Hillary Clinton to list or de-list the group as terrorist, a man who helped form the first such terrorist list says they are all irrelevant to the decision process.
Paul Pillar, who spent 28 years with the CIA and had a role in compiling the first list of “Foreign Terrorist Organizations” in the 1990s, said the list is the product of professional research and not put together on political whim.
Many believe the Moja-hedin was put on the list in 1997 to appease the Islamic Republic and try to induce it to engage in talks with the United States. But Pillar said that isn’t how groups are put on the list.
Meanwhile, Mojahedin supporters gathered outside the State Department last Friday to try to shout their way off the list. Mojahedin co-leader Maryam Rajavi, who cannot get a visa to visit the United States because of the group’s listing, appeared before the demonstrators via a video linkup from Paris.
“I salute your protest and gathering, which symbolizes an uprising for the freedom of the Iranian people,” she said in Farsi.
Former Rep. Patrick Ken-nedy, the son of the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, spoke to the gathering as well. He said the Mojahedin does not commit acts of terrorism or pose a threat to the United States. He hailed he group as a legitimate alternative to the Islamic Republic.
Reporters covering the rally found ralliers who didn’t know much or anything about the group.
The Washington Post talked to David Smith, 27, who said he had come from New York on a bus with other members of his church who were encouraged by their pastor to attend. Smith said he didn‘t know the name of the group sponsoring the rally or what country it came from.
Another person attending was Melvin Santiago, a 23-year-old homeless man from Staten Island, New York, who said he learned of the rally from a friend who had a flyer.
Radio Farda talked to an African-American couple at the rally. “We’ve come for Iranian people,” said the woman. When asked if they received money to attend, the woman said yes, but then retracted that at the man’s urging.
Organizers of the rally said they gathered “several thousand” people from all over the country. But Agence France Presse put the number at less than 2,000 while the Associated Press said only “hundreds” attended. Radio Farda put the total at “several hundred.”
The list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs) was ordered up in a law passed in 1996. The Mojahedin were put on the list in 1997. The list has now grown to a total of 47 organizations.
Pillar wrote this week in The National Interest that the decision on listing groups “is not some subjective act of crafting policy.”
He wrote: “The procedure for listing or recertifying FTOs, as they are called, involves not only the State Department but also the Justice Department and the intelligence community. It is a long legal and administrative procedure, as I can testify from having been involved in the creation of the initial list of FTOs after passage of the 1996 law.
“The criteria to be applied involve such things as involvement in terrorist activity and effects on US interests—which is not to be equated with terrorist attacks being directed against US targets. Having conducted an anti-US terrorist attack recently is not one of the criteria; if it were, many current FTOs—such as Lebanese Hezbollah—would not be on the list.”
Others have been lobbying just as enthusiastically to keep the Mojahedin on the FTO list.
Robert Hunter, a retired US ambassador now with the National Defense University, says the residents of Camp Ashraf ought to be protected, as the ralliers demanded. But, he adds, “getting into bed with these people, I think, would be a profound mistake.”
Hunter told National Public Radio the Mojahedin was a Marxist cult, whose members have learned the ways of Western public relations.
“This organization is not a friend of the United States and it never has been. Even though their tactics have changed, they now smile sweetly on us and others, their basic strategy and leadership has not changed at all,” Hunter said.
If the US takes the group off the terrorism list, Hunter worries this would send the wrong message to Iranians seeking more democracy. He says the Mojahedin-e Khalq is hated by many Iranians because it was a tool of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein during and after the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s.
Kenneth Katzman, an analyst with the Congressional Research Service, noted that Iran watchers have long debated the ramifications of delisting or continuing to list the group as terrorist.
Like Pillar, however, he said, “The Foreign Terrorist Organization list is supposed to really be decided on the technical question of, is the group a terrorist group or not.”