Our Men in Iran? Posted by Seymour M. Hersh

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http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/04/mek.html

From the air, the terrain of the Department of Energy’s Nevada National Security Site, with its arid high plains and remote mountain peaks, has the look of northwest Iran. The site, some sixty-five miles northwest of Las Vegas, was once used for nuclear testing, and now includes a counterintelligence training facility and a private airport capable of handling Boeing 737 aircraft. It’s a restricted area, and inhospitable—in certain sections, the curious are warned that the site’s security personnel are authorized to use deadly force, if necessary, against intruders.

It was here that the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) conducted training, beginning in 2005, for members of the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, a dissident Iranian opposition group known in the West as the M.E.K. The M.E.K. had its beginnings as a Marxist-Islamist student-led group and, in the nineteen-seventies, it was linked to the assassination of six American citizens. It was initially part of the broad-based revolution that led to the 1979 overthrow of the Shah of Iran. But, within a few years, the group was waging a bloody internal war with the ruling clerics, and, in 1997, it was listed as a foreign terrorist organization by the State Department. In 2002, the M.E.K. earned some international credibility by publicly revealing—accurately—that Iran had begun enriching uranium at a secret underground location. Mohamed ElBaradei, who at the time was the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations’ nuclear monitoring agency, told me later that he had been informed that the information was supplied by the Mossad. The M.E.K.’s ties with Western intelligence deepened after the fall of the Iraqi regime in 2003, and JSOC began operating inside Iran in an effort to substantiate the Bush Administration’s fears that Iran was building the bomb at one or more secret underground locations. Funds were covertly passed to a number of dissident organizations, for intelligence collection and, ultimately, for anti-regime terrorist activities. Directly, or indirectly, the M.E.K. ended up with resources like arms and intelligence. Some American-supported covert operations continue in Iran today, according to past and present intelligence officials and military consultants.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/04/mek.html#ixzz1rGiXjQGT

[niyad]

1. and here we go again

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2. +1

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3. They learned nothing from 9/11. Still giving terrorists CIA visas to enter the US to be trained to

blow things up. Last time it resulted in the blowback destruction of US airliners and landmark buildings with the loss of 3,000 Americans. What's next?

The MEK, like al-Qaeda before it and all these militant groups, are full of double-agents and operatives working for third-parties. This is a nightmare that doesn't stop when the particular operation is over -- Operation Cyclone, the Agency's recruitment and training operation against the Soviets in Afghanistan officially ended in 1990, but the WTC was bombed in '93 and finally brought down 8 years later by these same groups of CIA-trained terrorists -- the Agency needs to stop letting known terrorists into the US. We need to stop training and equipping terrorists. Period. It's how 9/11 happened. Those who cannot learn from history destroy themselves.