POLITICO
Former Governor and DNC Chairman Howard Dean, as I noted earlier, has emerged abruptly as America’s most vocal supporter of the embattled Mujahadeen-e-Khalq (MEK), a controversial Iranian opposition group based in part in Iraq.
Dean held a press conference today at the National Press Club to denounce the Iraq Government’s violent effort to push more than 3,000 MEK members from one refugee camp to another, something that happened after the camp lost its U.S. military protection and that’s seen as a favor by the Iraqis to Iran’s government.
Dean told me in a telephone interview this afternoon that the U.S. troops should return to the camp.
“We’re not looking to have an armed conflict with the Iraqis – if we send the American troops in, [the Iraqis] will leave,” he said, calling on the U.S. to evacuate the wounded, turn the water back in the camp, and provide hospital care to the survivors of the raid, and pointing to a video that appears to show Iraqi Humvees attacking civilians.
Though the MEK is on the State Department’s list of terror groups, supporters say they’ve laid down their arms, and European institutions have removed the terrorist label. Dean noted that the MEK have helped the U.S. in Iraq.
“We owe them and we promised we would protect them,” he said.
Dean said he’d only learned of the issue earlier this year “completely by chance,” after his speak
ing agent contacted him with a request to give a paid speech at an MEK’s conference. He said he’d researched the group before agreeing to speak, and sympathized with their cause.
“How I got hooked is I’m for the underdog,” he said. “These guys are getting a bad rap and they are getting killed for it.”
Dean said he’d been working closely with the group in recent days, even looking over and “cleaning up” the full-page ad they took out recently in POLITICO. He said that while he’s given paid speeches for the group, his advocacy is pro bono. He said he had been reassured to see former Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge, former National Security Adviser Jim Jones, and former Governor Bill Richardson at an MEK panel in Washington in late January and retired Generals Peter Pace and Hugh Shelton at the MEK conference in Paris where Dean spoke the next month.
“I said to myself, ‘These are obviously not terrorists. The former chairmen of the joint chiefs of staff will obviously not be consorting with terrorist,” he said.
After his speech, “They sent me a video of Camp Ashraf with the people thianking me in English – it’s an incredible place,” he said.
He also dismissed the common view that the MEK is a cult that isolates members from their families.
“It’s just not true,” he said, saying he’d had the charge that children were separated from their families satisfactorily explained: “They said, ‘Well what happened was we were attacked and we evacuated all the small children to and sent them to live with other people.”
“It’s exactly what the British did in World War II,” Dean said.
http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0411/Dean_calls_on_US_to_protect_Iranian_group.html