Typical US foreign policy in action...

Orizio

Typical of the US foreign policy over the last 50 years.Supporting islamic terrorists(just like the Afghani Mujahideen)for the greater good... :rolleyes:

...They argue that the U.S. should work with the sole Iranian opposition group that has experience fighting the Tehran regime: the People's Mujahedeen (Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, or MEK). According to them, the group possesses two irreplaceable assets: an established network of supporters inside Iran that can provide intelligence on Iran's nuclear program; a long history of fighting the Tehran regime.

Ledeen's camp, however, has been vocal in opposing the idea of using the MEK, which received significant military support from Saddam Hussein. And there's just one other problem: in 1997, the State Department put the MEK, and its political wing, the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), on the official U.S. government list of foreign terrorist organizations.

Founded as an Iranian leftist group in the 1960s with Marxist and Islamist leanings, the MEK participated in the 1979 revolution to overthrow the U.S.-backed Shah. But in 1981, the MEK broke with Iran's post-revolutionary leaders and decamped first to France (where it still has a large following), and then in 1986, to Iraq, where the group fought with Saddam Hussein against fellow Iranians during the Iran-Iraq war. They also served as shock troops to put down the rebelling Iraqi Shias in the wake of the first Gulf War. The MEK was also responsible for numerous attacks on Iranian embassies and assassination of Iranian officials carried out by the group in Europe and Iran in the 1990s.

Thanks to this bloody track record, the MEK/NCRI is widely despised by fellow Iranians, including other Iranian dissident groups that are working to overthrow Iran's clerical rulers.

Their history with regard to the United States is just as unsavory. When the State Department designated the MEK and the NCRI as terrorist organizations in 1997, it cited the group's involvement in attacks during the 1970s on U.S. military contractors in Iran, and more importantly, in the 1979 takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran.

Yet the Bush administration's policy toward the MEK has been erratic. During the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Washington first bombed MEK camps in Iraq but then, in April 2003, signed a ceasefire with the group in April 2003. The agreement confiscated the group's heavy weaponry and confined some 3,800 MEK members to Camp Ashraf in the northeast of Baghdad.

According to reports in the media, in the immediate aftermath of the Iraq campaign, some in the State Department favored turning over MEK members in Iraq to the Iranian government in exchange for al Qaeda suspects being held in Iranian custody even as some hardliners in the administration were lobbying to keep the MEK intact for possible use against the Iranian regime. At the time, the Pentagon's undersecretary of defense for policy Douglas Feith went on record in a June 2003 press conference to deny the any such plan. Th issue was put to rest this past July, when, after a year-long, multi-agency review, the U.S. government granted MEK members at Camp Ashraf formal protected person's status under the Fourth Geneva Convention – which guarantees MEK members can't be involuntarily repatriated to Iran.

http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/20739/