Sic Semper Tyrannis

The MeK - Washington's Favourite Communist Terrorist Cult (by CP)

I considered posting on the MeK, but now Richard Sale beat me to it with his excellent article on what they do and what they did.

I'll try to complement his piece by providing some additional background on what they are. The group has some quite outlandish characteristics that make it rather unique, and US support for it all the more surprising. It is, in a nutshell, Washington's (and Israel's) favourite terrorist cult.

A few days back they staged a protest at the White House, in order to plead for dear leader Maryam Rajavi being allowed to testify befor congress on ISIS, and naturally, Iran's evils. I invite readers to have a close look at the image, in particular the mug of their dear leader, Maryam Rajavi (iirc "the true president of Iran", in one of her unofficial titles), on placards.

After the US invasion or Iraq in 2003, the MeK were based in Camp Ashraf and 'liberated' by US troops. In fact, it was pretty soon that the US had to protect them from the Iraqis who held unfond memories of them, for aiding Saddam Hussein's efforts to suppress Kurds and Shia. After Saddam's demise, the MeK however quickly found a new sponsor in sympathetic neocons, who felt they could put the group to good use against Iran.

The RAND corporation wrote a rather thorough and damning report on the MeK in 2009 which can be found here:

http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monographs/2009/RAND_MG871.pdf

It is absolutely worth to be read in full. It should be required reading for everyone dealing with the group.

I will quote at length from the chapter (p.37 f) introducing the MeK's cult characteristics and especially from Appendix B (p.69 ff), which goes into greater detail.

♦ A Cult ... - p. 37 f of the PDF

Coalition Forces Were Not Prepared to Deal with an Unfamiliar Culture or the MeK’s Atypical Characteristics

... JIATF’s commanders had few or no opportunities to discuss the difficulties inherent in dealing with the MeK, to share knowledge, or to compare strategies. This deficit had particularly profound consequences once it became apparent to JIATF [ed: Joint Inter-Agency Task Force] officers through their early interrogations of MeK members that the organization was not just an FTO [ed: Foreign Terrorist Organisation]; it was also a cult.

The MeK as a Cult

From its earliest days, the MeK had had tight social bonds, but these began to be transformed into something more sinister during the mid-1980s after the group’s leaders and many of its members had relocated to Paris. There, Masoud Rajavi began to undertake what he called an “ideological revolution,” requiring a new regimen of activities—at first demanding increased study and devotion to the cause but soon expanding into near-religious devotion to the Rajavis (Masoud and his wife, Maryam), public self-deprecation sessions, mandatory divorce, celibacy, enforced separation from family and friends, and gender segregation. Prior to establishing an alliance with Saddam, the MeK had been a  popular  organization.  However,  once  it  settled  in  Iraq  and  fought against Iranian forces in alliance with Saddam, the group incurred the ire of the Iranian people and, as a result, faced a shortfall in volunteers. Thus began a campaign of disingenuous recruiting. The MeK naturally sought out Iranian dissidents, but it also approached Iranian economic migrants  in  such  countries  as  Turkey  and  the  United  Arab  Emirates with false promises of employment, land, aid in applying for asylum in Western countries, and even marriage, to attract them to Iraq. Relatives of members were given free trips to visit the MeK’s camps. Most of these “recruits” were brought into Iraq illegally and then required to hand over their identity documents for “safekeeping.” Thus, they were effectively trapped.

Yemen Update 6 May 2015

(Houthi tank)
"... two civilians were killed in the southwestern city ofNajran, while an Interior Ministry statement said three people were killed and did not specify if they were all civilians.

Residents in the southern Yemeni city of Aden said a Houthi advance had forced hundreds of families to flee.

Speaking by telephone, Mona Abdel-Maged, told the agency that a mortar shell killed her husband,  and six men who tried to retrieve his body were killed by another shell.

"After burying the dead, we would still find torn limbs and body parts in the streets. So we go back and bury them," she said." USAToday 

 http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2015/05/06/yemen-rebels-saudi-rockets/70876100/

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 Najran, the capital of Najran Governorate is quite a modern city now.  Take a look at it on Google Earth.  I have wandered around on both sides of the Saudi/Yemeni border in that area.  The inhabitants of the Wadi Najran are Wahhabi Sunni Arabs who live on subsidies from Riyadh and who feel no kinship whatever with the Yemeni Zeidi tribal Arabs on the other side of the mountainous border to the south of Najran City.   The Zeidis hold the Najrani Saudis in deep contempt as pet dogs for the Saudi royals.  The Zeidis have now attacked Najran City by fire twice in the last week.  To do that they would have entered SA because they do not have indirect fire weapons with the range to reach from their side of the border.  They are probing.  They are "counting the spears."  There will be more.  the Saudis tried to get Pakistan and Egypt to hire out 30 or 40 thousand troops to them for a ground war in Yemen.  That appeal failed.  Now they are bringing in Sudanese and Senegalese mercenaries.  This should become really interesting.  pl

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2015/05/05/why-senegal-is-sending-

troops-to-help-saudi-arabia-in-yemen/

pl 

Beware of the MEK By Richard Sale

Apparently, the Obama administration has gathered a group of former high-ranking U.S. government officials who are trying get the MEK taken off the U.S. terrorism list. According to recent news reports, the MEK helped Islamic clerics overthrow Iran's shah before carrying out a series of bombings and assassinations against the Iranian government. It fought in the 1980s alongside Saddam's forces in the Iran-Iraq war, but disarmed after the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. It has since suffered violent recriminations from Iraq's new Shiite-dominated government. 

The decision to remove the MEK list rests on two factors: whether it still had the capacity and intent to commit acts of terror.

But the MEK has a much darker side than most people believe.  In 2012, I did an article for ISSSource for its editor, Greg Hale, which deserves consideration. The text begins below. 

"The Stuxnet virus that damaged Iran’s nuclear program was implanted by an Israeli proxy — an Iranian, who used a corrupt “memory stick.32,”

former and serving U.S. intelligence officials said. 

Obama and "The Bear"

Obama:  "...  for far too long, for decades, you have a situation in which too many communities don’t have a relationship of trust with the police. If you just have a handful of police who are not doing the right thing, that makes the job tougher for all the other police officers out there. It creates an environment in the community where they feel as if rather than being protected and served, they’re the targets of arbitrary arrests or stops. And so our job has to be to rebuild trust, and we put forward a task force made up of police officers, but also young activists who had been protesting in Ferguson or here in New York. They came up with some terrific recommendations about collecting data on what happens when there’s a shooting involving police, what are we doing in terms of things like body cameras. And so there are some very practical, concrete things we can do to make the system work better.

But…this is not just a policing problem. What you have are pockets of poverty, lack of opportunity, lack of education all across this country. Too often we ignore those pockets until something happens. Then we act surprised and the TV cameras come in. Essentially, we put the police officers in a really tough spot where we say to them, “Just contain the problem.” If young African-American men are being shot but it’s not effecting us, we’ll just kinda paper that over. Part of the message that I’m trying do deliver is, look, you’ve got a crisis in these communities that’s been going on for years where too many young people don’t have hope, they don’t see opportunity, there aren’t enough jobs. We’ve created an approach to drugs that leads to mass incarcerations. So then you have no father figures in these communities. When those folks get out of prison, they can’t get a job because they’ve got a felony record. 

Today, part of what I did in New York was announce some additional initiatives around what we’re calling My Brother’s Keeper. How can we send a message to young people of color and minorities, particularly young men, saying your lives do matter, we do care about you, but we’re gonna invest in you before you have problems with the police, before there’s the kind of crisis we see in Baltimore. We’re gonna make sure you’ve got early childhood education, we’re gonna make sure you’ve got an opportunity to graduate and go to college and you’ve got mentors and apprenticeships. That kind of sustained effort I think is what we have to see in this country. Not just the episodic spasms of interest when something tragic happens. 

Letterman asked: ...Is racism a factor? The factor? A residual factor?

A residual factor, but also a buildup of our history. We can’t ignore that. Look, if you have slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination that built up over time, even if our society has made extraordinary strides—and I’m a testament to that, and my kids and your kids are growing up in an America where the attitudes of the next generation make you hopeful because I think they genuinely try to judge people on the basis of character. But it’s built up over time. If you have 100 years in which certain communities can only live in certain places, or the men in those communities can only get menial labor, or they can’t start a particular trade because it’s closed to them. Or they try to buy a house or a car and it’s more expensive. Over time that builds up. That results in communities where the kids who are born there are not going to have as good of a shot. We don’t have to accuse everybody of racism today to acknowledge that that’s part of our past and if we want to get past this, then we’ve gotta make a little bit of extra effort.   Letterman Show 4 May 2014

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The basic message in what President Obama said last night on Letterman's show is that White people are altogether responsible for the situation of Blacks in places like Baltimore where they live in festering isolation and poverty and that Blacks are in no way responsible.  This is an old telling of the narrative of victimization.  I remember reading this narrative in the second half of Faulkner's "The Bear"  when I was 18.  This version of the story is filled with a great self pity. William Faulkner as a great artist was quite capable of empathic self-pity.  This narrative is also demeaning to the success story of all the Blacks and people of mixed race who have overcome the disadvantages heaped on them by their history in America.

IMO we now know what Obama is going to do with the rest of his life.  pl 

http://news.yahoo.com/obama-gave-one-most-important-talks-race-last-143414842.html

Able Archer 83, Andropov's stovepipe and the Neocons (by CP)

A couple days back I watched a documentary on how NATO's 1983 exercise Able Archer brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. The story is by now reasonably well known, so I'll jump right to the point that interested me most: The way the Russians came to their erroneous conclusion that a NATO first strike was imminent in 1983.

Because of his fears of a nuclear attack and decapitation strike against the USSR by the US and NATO, Breshnev and Andropov ordered the KGB to put into action operation RYAN that tasked KGB agents worldwide to collect information on indications attack preparations by NATO and the US.

This info went straight to a top secret collection cell. In the documentary it was then displayed on a plexiglass matrix, every item of information displayed as an X - the assumption being that the fuller it became the likelier a US first strike was. And bit by bit, it became fuller.

The direction of the operation led to pressure on all agents to report everything, anything potentially suspicious. And they found plenty suspicious things: The protective measures adopted by the US after the Beirut bombings - suspicious, lights left on in the British MoD at night - suspicious, introducing Pershing II and GLCM - highly suspicious, talk of an 'Evil Empire' - extremely disturbing, high alert during exercise Able Archer 83 - scary etc  pp

All of this fed into Russian paranoia and fear to an extent that they secretly sent their strategic nuclear forces on full alert in the assumption that they were about to be be forced into a nuclear war with the US. In a climatic incident, a valiant Russian officer in an early warning center prevented a false alarm from triggering a retaliatory srike - a close one.

A few points to ponder on:

* Confirmation bias

For one, I was surprised by the extent to which the Russians were scared of an attack by NATO and felt vulnerable. The other thing that surprised me was that Andropov, to confirm his pre-existing notion that the US were an aggressive and hostile power, collected raw intelligence, apparently without analysing or contextualising it, and used it to indicate US attack preparations.

In a nutshell Andropow built himself a vertitable 'stovepipe'. Strikingly, a 'stovepipe' was exactly the same thing that the neocons built themselves after 9/11:

"Is NASA about to crack interstellar travel?" AJC.com

http://turcopolier.typepad.com/the_athenaeum/2015/05/httpwwwajccomnewsnewsnationalnasa-about-crack-interstellar-travelnk75m.html

pl

 

ISIS - Of Puppets and Puppet Masters

Is German newspaper "Der Spiegel" playing us? Or is it being played?

by Patrick Bahzad

Last week, the English online edition of German newspaper "Der Spiegel" published a report about ISIS that caused a bit of a buzz … Two months after US magazine "The Atlantic" got nationwide attention for its piece depicting the "Islamic State" as a sort of larger Muslim equivalent to David Koresh's "Branch Davidians", we were now served a wholly different story.

ISIS was not a group of lunatics and fanatics who would like nothing better than precipitate the End of days through the battle of "Dabiq", but a creature designed and built by ex-Baathist Iraqi officers, acting as puppet masters of their Jihadi pawns. That is what crucial documents giving insights into the "Islamic State" revealed, according to "Der Spiegel". It did sound almost as if Saddam Hussein had come back from the grave, with a vengeance.

What is interesting is that the article offers a sharp analysis of the genesis of ISIS, giving an credible account of the roots and causes for its emergence, mixed with a narrative that would be more appropriate for a mediocre Hollywood thriller. Questions need to be asked, not just about the authenticity of the documents, but also about the circumstances of their discovery and the flaws in the storyline of "Der Spiegel". In other words, what could have been an excellent background piece turned into a sensationalist article that should be cut back to size.

If you take the word of "Der Spiegel" for it, the months' long mission of their investigators in the war stricken Middle-East managed to come up with some ground-breaking news, a discovery maybe of the same magnitude as Schliemann finding the ruins of Troy ! That's a thing with today's investigative journalism, never be short of a hyperbole … It's always helpful to sell a story in the short run, while in the long run, everybody will have forgotten if your headline gets bedunked.

The story uncovered by "Der Spiegel"

What the German magazine claims to have discovered is a bundle of documents handwritten by one of the masterminds behind the rise of ISIS. This man, Samir Abd Muhammad al-Khlifawi by birth, but known as "Haji Bakr" in the Islamic State, was shot dead in January 2014 in Northern Syria by a rival group called the "Syrian Martyr's Brigade". It took this group a while to realize who they had taken out, but when they did, they got their hands on a few sheets of paper, described by "Der Spiegel" as the blueprint for ISIS' organisation, tactics and strategy. In short, the motherload of intelligence about ISIS and enough to unveil the mysteries surrounding the emergence and internal structure of the "Islamic State".

According to "Der Spiegel", these documents prove beyond any doubt that the leadership of the Islamic State was made-up of ex-Baathist officers, who used the same methods than under Saddam Hussein, only under a different pretense (Salafism instead of Baathism), in order to carve out a State of their own making. The baseline being of course that ISIS was not what it looked like, and that the religious fanatics who seemed to be in charge, were only the puppets of more shadowy figures, namely the ex-cronies of Saddam Hussein.

Civility - 3 May 2015

I want to see an improvement on SST with regard to the level of nastiness over politics.  If there is not an increase in civility I will start exiling people again.  pl

Judy Miller by Richard Sale

The Jon Stewart Show is the favorite of all the shows my wife and I watch. Stewart’s view of life: his determination to reverence the facts, his intense desire to be free of cant or popular falsehoods,  his determination to be free of fad, his suspicion of the fashionable and the current, his determination to be truthful, no matter what the cost, make him a special delight for us.

Could anyone have deflated the pompous idiocy of the White House Correspondents Dinner with more deftness, or more skin peeling sarcasm than Stewart?  When you have CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer standing there in his tux, facing the TV cameras, saying, “I can’t believe that I am standing here with Jane Fonda," one makes the effort to suppress the urge to puke. (My language is vulgar, I realize, but then, so is Wolfie.)

I know Judith Miller, the disgraced The New York Times journalist. I knew her socially in the 1970s when she was dating Larry Stern, an editor at The Washington Post. We made friends there. Judy is very good looking, a virtue she is very aware of, and which she uses to great effect.  Men adored her. We used to have lunch and trade tid-bits but we were simply friends. She was a very hard worker, very ambitious and productive, and I always respected her until the advent of the 2003 war when she like Hillary Clinton,  were fed, spoonful by spoonful, the bigoted second hand nonsense originating in the white House --- the allegation that Saddam Hussein was developing WMD.  He wasn’t, and had not been since May of 1991, and the “intelligence community” knew it.

The ideal of the journalists with whom I have worked and have respected, is the reverence for facts, especially inconvenient facts.  All of us have tendencies, habits, deep rooted beliefs that, if not corrected prevent us from calmly and critically evaluating the information our sources give us. Reporters are a bit like bees that alight on different blossoms until we can come up with a mixture of truthful facts to be used in a story.

The Straits of Hormuz, by Bablefish

 

This was in the USNI newsfeed this morning:

 

http://news.usni.org/2015/04/30/u-s-navy-ships-will-accompany-american-merchant-ships-through-strait-of-hormuz-to-prevent-irgcn-harassment?utm_source=USNI+News&utm_campaign=145eb3b989-USNI_NEWS_DAILY&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0dd4a1450b-145eb3b989-230407953&mc_cid=145eb3b989&mc_eid=92be829f50

 

I am short on knowledge of the specifics of how a country like Iran can coordinate, if at all, between their ‘regular navy’ and a separate organization run by the Revolutionary Guards. Is there internal politics showing its ugly head? If so, it is a damn dangerous thing to be doing. IMO, the Navy might be constrained by rules of engagement to not shoot up IRGCN boats but I am thinking they are not so constrained. If they do go after them, does that move to a wider conflict and we get a repeat of Operation Praying Mantis?

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Praying_Mantis

 

I am going to try to find open source material on what the patrol boats have in the way of weapons, other than items like anti-armor missiles. If they are going to tackle a Burke, they will need some long range something or do a swarm kamikaze attack.

 

The optics in the article show an arleigh Burke class doing an escort. I am not sure this is the best ship in the Navy to do this job. This is interesting given the discussions we have had on SST about Littoral Combat Ships, gunboats, etc. This theater would be a good place to have the LCSs doing these duties, equipped with a Surface Warfare module. I would worry right now about any Navy ship being ‘swarmed’ by a substantial number of these boats but an LCS, equipped with its main gun and 30 mm anti-boat guns could be tough on the Guards. I do not know when they are scheduled to receive Hellfire missiles as an additional boat swarm weapon but they will sometime in the future.

"Six Officers Charged in Freddie Gray's Death" Newsmax

 
Baltimore's top prosecutor announced criminal charges Friday against all six officers suspended after a man suffered a fatal spinal injury in police custody, saying "no one is above the law."
"Mr. Gray's death was a homicide," State's Attorney Marilyn Mosby declared. His arrest was illegal and his treatment in custody amounted to murder and manslaughter, she said.
The announcement came after nearly two weeks of growing anger over Freddie Gray's death, and only hours after State's Attorney Marilyn J. Mosby received the results of a police investigation.
Mosby announced the stiffest charge -- second-degree "depraved heart" murder -- against the driver of the police van. Other officers face charges of involuntary manslaughter, assault and illegal arrest.

Mosby said the switchblade officers accused Gray of illegally carrying clipped inside his pants pocket was in fact a legal knife, and no justification for his arrest.
Mosby said she comes from five generations of police officers, and that the charges against these six officers should in no way damage the relationship between police and prosecutors in Baltimore.
Her announcement came as the city braced for two move waves of protests Friday and Saturday focused on the case.

Warrants have been issued for the arrest of the officers charged in the case, she said. In addition to murder and manslaughter, charges include assault, misconduct and false imprisonment.

Read Latest Breaking News from Newsmax.com  http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/freddie-gray-homicide-prosecutor/2015/05/01/id/642014/#ixzz3Yu5g5Y5Q 

 

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Mosby is an elected official and is quite telegenic.  IMO she will go far.  She mentioned that the BPD had cooperated with her throughout but the media is doing their best to ignore that.  I wonder how this will affect the BPD's performance and retention of police employees.   pl