US delisted MKO for anti-Iran scenario

(Ahlul Bayt News Agency) - The United States arrays “yesterday’s terrorist” anti-Iran Mujahedin-e Khalq Organization (MKO) and honors them as “today’s freedom fighters” to use them against the Islamic Republic, a political analyst tells Press TV.“Yesterday’s terrorists (MKO) can be today’s freedom fighters even if they are going to be tomorrow’s terrorists. This is a thinly, thinly disguised effort to ratchet up the pressure on Iran,” said Franklin Lamb, a Beirut-based international lawyer and the director of the Americans Concerned for Middle East Peace movement, on Saturday.Lamb argued that the terrorist organization will soon be propped up with the support of the Israeli regime and the US to establish a counterweight against Iran.“Count the days before their (MKO) headquarters is in Washington. Count the days before the Zionist lobby joins them and funds them and the American intelligence agency supports them in order to do what? In order to create a hopeful, viable opposition to the government of the Islamic Republic in time for next year’s election.”On September 28, the MKO was taken off the US State Department’s blacklist a week after US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sent the Congress a classified communication about the move.“These (MKO terrorists) will be billed to the public and the world as the new Jeffersonian Democrats of the Middle East, whatever it takes to dress them up in respectability. So that’s what we see here. Forget history. Forget terrorism. Forget who killed who on American soil that used to stand for something. We have a political agenda. We want them. We need them. We’re going to squeeze Iran in the coming months,” Lamb stated.Members of the MKO, who had murdered over 17,000 Iranians since the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, fled to Iraq in the 1980s, where they had the support of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and set up Camp Ashraf in the eastern province of Diyala near the Iranian border.Iran has repeatedly called on the Iraqi government to expel the MKO, but the US has been putting pressure on Baghdad to resist the calls.“That was 30 years ago that we supported the MEK as part of our support of Saddam against Iran… We weren’t all that interested in this group until recently we see an opportunity, another layer of sanction if you will, another way to pressure the regime hoping that it will implode in some way. I don’t know that we have a big future with the MEK but they’re a very useful instrument today,” Lamb concluded./129