[Congressional Record Volume 158, Number 62 (Friday, April 27, 2012)]
[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

                                 ______
                                 

                          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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