"All warfare is based on deception." --SunTzu, Art of War

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[A] key Iranian opposition figure said that Iran has ramped up its production of missiles capable of carrying atomic warheads.

Providing what he said were secret details of those missile programs, Alireza Jafarzadeh told the AP Thursday that Iran had "significantly increased the production line'' of its Shahab 3 missiles last year, and was now turning out 90 a year - more than four times its previous production rate.

Jafarzadeh has worked for the political wing of the Mujahedin Khalq, an Iranian opposition group that Washington and the European Union list as a terrorist organization. [the same list Hamas is on]

Jafarzadeh, who heads the Washington-based Strategic Policy Consulting think tank, helped reveal what was then Iran's clandestine nuclear program three years ago. In January he divulged details of Iran's enrichment plans, which were confirmed a few days ago by the IAEA. [the best lies are those mixed with truth]

However, other accusations he has made against Iran remain unproven. There was no independent confirmation of the information Jafarzadeh offered Thursday, which he said he received from unspecified sources inside Iran.

MEK has long been controversial because of its history of violent attacks in Iran, its relationship with Saddam's regime and its background as a quasi-religious, quasi-Marxist radical resistance group founded in the era of the late Iranian shah.

In 1997, the Clinton administration put MEK on the State Department's list of foreign terrorist groups. MEK's U.S. supporters, among whom at one point numbered dozens of members of Congress, charged that the Clinton administration only labeled MEK as a terrorist group as part of an ill-conceived attempt to improve relations with the ayatollahs who currently run Iran. However, the Bush administration added two alleged MEK front organizations to the State Department's terrorist list in 2003.

Despite the group's notoriety, Bush himself cited purported intelligence gathered by MEK as evidence of the Iranian regime's rapidly accelerating nuclear ambitions. At a March 16 press conference, Bush said Iran's hidden nuclear program had been discovered not because of international inspections but "because a dissident group pointed it out to the world." White House aides acknowledged later that the dissident group cited by the president is the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), one of the MEK front groups added to the State Department list two years ago.

In an appearance before a House International Relations Subcommittee a year ago, John Bolton, the controversial State Department undersecretary who Bush has nominated to become US ambassador to the United Nations, was questioned by a Congressman sympathetic to MEK [who, I wonder] about whether it was appropriate for the U.S. government to pay attention to allegations about Iran supplied by the group.

Bolton said he believed that MEK "qualifies as a terrorist organization according to our criteria." But he added that he did not think the official label had "prohibited us from getting information from them. And I certainly don't have any inhibition about getting information about what's going on in Iran from whatever source we can find that we deem reliable." [emphasis added]

However, current and former senior U.S. national-security officials, who asked not to be named because they are not supposed to talk about intelligence-gathering activities, say that all the major revelations MEK publicly claims to have made regarding nuclear advances in Iran were reported in classified form—and from other sources—to U.S. policymakers before MEK made them public. [extra emphasis added]

A Western diplomat familiar with the work of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations component that has been monitoring Iran's nuclear program, said that while the MEK has occasionally come up with accurate information about Iran's nukes, the group has come up with a similar number of other tips that have not checked out.

According to Human Rights Watch, several members of Congress, including both Republicans and Democrats, only last month attended a Washington meeting of a legal "MKO-backed" group called the National Convention for a Democratic, Secular Republic in Iran. In February, the group says, a think tank co-chaired by retired U.S. military officers [I wonder who] called for MEK to be dropped from the State Department terrorist list and recommended that the U.S. government actively support MEK in its campaign to bring down the Iranian theocracy. [surprise, surprise]

According to administration officials, some Pentagon officials want to recruit former MEK members as U.S. secret agents who would infiltrate Iran on intelligence missions. The Pentagon has emphatically insisted that it has no plans to work with the MEK or any of the group's members. [I guess they changed their minds]

The new Human Rights Watch report offers no insight into the validity or inaccuracy of MEK information about Iranian's nuclear program but it does allege strange and sometimes brutal behavior by the group’s leaders and internal security apparatus. According to the report, MEK, formed in 1965 by three political activists, originally was an "urban guerilla group" which participated in the struggle against the shah that resulted in the 1979 Iranian revolution and produced the current theocratic regime in Tehran. [well, well]

In an early schism following the revolution, the MEK and Abolhassan Bani Sadr, briefly Iran's president during the 1980 U.S. Embassy hostage crisis, split away from the main revolutionary movement led by Ayatollah Khomeini and went into exile. Later, Bani Sadr in turn split from MEK after a disagreement with Massoud Rajavi, who, with his wife, Maryam, subsequently became the movement's unchallenged leader.

During the Iran-Iraq War, Saddam allowed MEK to set up several military camps in Iraq—with a headquarters encampment near Baghdad known as Camp Ashraf—and the group proceeded to conduct paramilitary operations against the Tehran regime, the largest of which was mounted—unsuccessfully—shortly after Iran agreed to a U.N.-brokered ceasefire in the Iran-Iraq War. MEK reportedly lost more than 1,000 fighters in this attack. [These people have a SERIOUS axe to grind!]

According to Human Rights Watch, following this 1988 military defeat, the Rajavi's leadership of MEK became increasingly authoritarian and cultlike. According to an MEK defector's memoir, Rajavi claimed to have a mystical relationship with a prophet known as Imam Zaman, who is Shia Islam's version of the long-awaited Messiah. [AND, they have VERY grand plans.]

The most advanced Shahab has a range of nearly 1,200 miles, Jafarzadeh said. That is enough to target arch-foe Israel.

Working together with North Korean experts at the Hemmat Missile Industries complex in Tehran, Iranian engineers also were "70 percent" finished on prototype Ghadar 101 and Ghadar 110 missiles, which have a range of up to 1,800 miles, he said, putting central Europe within reach. These missiles also were "ready for launch" within 30 minutes, compared to several hours for the Shahab, he said. [compare Colin Powell, mobile weapons lab]

U.S. intelligence chief John Negroponte told lawmakers Wednesday in Washington that the risk of Iran acquiring nuclear arms and merging them with ballistic missile systems was "a reason for immediate concern." [compare Condi, mushroom cloud]

Newsweek reports that the INA—a group with a vested interest in seeing the downfall of the Baathist regime—has confirmed that it originated the leak about alleged pre-war WMD deployments by Iraq. It also supplied the equally flimsy and uncorroborated evidence supposedly linking Saddam to 9/11 hijacker Muhammad Atta.

INA leader Allawi’s representative in Washington, Nick Theros, told Newsweek that Lieutenant Colonel al-Dabbagh was a member of the group. He admitted that al-Dabbagh never saw what was in the supposed weapons crates, and that the claim now “looks like it could have been a crock of s—t.”

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The admission that al-Dabbagh was an INA spy who was making up his claims from whole cloth confirms once again that the Blair government dragged Britain to war based on a tissue of lies.

Tellingly, Newsweek reports that “Officials close to the CIA and MI6 say that while the agencies believe the INA’s tales are unfounded, they still regard the group as a reliable ally” (emphasis added). [compare with Bolton's statement on Iran]

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“In al-Dabbagh’s case the presumption should be that his evidence is not to be believed, given that he is a man with a definite political agenda. His aim is not only to support Blair’s claims that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, but also to insist that they are a continued threat that can be employed by remnants of the old regime. In this way he hopes to justify further repression by the occupation forces and their puppet government, for which he functions as an advisor.

“As was so often the case, if al-Dabbagh’s claim of origin is to be believed, then the intelligence cited in the September dossier came from forces anxious to bolster the case for war against Iraq and with a vested interest in the Bush administration’s plans for regime change.”