People's Mujaheddin swears it has changed its terrorist ways

The People's Mujaheddin is sick and tired of being called a terrorist organization by the U.S. government. So leaders of the terrorist group settled on a uniquely American strategy for handling this problem: They sued.

Yes, the group has done its share of assassinations, bombings, embassy attacks and killings of U.S. troops. But that was long ago, and now the People's Mujaheddin wants to let bygones be bygones. It says it has devoted itself to democracy and nonviolence, and it would like very much to be taken off the State Department's list of international terrorist groups.

Friends of the People's Mujaheddin Organization of Iran -- a.k.a. MEK, a.k.a. Mujaheddin-e Khalq, a.k.a. National Liberation Army of Iran, a.k.a. National Council of Resistance, a.k.a. Organization of the People's Holy Warriors -- assembled in a fifth-floor courtroom at the U.S. courthouse in Washington on Tuesday to hear Andrew Frey of the firm Mayer Brown plead their case.

"Today's PMOI is unique among foreign terrorist organizations," the lawyer told a three-judge appellate panel. "The organization has foresworn violence. We walk the walk. There have been no terrorist acts by PMOI for eight years."

But couldn't the attacks resume? "The fact that terrorist activities are bad if they happen could be said of the Girl Scouts," Frey reasoned.

The People's Mujaheddin as Girl Scouts. Only in America.

People's Mujaheddin fighters were old-school terrorists who once battled the shah of Iran. They then went to Iraq and, with Saddam Hussein's help, attacked the ayatollahs. They allegedly killed hundreds of people, but now they call themselves a nonviolent Iranian opposition movement. About 3,400 of them and their family members still live at Camp Ashraf in Iraq -- and they have plenty of friends in the United States, including former congressman Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.), who watched Tuesday's proceedings from the front row.

The government's lawyer, Douglas Letter, wasn't about to negotiate with "an organization that for at least 30 years has been involved in terrorism, violence, assassination, et cetera."

He admitted the public record was not sufficient to demonstrate that the group still poses a threat, but he said "it was the classified material" that made it clear that the group still deserves its terrorist listing.

Here the People's Mjuaheddin has a problem: The group is allowed to respond to the classified evidence, but is not allowed to see it. "Due process," Letter explained, "is a flexible concept."

This turned the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit into something of a kangaroo court on Tuesday. With the terrorist organization not allowed to know the evidence against it, there was little hope of prevailing. "We're at the blind man's bluff part of the argument," Frey complained.

"We were always at that stage," corrected Judge Stephen Williams, one of the three on the panel.