Birds of a feather

Columnists Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball, writing in Newsweek, report that

[t]he new report by chief U.S. weapons inspector Charles Duelfer contains evidence that Saddam Hussein allegedly used the United Nations-managed Oil-for-Food program to provide millions of dollars in subsidies to a group the U.S. State Department has branded a foreign terrorist organization.

So why hasn't this been trumpeted by the White House as proof of Saddam's "connections to terrorists?" Because, turns out, the group in question is the Mujahedin-e Khalq, or MEK, an Iranian opposition group backed by Baghdad as a counterweight to Tehran.

Not only does the MEK have no connection either to September 11 or Al Qaeda, in the past, it has had strong support from members of Congress — including leading Republicans in both chambers and a current Bush cabinet member, Attorney General John Ashcroft.

The invasion of Iraq only intensified the difficulty for the US in how to deal with the MEK. First they were rounded up as terrorists supported by Saddam. But then they were going to be released because they hadn't resisted the invasion. Meanwhile,

[s]ome Pentagon hard-liners and neoconservative political activists pushed last year to provide the group with secret U.S. backing as part of a broader covert campaign to destabilize the mullahs' regime in Tehran.

That idea apparently fell through, as did the idea of returning them to Iran in exchange for some al-Qaeda higher-ups thought to be under house arrest there.

So just what do you do with people who you have labeled "terrorists" but who are terrorists against people you don't like? It seems the White House still hasn't figured that out. Which may tell us something about the underlying meaning of the War on Terror^{(c)(tm)(pat.pend.)} which some among us might not like to hear.