacks on Iranian nuclear scientists, nuclear sabotage and intelligence gathering,” noted Seyed Hossein Mousavian, a former senior Iranian diplomat and nuclear negotiator currently at Princeton University.
“Therefore, the delisting of MEK will be seen in Tehran as a reward for the group’s terrorist actions in the country,” he wrote in an email exchange with IPS. “Furthermore, Iran has firmly concluded that the Western demands for broader inspections (of Iran’s nuclear programme), including its military sites, are a smokescreen for mounting increased cyber attacks, sabotage and terror of nuclear scientists.
“Delisting MEK would be considered in Tehran as a U.S.-led effort to increase sabotage and covert actions through MEK leading inevitably to less cooperation by Iran with the IAEA (the International Atomic Energy Agency).”
He added that government in Tehran will use this as a way of “demonstrating to the public that the U.S. is seeking …to bring a MEK-style group to power” which, in turn, “would strengthen the Iranian nation’s support for the current system as the perceived alternative advanced by Washington would be catastrophic.”
That view was echoed by the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), which noted that the decision opens the doors to Congressional funding of the MEK and that leaders of the Iran’s Green Movement have long repudiated the group.
“The biggest winner today is the Iranian regime, which has claimed for a long time that the U.S. is out to destroy Iran and is the enemy of the Iranian people,” said NIAC’s policy director, Jamal Abdi.
“It will certainly not improve U.S.-Iranian relations,” according to Alireza Nader, an Iran specialist at the Rand Corporation, who agreed that the “delisting reinforces Tehran’s longstanding narrative regarding U.S. hostility toward the regime.
“Nevertheless,” he added, “I don’t think it is detrimental to U.S. interests as Tehran suspects U.S. collusion with the MEDK anyhow, whether this perception is correct or not.”
Karim Sadjadpour, an analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said the move was unlikely to be “game-changer” in that “the MEK will continue to be perceived inside Iran as an antiquated cult which sided with Saddam Hussein during the (Iran-Iraq) war, and U.S. Iran relations will remain hostile.”
“It doesn’t help (Washington’s) image within Iran, certainly, and some Iranian democracy activists may misperceive this as a U.S. show of support for the MEK, which could have negative ramifications,” he noted.
Another casualty of the decision may be the credibility of the FTO list itself, according to Mila Johns, a researcher at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland.
“The entire atmosphere around the MEK’s campaign to be removed from the FTO list – the fact that (former) American government officials were allowed to actively and openly receive financial incentives to speak in support of an organisation that was legally designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, without consequence – created the impression that the list is essentially a meaningless political tool,” she told IPS.
“It is hard to imagine that the FTO designation holds much legitimacy within the international community when it is barely respected by our own government,” she said.
No other group, she noted, has been de-listed in this way, “though now that the precedent has been set, I would expect that other groups will explore this as an option.”
]]>Because I got hung up in New York Wednesday morning, I hit rush hour traffic on the Beltway coming into DC, and arrived late for the opening session of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies‘s Washington Forum on “Countering the Iranian Threat.”
Nothing out of the ordinary during last night’s cocktail outing at the Ritz-Carlton, where in an adjacent conference area, two Barhraini gentlemen stood in white robes and head-dresses greeting people for an event sponsored by that government. The Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) event is your run-of-the-mill blue chip neoconservative conference at the high-endest of high-end Washington hotels.
As I looked closely at the final schedule, I was rather struck by the speakers’ list.
The New York Times‘s David Sanger — who just co-wrote a controversial story about Iran – will moderate a panel. Jeffry Goldberg, another mainstream journalist and no stranger to controversial stories on Iran, will be on a panel with perhaps the most strident advocate of immediate attacks on Iran, Reuel Marc Gerecht.
From officialdom, U.S. WMD czar and the former vice president of United Against a Nuclear Iran, Gary Samore, will address the crowd on Friday morning.
Naturally, the right wing of the foreign policy establishment is represented as well. Iran Policy Committee head Raymond Tanter, a tireless advocate of the Mojehedeen-e Khalq (MEK), was at the cocktail. And the Hudson Institute‘s I. Lewis Scooter Libby — formerly then-Vice President Dick Cheney‘s chief of staff who was convicted of lying to investigators in the PlameGate scandal — was in attendance for Thursday morning’s panels, as was Patrick Clawson of the AIPAC-formed Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Of course there is the FDD roster itself: Gerecht (who was seen chatting in the lobby on Thursday morning with neoconservative Washington Times journalist Eli Lake), Cliff May, Michael Ledeen, and all the others.
But what really piqued my interest was an FDD fundraiser scheduled for Thursday night at the home of an unnamed ambassador to the United States.
Here’s what the schedule has to say:
7:00 pm
Dinner at the residence of one
of Washington’s noteworthy Ambassadors
(Closed to Media)
(Minimum $5,000 gift required. Contribute here, or for more information on becoming a donor, please contact XXXXXXX)
FDD’s communications director, Judy Mayka, told me on Wednesday night that just which ambassador is hosting the $5,000 a plate fund-raiser is such a closely guarded secret that even she didn’t know. I’ll update as I find out more.
However, Thursday morning’s session featured Sen. Mark Kirk (R-IL), who made the case for more robust U.S. assistance to Israel on missile defense. He received spontaneous mid-presentation applause — a rarity at these Washington panels.
Given the focus on Israel for FDD and many of its scholars — and the neoconservative movement from which they emerge — it’s not a stretch to put the early odds that Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren will play host to tonight’s big money FDD donors.
Otherwise, what I caught of the opening panel was rather unremarkable. Former Regean administration national security advisor Bud McFarlane spoke about impending threats and FDD’s unique ability to confront them:
We’re going, in the next two years, to face a threat from Iran, North Korea… We’re probably going to face a disruption of the oil supply…
Nobody else in Washington has the reach and the depth and the solutions that will get us out of this.
Mark Dubowitz, FDD’s executive director, ran down the group’s roster and sang their praises. He joked, as anti-anti-Semitism activist Irwin Cotler did on Thursday morning, about being a Canadian. Threats against Iran were not totally absent, but Dubowitz delivered them with a metaphor:
There’s no silver bullet for solving this problem, but there might be silver shrapnel.
Knowing some of the views of FDD staff and experts, some of the panel titles read like rhetorical questions:
- Sanctions: What’s Next?
Is enforcement enough?- Increasing Threats, Diminishing Options: Should the Military Option be Employed against Iran?
When does this become the only option?
Dubowitz confirmed the militarist bent of FDD when he closed out Wednesday night’s opening cocktail reception: “We’re not just a think tank. We like to think of ourselves as a ‘battle tank’.”
]]>The MEK, which, along with its political front group, the National Council for Resistance in [...]]]>
The MEK, which, along with its political front group, the National Council for Resistance in Iran (NCRI), had representatives at the presser, claims it discovered the site through an “internal network of sources” in Iran.
But the source of the information — the MEK is listed as a terrorist organization by the State Department — and the group’s affiliation and promotion by U.S. neoconservatives pushing hard-line policies towards Iran are reasons for skepticism. Both the State Department and independent experts have raised several alarms about the reliability of the MEK’s claims.
While in the past, official U.S. sources have been willing to confirm information made public by the MEK, the State Department today told Fox News it would “study” the information, which included satellite images, and noted the MEK’s mixed record. “The MEK has made pronouncements about Iranian facilities in the past — some accurate, some not,” State spokesman P.J. Crowley told Fox. Indeed, the MEK was the first to reveal the existence of an Iranian nuclear facility at Natanz.
Some independent experts are also skeptical. While the MEK claims that the site has been under construction for five years — to the tune of $100 million — with tunnels being built for centrifuges. One expert, speaking to the Washington Post‘s “Checkpoint” national security blog, noted that underground facilities are not synonymous with centrifuge work:
“We saw nothing in the images that suggests a centrifuge plant,” said David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security. “There are many underground facilities in Iran.”
At his new blog, former National Iranian American Council assistant policy director Patrick Disney lays out a host of reasons to be skeptical about the new claims about Iran’s nuclear program from the MEK. (Disney’s piece is worth checking out in full.)
Far from being a “leading Iranian opposition” group — as the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, in its article about the new revelations, called the group — Disney casts doubts on the MEK’s ability to cultivate its “network of sources” in the Islamic Republic:
Long recognized as a terrorist entity, the MEK has been responsible for the killing of numerous Iranian and American civilians since the 1970s. Its cult-like membership maintains close to zero support among the Iranian people — a consequence of the group’s siding with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War. Thus, it is unlikely that the MEK’s networks in Iran are extensive enough to obtain credible evidence of any such nuclear facilities.
As for the Iran Policy Committee, the group has long called for U.S.-sponsored regime change in Iran, but with the caveat that such an effort be led by Iranians, specifically the MEK. The plan is something akin to the neoconservative emphasis on using the now-disgraced Ahmad Chalabi (since accused of being an Iranian spy) and his Iraqi National Congress exile opposition group to install a new government in Iraq.
Raymond Tanter, who founded and co-chairs the IPC, is a former fellow of the Hudson Institute and a current adjunct scholar at the AIPAC-formed Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Tanter has, for years, lobbied power-centers in Washington — with some success on Capitol Hill – to remove the MEK from U.S. terror lists and use them to conduct a cross-border insurgency against Iran from Iraq, where the MEK has been based.
Another IPC director is retired Gen. Thomas McInerney, who chairs the group’s advisory committee. An über hawk, McInerney has argued, among other things, that the U.S. ought to invade Syria in order to find the weapons of mass destruction that he alleges Saddam Hussein smuggled there before the 2003 U.S.-led invasion. McInerney, a Fox News analyst who also sits on the military committee of Frank Gaffney‘s neocon Center for Security Policy, was recently exposed by Talking Points Memo as a supporter of the “birther” conspiracy that alleges, despite replete evidence to the contrary, that Barack Obama was not born in the U.S. and is therefore ineligible to be president.
Is this unlikely marriage of accused terrorists and neoconservatives — both with mixed-if-not-poor records on intelligence in the Mid East — really where the U.S. wants to be getting its information about developments in Iran?
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