[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E681-E682]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

REMARKS BY AMBASSADOR JOHN BOLTON ON THE ANNIVERSARY OF THE APRIL 8,
2011 MASSACRE AT CAMP ASHRAF

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HON. TOM McCLINTOCK

of california

in the house of representatives

Friday, April 27, 2012

Mr. McCLINTOCK. Mr. Speaker, I submit remarks made by Ambassador John
Bolton at a conference on U.S. Obligations and Policy Options on Iran
held at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, DC on Friday, April 6, 2012.

Thank you very much. It's a great pleasure to be here today
with all of you. It's sad that we're on the first anniversary
of the attack at Camp Ashraf. It's a brutal reminder of the
danger the people at Ashraf and Camp Liberty live in. And a
continuing representation and a failure of American policy.
But I do think that we are coming to potentially decisive
points on a number of fronts. Number one, on the status of
the MEK listed on the list of foreign terrorist organizations
and on the question of the regime and Tehran's nuclear
weapons program. Both absolutely critical in how they're
resolved.
So I just want to take a few minutes here today to talk
about that and specifically to talk a little bit about why
this designation of the MEK as a foreign terrorist
organization has been wrong from the outset, wrong throughout
the duration of its being on the list and wrong for it to
continue.
You know, this is a, as Judge Mukasey and Professor
Dershowitz said, this question of listing organizations is a
statutory question. It's not a question of whether you like
the group, you know, we could go out on double dates with its
members? Would they win an election in their home country? Do
they have customs that are a little bit different from yours?
If those were criteria to be listed on the list of foreign
terrorist organizations, that would be a pretty long list,
but it's not.
And the list, the criteria that Congress has given is very,
very specific and those criteria have not been met.
I know this in part from my own personal knowledge. I think
I first heard of the MEK early during the George W. Bush
administration when we were concerned, among other things,
about the efforts by the regime in Tehran to acquire a
variety of weapons of mass destruction and specifically and
in particular nuclear weapons.
As we looked at what the regime was doing, the progress it
was making, the steps it was taking to conceal its effort, I
read from time to time about information that came from
Iranian exiles in the United States, in Europe disclosing
aspects of the regime's nuclear weapons program. And that was
the first time that I saw the name MEK. I didn't know what it
was. That it was perhaps a profession of ignorance of
history, but that's the fact.
So I was quite interested in the information that was being
released over a period of time. Some of it was information
that the government of the United States already knew about,
but had not disclosed publicly. Some of it was information we
hadn't learned about, but learned about later. Some of it was
just information we didn't know about.
And I can say with considerable force that because of the
importance of understanding the progress that the nuclear
program is making, that all sources of information were
potentially important to us and the accuracy

[[Page E682]]

of the information, even more so. I never saw any information
that the MEK disclosed that was in any material respect
inaccurate as far as we knew. And I thought this was
significant in many respects because within the U.S.
Government there was a disagreement about how to deal with
Iran and how much of the information that we knew about to
make public. How much to share with the International Atomic
Energy Agency. How much to talk about in public. I generally
felt that more public discussion was useful because the
threat of a nuclear weapons program in Iran was a very real
one to me.
So I have to say I lost a lot of battles in the immediate
administration about what to talk about publicly. I was not
unhappy to see someone else making that information public so
that the rest of the world could appreciate the progress the
regime was making towards its long sought objective of
nuclear weapons and how dangerous it was.
What I think was really striking came in the days after
U.S. invasion of Iraq and part of our effort to overthrow
Sadam Hussein's regime. I remember in particular one staff
meeting that Secretary Powell had as the military action was
under way when someone around the table said that the U.S.
military had arrived at someplace called Camp Ashraf and had
secured the location and was providing protection for the
residents. Make sure they didn't suffer from reprisals.
I said to myself, I'm not going to listen anymore just to
what's being said in the newspaper. I want to find out more
about what the MEK is and why this group that seems to know
so much about Iran's illicit nuclear weapons program is
listed as a foreign terrorist organization.
So I did what you would expect. I asked around. I asked
career civil servants and diplomats. I looked into the
records. And I was stunned that the uniform response was that
the MEK had been put on the list of terrorist organizations
in the late 1990s in the hope that it would be a signal to
the regime in Tehran of the bona fides days of the Clinton
administration's desire to open active negotiations with the
government of Iran. That that was the reason. Over and over
again that was the reason.
So I asked for information about the MEK. And there were
facts back in the late '70s and early '80s that were pretty
unappetizing, but there was no having to deal with the regime
of the Shah and its overthrow.
But nothing in nearly 20 years since then. Nothing that I
saw during my time at the State Department that would justify
listing the MEK as a foreign terrorist organization.
Then we came to find in late 2008 that Secretary Rice was
given the opportunity whether to decide to de-list the MEK
and she chose not to because she hoped that that would give
the incoming Obama administration flexibility to deal with
the government of Iran. It would be an occasion of continued
interest in trying to deal with the regime.
Now, both of these decisions were political decisions. You
can agree with them or disagree with them. I disagree with
them. But they were political. They were not based on facts.
They were not based on the criteria in the statute.
I think that does a disservice to the whole concept of
having a list of foreign terrorist organizations. If you
don't allow the facts to fall where they will, then the list
itself is discredited.
I think this problem of politicization isn't limited to the
FTO list. I felt one of the Bush Administration's worst
mistakes was taking the government of North Korea off the
list of state sponsors of terrorism. A government that to
this day has never provided satisfaction to the government of
Japan and South Korea for kidnapping their innocent civilians
and holding them in North Korea. And why was North Korea
taken off the list of state sponsored terrorism? In hopes of
negotiating with North Korea about its nuclear weapons
program. You see a pattern here?
This is the State Department making decisions not intended
by Congress but for political and diplomatic purposes.
Now, it's interesting in all of these cases the political
and diplomatic purpose has not been achieved. You would think
that would teach people something. But I'm not that much of
an optimist.
But even worse, we had seen within the past weeks Secretary
Clinton say that the conduct of the MEK in transferring
residents from Ashraf to Camp Liberty would be a factor in
deciding whether the MEK would stay on the list of foreign
terrorist organizations.
Now we have all heard she's very busy, not busy enough,
though, not busy enough that she couldn't make that point.
Another fundamentally political point.
So if the original designation was bad and it was, and if
the decision in 2008 to continue the listing was worse, this
is worst of all. This isn't just political, this is using a
humanitarian catastrophe to attempt to achieve political
objectives.
Governor Rendell just asked what I think is a very
pertinent question and providing some telling insights into
why there is no good answer. Why does the State Department
keep doing this? What is the rationale here?
I think the rationale emerges from what we know about the
State Department's history dealing with this regime. They are
convinced to this day that you can negotiate with this
authoritarian regime.
I believe you cannot. But I believe what's going on here is
that the State Department is fearful that if it does what
it's supposed to do that the government in Tehran will cut
off the last chance to negotiate a peaceful resolution to the
nuclear weapons program. Now, I don't think there's any
chance that we're going to get a satisfactory, diplomatic
resolution anyway. But I think what's happening now is that
the State Department knows it doesn't have a shred of
evidence to continue this designation. If they did, and I'll
steal this point from Louis Freeh who made it before, but not
here, if there was information that justified the continuing
listing of the MEK on the foreign terrorist list in
Washington as we know it, it would have leaked out, we'd be
reading about it. And the silence is deafening.
And it's because if the State Department can say to the
regime in Tehran, we didn't take them off the list, that
court made us do it, that they hope the regime will say, oh,
it's okay, now we'll talk to you.
I just find that completely irresponsible. I'm perfectly
content to say that if there are facts to justify a listing
on the FTO list, list the organization. If the organization
is on a list for political purposes, or it's taken off for
political purposes, that's wrong. I don't personally know any
reason why the MEK should be listed and I'll guarantee you
neither does the State Department or it would have presented
the evidence to the court.
So the issue here turns not just on this abuse of our legal
process, not just on the humanitarian tragedy that we see
unfolding in Ashraf, but on our country's ability to deal
effectively with the growing threat of the ayatollahs in
control of the world's most dangerous weapon. And every day
that goes by that we take our eye off that eventuality is a
day that makes the world much less safe.
It is time, if the State Department won't act, then the
court should act. I think it will. And I think hopefully in a
few months we'll be back here having a very different kind of
conversation. Thank you very much.

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