Top American supporters of the Iranian resistance are growing increasingly critical of the Obama administration for failing to keep a U.S. promise to protect more than 3,000 Iranian dissidents in an overcrowded refugee camp in Iraq, where they have been under repeated deadly attacks by Iraqi gunmen.
 “It was a deal. It was a bargain, and the United States has never lived up to that bargain,” Ed Rendell, a former chairman of the Democratic Party, told a weekend forum of Iranian-Americans at the Los Angeles Convention Center on February 22.
The Iranian dissidents handed over their weapons to U.S. forces voluntarily in 2003 in exchange for a U.S. pledge to treat them as protected persons under the Geneva Conventions. But in 2009, the Obama administration turned that responsibility over to the Iraqi government, which later launched three lethal attacks against the dissidents in Camp Ashraf, their home of 27 years north of Baghdad, and facilitated four more missile attacks on Camp Liberty, near Baghdad International Airport, where the nearly 3,000 dissidents now reside.
Mr. Rendell also denounced the United Nations for failing to open an independent investigation into the attacks and relying on the Iraqi government to conduct its own probe into the killings.
 “That’s like asking Al Capone to investigate the St. Valentine’s Day murders,” he said, referring to the infamous gangland killings in Chicago in 1929.
Patrick Kennedy, a former Democratic congressman from Rhode Island, declared that U.S. policy toward Iran “must change, and it must change now.”
He called the dissidents “courageous” and denounced Iran’s brutal and intolerant theocratic regime.
 “It tortures and imprisons and represses all of its 78 million people. … It is also the central banker and chief arms dealer for every major terrorist organization around the world. … Tehran supports the two most violent regimes in the Middle East: Syria’s [ Bashar] Assad and Iraq’s [ Nouri] al-Maliki. This … is an example of them supporting international war criminals,” said Mr. Kennedy, the nephew of U.S. President John F. Kennedy and son of the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts.
Tom Ridge, Homeland Security Secretary under President George W. Bush, also criticized the administration for “empty words” and “unfulfilled promises.”
 “I take it personally — as a former soldier, former public servant and now as a private citizen — that my country has not kept its word,” he said.