The United States have known that the MEK is not a terrorist organization from day one. Louis Freeh who headed FBI when the Clinton administration put the MEK on the FTO list in 1997, recently said that the organisation had not posed a threat to U.S. interests, but was listed as "part of a fruitless political ploy to encourage dialogue with Tehran."
"There was no credible evidence then, nor has there been since, that the group posed any threat to the United States," Freeh wrote in the New York Times in October.
Back in 2004, the New York Times had reported that a 16-month thorough investigation and "Screening" - matching finger prints, DNA tests etc. - by US security bodies had cleared all members in Camp Ashraf from links with terrorism. The individual agreements signed thereafter with every resident of Camp Ashraf committing the US to protect them was done with full knowledge of their MEK membership - something the US would never have done with real terrorists.
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The State Department's hysterical animosity towards the MEK reminds many Iranians of the story of the late Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh who nationalised Iran's oil industry only to be toppled by a US-led coup in 1953. At that time, the CIA sponsored coup was seen by Iranians as an unjustified US intervention to keep Shah Mohammad-Reza Pahlavi in power, in spite of public detestation of his regime. Six decades later, Barack Obama's administration appears to the Iranian younger generation much on the same wave-length: trying to consolidate rulers detested by their own people, through discrediting their principal opponents.
In this perspective, the smear campaign orchestrated by Foggy Bottom's unnamed officials would rather discredit the US in the eyes of the Iranian public, while helping the MEK win hearts and minds of more Iranians back home.
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