A group of prominent Republicans may have actually committed a crime last month when they traveled to Paris to speak to an Iranian opposition group that the US has deemed to be terrorists.
Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, former national security adviser Fran Townsend and former Attorney General Michael Mukasey all attended a forum organized by supporters of Mujaheddin-e Khalq (MEK).
The MEK is a communist group that helped Saddam Hussein carry out attacks against Iraq's Shiite population in the 1990s. The group attacked Americans in Iran in the 1980s and helped with the 1979 takeover of the US embassy in Tehran.
The US designated the MEK a foreign terrorist organization in January 2009.
Giuliani and the former Bush officials, however, sided with the group due to their opposition to the current Iranian regime.
"Appeasement of dictators leads to war, destruction and the loss of human lives," Giuliani told the forum. "For your organization to be described as a terrorist organization is just really a disgrace."
"The United States should not just be on your side," he said. "It should be enthusiastically on your side. You want the same things we want."
"If the United States truly wants to put pressure on the Iranian regime, it takes more than talk and it takes more than sanctions," Townsend declared.
Georgetown University law professor and attorney David Cole believes that under US law, the group of conservatives may have gone too far.
"The problem is that the United States government has labeled the Mujahedeen Khalq a 'foreign terrorist organization,' making it a crime to provide it, directly or indirectly, with any material support," he wrote in Monday's edition of the New York Times. "It is therefore a felony, the government has argued, to file an amicus brief on behalf of a 'terrorist' group, to engage in public advocacy to challenge a group’s 'terrorist' designation or even to encourage peaceful avenues for redress of grievances."
The Supreme Court has ruled that any "advocacy performed in coordination with, or at the direction of, a foreign terrorist organization" is a crime.
Playing both sides of 9/11. Classic Republicanism.
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