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Iran's Legislature Labels CIA, U.S. Army As Terrorist Groups

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By ALI AKBAR DAREINI, The Associated Press

Published: September 30, 2007

TEHRAN, Iran - Iran's parliament voted Saturday to designate the CIA and U.S. Army as 'terrorist organizations,' a largely symbolic response to a U.S. Senate resolution seeking a similar designation for Iran's Revolutionary Guards.

The parliament said the Army and CIA were terrorists because of the atomic bombing of Japan; the use of depleted uranium munitions in the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq; support of the killings of Palestinians by Israel; the bombing and killing of Iraqi civilians; and the torture of imprisoned terror suspects.

'The aggressor U.S. Army and the Central Intelligence Agency are terrorists and also nurture terror,' said a statement by the 215 lawmakers who signed the resolution at an open session of the 290-member Iranian parliament.

The resolution, which urges President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's government to treat the two as terrorist organizations, would become law if ratified by the country's hard-line constitutional watchdog but probably would have little effect as the two nations have no diplomatic relations.

Ahmadinejad's government was expected to wait for U.S. reaction before making its decision.

The U.S. Senate voted Wednesday in favor of a resolution urging the State Department to designate the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization. Charged with defending the system put in place after Iran's 1979 Islamic Revolution, the Guards answer to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

The Senate's terrorist designation, the first such move against a foreign government entity, would cut the Revolutionary Guards off from the U.S. financial system and freeze the assets of its members or subsidiaries have in U.S. jurisdictions.

It also would allow the Treasury to move against companies subject to U.S. law that do business with the Guards, which have vast business interests at home and abroad.

Although the proposal attracted overwhelming bipartisan support, a small group of Democrats said they feared that labeling the state-sponsored organization a terrorist group could be interpreted as a congressional authorization of military action in Iran.

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