Muddy Waters

Having sold us a dodgy dossier about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and the ‘imminent’ threat that they posed, it now seems that the same people are trying to sell us a slight soggy dossier that claims that the recent arrest of the British sailors by the Iranians is all part of some cunning plan.

In separate developments yesterday, Downing Street was passed evidence purporting to show that the arrest of the British sailors was planned days in advance. Hossein Abedini, spokesman for the exiled National Council of Resistance of Iran, said the arrests were a ‘meticulously concocted operation’ to divert attention from Iran’s nuclear programme.

[Iran snubs UK olive branch]

Meanwhile, a claim was made at a press conference in London by the National Council of Resistance of Iran that an Iranian Revolutionary Guard naval garrison was placed on alert the night before the seizure of the sailors

And the political wing of the Iranian MEK opposition group – listed as a terrorist group by Britain, the US and the EU – said the British crew’s capture was planned in advance, but offered no evidence to support this.

[Britain takes softer line as Iran's hardliners seek to escalate crisis]

What these articles don’t mention, though, is that NCRI is the political front for the neocon-connected Mujahideen-e-Khalq (People’s Mujahedin of Iran, or PMOI, in English), an organization that has been designated a terrorist group by the United States, European Union and Iran. The group has close ties to the neocons and the Israel Lobby in the United States, with the AIPAC front organization, Iran Policy Committee (headed by WINEP fellow Raymond Tanter) campaigning for the past few years to get it off the State Department’s list of known terrorist organizations. According to Scott Ritter, MeK has been used since 2002 by the Israeli intelligence to publicize information on Iran’s nuclear program.

Sobhani [an Iranian con-artist] and CDI [Committee for a Democratic Iran, an AIPAC spinoff] provided an ideal solution, namely that the Israeli government use Reza Pahlavi as the mouthpiece for telling the world about what the Iranians were up to in the field of nuclear weapons, and in exchange Pahlavi would be given immedite credibility and with it front runner status in the race of those trying to rule Iran post-Mullah. Unfortunately for the Israelis and CDI, Reza Pahlavi balked…Undeterred, [Michael] Ledeen and the CI turned to the MEK, or more specifically, its political front in the Washingt, D.C., the NCRI, as the next best option to bring the Israeli intelligence to center stage. CDI reportedly lobbied the NCRI representative, Alireza Jaferzadeh, to serve as the mouthpiece for presenting the Israeli intelligence to the general public…Isareli intelligence had maintained a relationship with the MEK that dated back to the mid-1990s.
[Ritter, Target Iran, p. xxv]

Technorati Tags: Middle East, Iran, Iraq, UK, National Council of Resistance of Iran, Mujahideen-e-Khalq, dodgy dossier, Weapons of Mass Destruction, imminent threat