The undeniable fact, of course, is that the MEK never engaged in terrorism to begin with. Its classification in 1997, according to senior State Department officials at the time and in the ensuring years, “was a goodwill gesture to the newly-elected moderate [Iranian] president Mohammed Khatami.” Indeed, after a 10-year investigation into the conduct of the MEK, a French anti-terrorism investigative magistrate ruled in 2011 that the MEK’s actions even in the 1970s and ’80s did not target civilians and amounted to resistance against tyranny.

Contrary to the author’s assertion, support for the MEK did not come about after its nuclear revelations in 2002, nor has it been limited to “U.S. conservatives.” A bipartisan majority in the House recognized the group as a legitimate resistance movement as far back as 1992 and some 32 senators from both sides of the aisle reiterated this in 2001. A stellar group of the most senior former U.S. foreign policy, national security and military officials endorsing the MEK delisting in the past three years includes not only Republicans, but prominent Democrats such as President Obama’s first national security adviser, Gen. James Jones, former House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Lee Hamilton (D-Ind.), former Govs. Bill Richardson, Ed Rendell and Howard Dean, and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Hugh Shelton.

The MEK was delisted not because of “an intense lobbying campaign” as the article contends, but after America’s second highest court, the U.S. Federal Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, granted a Writ of Mandamus and issued a unanimous and scathing rebuke in June 2012, lambasting the secretary’s “egregious” delay in reaching a decision. The three-judge panel warned her that if she delayed beyond October, it would delist the MEK itself, a ruling unprecedented in the 230-year plus judicial history of the United States.

http://thehill.com/opinion/letters/304617-senates-current-farm-bill-a-cornucopia-of-bad-ideas