Spoilers, alerted: Postscript

Nima Shirazi's account of the case, which makes me feel now that I've read it that I shouldn't even have bothered because it is truly comprehensive and informed (so please read it), has been updated to advert to an also indispensable account by Robert Mackey in the New York Times's Lede blog, which points out that there are plenty of former members of the Students Following the Imam's Line engaging in successful diplomatic careers without incident. One fascinating detail that I just have to put on my own record here: seems that the narrative of how ambassador-designate Aboutalebi is a terrorist has been pushed in particular by none other than the Muhajedin-e-Khalq, an organization we have discussed before, an actual terrorist organization, Israel's known partner in the murders of Iranian physicists a couple of years back.

MEK, of course, has since become a non-terrorist organization by means of the magic of the United States State Department de-listing it under monumental pressure from a lot of people (I'm looking at you, Howard Dean) who had plenty of opportunities to know better. It is obvious that their aim, or that of their secret masters/funders, is to derail the Vienna talks that started on Thursday. This is very bad, and it needs to stop.

Hamid Abutalebi looking a little like a Truffaut character, not too terrorizing. Via Al-Monitor.

[Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog]

Redlining their own neighborhood

This view of last week's UN highjinks from the great Iranian cartoonist Mana Neyestani, passed on from Richard Silverstein's Tikun Olam.

Also from Silverstein, an excellent rundown of the State Department's removal from its list of terrorist organizations of the Iranian exile group Mujahedin-e-Khalq, which I have fussed about before. Silverstein's post also features a brilliant postography, or whatever you call a bibliography of online writings.

I do think Silverstein is too harsh in calling the delisting one of Hillary Clinton's "great shams". The official notice is pretty honest, anyway—

With today’s actions, the Department does not overlook or forget the MEK’s past acts of terrorism, including its involvement in the killing of U.S. citizens in Iran in the 1970s and an attack on U.S. soil in 1992. The Department also has serious concerns about the MEK as an organization, particularly with regard to allegations of abuse committed against its own members.

—though it doesn't mention very recent acts of terrorism, namely those assassinations of Iranian physicists. But something really had to be done about them, especially those abused members; they are absolutely not welcome in Iraq, now that Iran and Iraq are close allies (thanks, President Bush and Ambassador Wolfowitz and all you cute kids!),  and you're going to have a lot of trouble getting some other country to adopt them if you don't stop calling them terrorists ("Hello, Prime Minister? I've got some Persian terrorists in need of a home, you don't suppose you could—Prime Minister? Are we cut off?").

Be afraid. Be meta-afraid.

As you will recall, Saddam Hussein had his own little camp of Iranian terrorists on the Iraqi side of the border, the Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK), acquired after Saddam's downfall by our dear JSOC and subsequently by Israeli intelligence, who used them to murder Iranian physicists. They've always had a big sad about everybody calling them terrorists, just because they do a lot of terroristic, um, stuff, but now we learn from emptywheel that the Obama administration is thoughtfully working to get them off that list. Great headline:

MEK to Be Delisted as Terrorists in Reward for Engaging in Terrorism

And guess where else they're showing up this week? In Hamburg, of all places, where they have provided Die Welt (summarized in English in Haaretz) with another one of their specialty packages detailing how Iran has intensified work on its nuclear weapons program, if it has, which is as usual far from clear; as in previous such packages of 2002 and 2008, MEK's assertions can't be independently assessed, and they don't have a very good track record. Not to mention the infamous Laptop of Death they hung around Colin Powell's neck in 2004.

Maybe they've moved up into specializing in metaterror: frightening us with the news that we're going to be frightened. Wonder if there's a list for that?

Meanwhile in Israel, amusingly enough, Iran seems to be virtually forgotten in the exuberance in the new political arrangement, in which Likud and Labor and Kadima have united in the common purpose of let's please just not have an election for a long while, revealing Binyamin Netanyahu's real top priority to be pretty much the same as that of his rival Shaul Mofaz.

What will really be interesting is if Iran's upcoming talks in Baghdad, conducted, for once, without Netanyahu standing outside waving his finger in everyone's face, actually got somewhere for a change. Thomas Erdbrink for the Times sketches out a really interesting picture of how this might happen with Iran declaring, essentially, victory—they've got the peaceful nuclear program they always said they wanted. This is the first really new-looking thing I've seen on the issue in a long time: read it.

Bibi guns redux

Recall how Israel has its own terrorist cult of Persian killers holed up at Camp Ashraf in eastern Iraq, from which they sally out from time to time to assassinate Iranian physicists? Formerly the pet terrorists of Saddam Hussein and taken over by Israeli management when Hussein no longer had time to take care of them?

Not quite. It turns out (Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker via Juan Cole) that there was an interval when they belonged to US—me and my government—in the form of the Joint Special Operations Command, which was training them in God alone knows what kind of counterinsurgency technique at a secret site in Nevada during the Bush regime, even though they were an organiation on the US terrorist watch list with six murders of US citizens notched on their belts.

That was pretty illegal of them! But we all like to look forward, not backward, don't we, except when we're rubbernecking at whistleblowers who may have broken a law or two in the course of unveiling large-scale crimes against humanity. If you know what I mean.

Iranian troops in the Persepolis years, in historical costume, Teheran 1971. Photo by Associated Press.

Bibi guns

There is important Iran news (h/t voteforobamain2012 at Kos) breaking this morning from NBC News, of all places: Anonymous US officials have confirmed that the group responsible for murdering Iranian scientists is the MEK terrorist group (Mujahedin-e-Khalq) encamped in eastern Iraq--anti-Ayatollah and equally anti-Shah before that, a tool of Saddam Hussein in the war with Iran and now a tool of Israeli foreign policy.

It's not exactly news that that's who the killers and their paymasters are. [jump]

Persian warriors. Pergamon Museum/Vorderasiastishes Museum, Berlin; image from  Wikipedia.