Free Republic

WASHINGTON -- Now that the festivities are over, it is time for the masters of the media to stop asking inane questions of the new folks in town -- such as, "How do you like your new office?" -- and for the Obama administration to get down to work on a clear and present danger. Notwithstanding the "day one" and "first week" coverage, the most pressing issue confronting the American people isn't closing "Gitmo" or the always ephemeral "Mideast peace process" in the aftermath of Gaza or even "fixing the economy." Item No. 1 ought to be preventing the world's...

The trial in Sweden of Hamid Noury, an agent of the Iranian regime, ended on May 5th. The prosecutor told the court that there was plenty of evidence to show that Hamid Noury committed the crimes he had been charged with and she asked for him to be sentenced to life imprisonment. The verdict is expected later. The court case in Stockholm has been a direct embarrassment to Iran’s executioner president, Ebrahim Raisi, dubbed ‘The Butcher of Tehran’ for his hands-on role in the killing of thousands of political prisoners, including teenagers and even pregnant women, during a notorious massacre...

Something strange is going on. Why is the EU so keen to shoe-horn America back into the nuclear deal with Iran? Former US president Donald Trump ditched the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) deal three years ago and imposed heavy sanctions on the mullahs’ regime under his ‘maximum pressure’ campaign. Since then, the Iranians have boasted about how they have flouted the terms of the deal by accelerating their advanced centrifuge program and enriching uranium to almost weapons grade fissile status. The Biden administration is being ultra-cautious. But the EU’s high Representative for Foreign Affairs & Security, the Spanish...

You may recall a stunning report from September that looked into an infrequently discussed Pentagon group known as the Iran Experts Initiative. In it, we learned about one of Joe Biden’s Iranian “experts” who was probably far too much of an expert in this field. Ariane Tabatabai is an Iranian-born aide and chief of staff to a Pentagon Assistant Secretary of Defense. She initially worked alongside the now-suspended Robert Malley on Biden’s efforts to restart Obama’s Iran nuclear deal. But the September report suggests she was working far more on behalf of the Iranian regime than our government. Still, she...

I once asked a senior American official about why he accepted honoraria from the Mujahedin-e-Khalq, or the MKO, given the group’s cultlike nature and its lack of popularity inside Iran. His response: Even if the group lied about its support, they said the right things about democracy and regime change, and so he saw no harm in collecting the cash. The regime’s fall, he said, would be a moment of truth: Either the MKO would prove itself right, or its political Ponzi scheme would collapse. The problem with engaging in the MKO’s endorsement-for-cash scheme is the impact it has on...

The Mujahedin al Khalq, or MKO, is, after the Iranian regime itself, the most hated group inside Iran. It allied with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to enable the Islamic Revolution but, after a falling out, launched a terrorist campaign inside Iran. The MKO also cast its lot with Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Its leader, Maryam Rajavi, rules with an iron fist over the organization and insists upon the same head covering that Iranians risk their lives to shed. Far from supporting women’s rights, the group tells women whom they can marry and forcibly divorces them. In short, it is a cult

Iranian embassy staff in the Albanian capital worked through the night after they were given 24 hours to leave the country over a major cyberattack that the Albanian government blames on Iran. It is the first known case of a country cutting diplomatic relations over a cyberattack. Movement inside the Iranian embassy in Tirana continued nonstop from Wednesday into Thursday. An empty barrel was seen taken into the compound and later a fire was started in it, apparently burning documents. A diplomatic car went in and out, while an Albanian police officer communicated with the embassy before two officers entered...

The Trump administration issued the designation in 2019 A top Iranian resistance group is warning that any move to take the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps off the U.S. Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) list will "heighten terrorism and mayhem" in the region, amid fears the Biden administration will make such a move as part of negotiations to bring Iran back into the 2015 nuclear deal. "A potential IRGC exclusion from the FTO list and taking these individuals off the terror blacklist, as requested by Iran’s ruling theocracy, will no doubt heighten terrorism and mayhem in the region," the report by the...

Last week, a former Iranian judiciary official charged with war crimes in Iran testified in a Swedish court. The first person to date to face trial for the horrific 1988 massacre, Hamid Noury’s testimony offered revelations that laid bare Tehran’s vulnerabilities and revealed important insights into the regime’s domestic affairs. Noury, who is accused of participation in the massacre of more than 30,000 political prisoners in Iran in 1988, 90 percent of whom were members of a singular opposition movement – was arrested in Sweden in 2019. In heated exchanges with confused prosecutors, the defendant doggedly refused to speak the...

On Thursday, October 28, supporters of the People's Mujahidin ‎Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK) and the National Council of ‎Resistance of Iran (NCRI) held a large conference in Washington ‎DC. The conference, titled, "2021 Free Iran Summit: Holding ‎Ebrahim Raisi Accountable for Crimes Against Humanity, ‎Genocide, Regional Meddling, and Nuclear Defiance," ‎ This conference, however, was significantly different from similar ‎meetings that were previously held in the United States. In this ‎ever-important gathering, in addition to distinguished American ‎personalities such as Senator Joe Lieberman, US Vice President ‎candidate (2000), Senator Torricelli, U.S. Senator (1997-2003), ‎Honorable Judge Michael Mukasey, 81st U.S. Attorney...

For the first time ever, significant light is being shed on one of the most horrendous human rights atrocities of the second half of the 20th century. In 1988, more than 30,000 political prisoners were senselessly massacred by Iranian officials. More than 30 years later, one of the people who participated in the massacre, Hamid Noury, is on trial in Sweden. The Noury trial should spark more media and public scrutiny about the 1988 massacre, and ultimately trigger a long overdue international investigation. Hamid Noury has been incarcerated in Sweden since November 2019 when he visited the country for personal...

During a rendezvous at the United Nations General Assembly, the Iranian regime's foreign minister lodged a formal complaint with his Swedish counterpart about the trial of Hamid Noury, a former Iranian official, in Stockholm. Hossein Amir-Abdollahian told Sweden's Ann Linde that all the documents provided to the court are "fabricated." A month prior, a spokesman for the regime's Foreign Ministry had warned, "We will naturally use all our diplomatic means to obtain and enforce Hamid Noury's rights." Who is Hamid Noury, and why is the regime clearly terrified of his trial in Sweden? Hamid Noury was a low-ranking official in...

Source: Official White House Photo by Delano Scott The international community's patience is growing thin as the Iranian regime's nuclear defiance and regional terrorism intensify. At the same time, credible accusations that the regime's President, Ebrahim Raisi, was involved in the massacre of thousands of political prisoners in 1988, are making it harder for other countries to engage and negotiate with a genocidal president. The Iranian regime is dealing with a multitude of crises and challenges. The economy is in shambles, COVID-19 is wreaking havoc, the unemployment rate continues to set new records, and the official inflation rate is now...

Human rights usually feature prominently in America's political rhetoric but fade insignificance when it comes to concrete action. That trend can take a historic turn when it comes to Iran, where a genocidal madman has taken the presidency. That the presidency of Ebrahim Raisi in Iran hasn't galvanized governments in the West and in the U.S. in particular to pursue his prosecution is still a mystery. Human rights groups, UN experts, Nobel laureates, scores of elected officials, lawmakers, and journalists have already expressed outrage over Raisi's rise to power. And justifiably so. In 1988, Raisi was one of the members...

Human rights activists have recently joined with persons affected by the Iranian regime’s human rights abuses in order to issue formal requests for the arrest of Ebrahim Raisi, the president of Iran. Raisi assumed office in August following months of protests by Iranian citizens and expatriates alike over his role in severe human rights violations, including the massacre of 30,000 political prisoners, mostly members and supporters of the main opposition, the Mojahedin-e-Khalq (MEK) in the summer of 1988. Public demands for his arrest intensified in the wake of the announcement that Raisi is expected to attend the COP26 climate change...

Primo Levi, a Holocaust survivor of Italian origin who led a distinguished life, was at the Auschwitz concentration camp hospital one day due to high fever caused by an infectious disease. He later wrote in his memoirs that when confronted with Soviet soldiers: "They neither greeted nor smiled; they seemed to be tormented by the guilt of why this crime had to happen." The trial of one of the perpetrators of another heinous crime, the massacre of 30,000 Iranian political prisoners in 1988, is currently taking place in a Swedish court. What happened in 1988 was a ruthless, bloody, and...

The MKO’s tendency to cry wolf hinder and obstruct the real fights against the Iranian regime, Iranian terrorism, and the Islamic Republic’s covert nuclear program. The Mujahedin al-Khalq (MKO) formed against the backdrop of the anti-shah opposition in the 1960s and evolved to become an important component of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s revolutionary coalition. But Khomeini turned on the MKO as he consolidated his dictatorship. Unlike others forced out of power, persecuted domestically, or sent into exile, the MKO fought back: They both sponsored a terror campaign targeting regime officials—killing many innocent bystanders in the process—and they accepted Iraqi dictator Saddam...

Judging by the rhetoric coming out of Tehran, John Bolton’s appointment as America’s National Security Advisor is the worst thing that ever happened. The Secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council labeled Bolton’s appointment “a matter of shame.”  The Chairman of the Iranian Parliament's Committee on National Security and Foreign Policy declared,  "The use of hardline elements against the Islamic Republic of Iran shows that the Americans seek to exert more pressure on Iran.”First Vice President Eshaq Jahangiri opined, “They (US officials) are wrong to assume that the Iranian nation will give in to their threats against the Islamic Republic.”  ...

While working on terrorism-related issues during my congressional career, I soon understood not only that Iran had earned its reputation as the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, but also that the country’s leadership considered terrorism a viable replacement for standard political and diplomatic statecraft. A recent criminal court ruling in Belgium reinforces this fact. Since the time of the 1979 revolution, the use of proxies in terror operations abroad afforded the regime some measure of plausible deniability and made it more difficult for the U.S. or its allies to hold Iranian officials directly accountable. Still, it was shocking when...

On April 11, citizens of Iran began returning to work after an inexcusably brief nationwide lockdown. The coronavirus outbreak in Iran is the worst in the Middle East and possibly the world. Yet the Iranian regime moved more slowly and took less action that most others. The official death toll has already exceeded 5,000, but credible sources like the main opposition National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) have concluded that the actual number of COVID-19-related fatalities is between five and 10 times this number. The brief lockdown notwithstanding, these dramatic estimates reflect gross mismanagement of the crisis from its...