On August 30, 2012, 17 former U.S. Generals and elected officials of U.S. government issued a joint statement calling on the Department of State to remove the name of the Iranian resistance movement, the Mujahedin-e Khalq, MEK from its Foreign Terrorist Organizations list. The full text of the statement, as was received by Stop Fundamentalism, is as follows.

Washington, DC–In February of this year, in response to open and repeated skepticism from members of Congress as to why the State Department continues to designate as a Foreign Terrorist Organization a group of Iranian expatriates who fervently oppose the oppressive regime in their native country and who present no threat to this country’s security, our Secretary of State said she would reconsider that designation.  She said that one significant element in that reconsideration is whether 3,400 members of that organization, known as MEK, who resided at a location within Iraq known as Camp Ashraf and had surrendered what weapons they had to U.S. troops in 2003 in return for a guarantee that they would be treated as protected persons, would move to an abandoned U.S. military base near Baghdad known as Camp Liberty.  The move was supposed to be in aid of resettling the MEK members in other countries.  In part because these defenseless people had already been attacked twice — in 2009 and 2011 – by Iraqi troops acting at the apparent behest of Iran, with dozens killed any many more wounded, they agreed.