MEK Given Hi-Tech Devices to Spawn Fake News

Date: 20 October 2019 - 21:36

News ID: ۷۱۸۹۹

TEHRAN (Dispatches) -- Iranian Ambassador to London Hamid Baeidinejad said on Sunday that members of the terrorist Mujahedin Khalq Organization (MEK) are using super-modern computers to publish disinformation and fake news in order to manipulate the public opinion in Iran.
Posting a photo of the group’s members, Baeidinejad tweeted, "This photo of members of the Monafiqeen (MEK) in Camp Ashraf in Albania was recently leaked.”
He added, "Many of the members of the organization, with non-military clothes, have laid their hands on new weapons, which are super-modern computers by which they extensively publish fake news and disinformation in order to poison public opinion.”
The MEK, established in the 1960s, has a history of terrorist bombings and assassinations which have left 17,000 Iranians dead.
The MEK is listed as a terrorist organization by much of the international community. The U.S. and the Europeans, however, have been hosting the group’s leaders and making their influential politicians available to the terrorist group for support in their common enmity with the Islamic Republic.
The terrorist group is detested by Iranians for betraying the nation and aiding the former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein during his eight-war on Iran in the 1980s.
In 2012, the U.S. State Department removed the MKO from its list of designated terrorist organizations under intense lobbying by groups associated with Saudi Arabia and other regimes opposed to Iran.
A few years ago, MEK members were relocated from their Camp Ashraf in Iraq’s Diyala province to a former U.S. military base in Baghdad, before being relocated by the United States to Albania.
U.S. news outlet The Intercept has recently revealed how the MEK uses fake social media accounts to curate a false narrative about Iran to influence U.S. policy.
The Intercept wrote that in the buildup to President Donald Trump's decision to leave the 2015 Iran nuclear deal in May 2018, the White House specifically tried to sway The Washington Post and other skeptical press by providing contributions by an imaginary character spawned by the MEK to Forbes as a "source."
Then a series of photographs were leaked from inside the MEK’s camp in Albania and published in Iran. The photos offer an unguarded glimpse into the operational and organizational life of the cult.
Earlier this year, Germany’s Der Spiegel revealed that members of the MEK undergo horrific training in a camp in Albania.
Der Spiegel said the members held in the camp practice "cutting throats with knife”, "breaking hand”, "removing eyes with finger” and "tearing down mouth”.
The German weekly magazine added those who left the cult group said the members were being tortured and subjected to psychological trauma.
Talking to 15 members of the group, the magazine said the camp in which 2,000 members are kept is 50 times the size of a soccer field.
American journalist Seymour Hersh, a Pulitzer Prize winner who has written for The New Yorker, reported in 2012 that a number of MEK members had been secretly trained by the United States Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) at the Department of Energy’s Nevada National Security Site, a secretive training facility northwest of Las Vegas, in a program that began in 2005 and purportedly ended "sometime before President Obama took office.”
Hersh also cited an NBC report — itself citing "two senior Obama Administration officials” — that said MKO "units... financed and trained by Mossad, the Israeli secret service” had been involved in the assassination of four Iranian nuclear scientists and an attempted attack on another one after 2007.