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Ten years after being banished from Washington, the Iranian resistance will reopen an office Thursday just a block away from the White House, where three presidents kept the dissidents on the U.S. terrorist blacklist until a federal court intervened.
"This marks a new era," said Soona Samsami, the U.S. representative for the Paris-based National Council of Resistance of Iran.
She added that the resistance sees a "serious prospect for change by the Iranian people and the organized opposition" because of an internal power struggle among the ruling mullahs of the brutal Islamist regime.
Founded in Tehran in 1981, the resistance is a democratic coalition of five Iranian opposition groups and calls itself the "longest-lasting political coalition in Iran's contemporary history."
President Bill Clinton put the resistance on the terrorist list in 1997, meeting a key demand of the Iranian regime as a precondition for talks with the United States. President George W. Bush kept the dissidents on the list, although demands were growing in Congress for their removal.
A federal judge last year ordered the Obama administration to justify keeping the dissidents on the list or removing them. Then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton removed the resistance from the terrorist files in November.
Members of Washington's diplomatic corps and former senior U.S. officials are expected to attend a reopening ceremony at the resistance office at 1747 Pennsylvania Ave. NW. (Article Source)
Email Embassy Row at jmorrison@washingtontimes.com. The column is published on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.
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