The decision in April to sign a cease-fire agreement with the People’s Mujahedeen which allowed them to keep their guns created controversy. Only after continued questioning of the policy including accusations from Iran that MEK was staging operations against them from within Iraq did the U.S. revise the decision. Rice and other advisers reassured the curious in May when questioned whether the U.S. was considering utilising MEK to instigate opposition to Iran…
…saying that while some might consider the MEK freedom fighters, “a terrorist is a terrorist is a terrorist,” according to officials involved in the debate…
Yet the stories kept coming that in fact MEK enjoyed a measure of Congressional support. Jerry Bowles had an informative post about it back in June.
Most recently Justin Raimondo brought the inconsistencies up-to-date in this article.
Today there’s an article concerning MEK in the LA Times which reports;
Although the group is to be treated as a terrorist organization under U.S. policy, the American military “apparently is not really policing them at all,” the official said.
He said that State Department officials learned of the continued Moujahedeen Khalq activity when U.S. intelligence reports picked up on Iranian concerns that weapons were arriving in two Moujahedeen Khalq camps, and that the group was making broadcasts into Iran.
“The only people who know the realities are in Central Command. And they get orders from the Pentagon policymakers,” the official said.
State Department spokesman Richard Boucher would neither confirm nor deny Thursday a report in the Washington Post that Secretary of State Colin L. Powell wrote Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld about the matter this month. Defense officials also refused to confirm or deny the report.
Could there be a connection between what might be a utilisation of MEK and the secrecy surrounding how funding for Iraq is being spent?
[LINK]
In detailing its request for $87bn (€77bn, £55bn) to fund the “war on terrorism” for the forthcoming year, the White House budget office said this week that a vast majority of those funds – $51bn – would go directly to military operations in Iraq.
It noted that $800m of that spending would go to coalition members who cannot afford to deploy their own troops. An additional $300m would go to new life-saving body armour; and $140m to heavily armoured Humvees to protect its soldiers.
But apart from those few details, the Bush administration has been tight-lipped about where the huge sums – which come on top of $62bn appropriated for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan in April – are going. Because Iraq military efforts are being funded outside the normal appropriations process, in so-called “supplemental” or emergency spending bills, the funding does not go through the same rigorous congressional oversight to which normal Pentagon spending is subject annually.
As a result, the spending is difficult to track, leading to concerns among some members of Congress, and experts in Pentagon budgeting, about the Defence Department’s accountability.
John Hamre, a former Pentagon budget chief who headed the administration-backed team of external experts to examine rebuilding efforts this summer, has said the $4bn a month the Defence Department is spending on military operations is high even by Pentagon standards: “A lot of people I know can’t figure out why that number is so expensive.”