US Citizens support Terrorist Group?

Thanks to Glenn Greenwald for putting this together [Link - GG].

The key points follow.

According to this article, [Washington Post - Link], four US elites met with the MEK a terrorist organization last month.

The Americans - former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani, former secretary of homeland security Tom Ridge, former White House homeland security adviser Frances Fragos Townsend and former attorney general Michael Mukasey - demanded that Obama instead take the controversial Mujaheddin-e Khalq (MEK) opposition group off the U.S. list of foreign terrorist organizations and incorporate it into efforts to overturn the mullah-led government in Tehran.

The MEK are an Iranian terrorist group that were supplied and financed by Saddam Hussein to fight Iran. This US list of terrorist organizations decribes the group.[US State Dept -Link]

According to evidence which became available after the fall of Saddam Hussein, the MEK received millions of dollars in Oil-for-Food program subsidies from Saddam Hussein from 1999 through 2003, which supported planning and executing future terrorist attacks. In addition to discovering 13 lists of recipients of such vouchers on which the MEK appeared, evidence linking the MEK to the former Iraqi regime includes lists, as well as video footage of Saddam Hussein handing over suitcases of money to known MEK leaders, and video of MEK operatives receiving training from the Iraqi military.

Fran Townsend, one of the four US elites meeting with the group, once argued that even voicing support for a terrorist organization was the equivalent of providing material support for a foreign terrorist organization and thus a crime under the Patroit act. [link - CNN Wolf Blitzer]

This is great....

An American citizen, Fran Townsend, who believes that voicing support for terrorists is a crime, meets with and voices support for terrorists.

The Bush administration, which had used "supporting terrorism" as one of the excuses to take out Saddam, now has its administration members supporting a terrorist group that Saddam supported.

While,... another American citizen was convicted of supporting terrorism for very similar actions with the same group.

This shows one of the problems with the "war on Terrorism". Much like in Orwell's 1984, the enemy can be changed at will. When Saddam was our number one enemy, MEK was a terrorist group. Now that Iran is our enemy, the MEK are goods guys.

One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.

tnb