TEHRAN, Sept 29: Iranian MPs on Saturday branded the US Army and the Central Intelligence Agency as terrorist, hitting back at US lawmakers’ designation of the elite Revolutionary Guards as a terrorist organisation.

“The aggressing US Army and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) sponsor terrorism and are terrorists themselves,” said 215 MPs out of 290 in the conservative-dominated parliament in a statement carried by the ISNA news agency.

The MPs cited Washington’s “unlimited support of the racist Zionist regime and participating in that regime’s state terrorism” and “training Al Qaeda and Taliban terrorists” among reasons for their designation.

They called on the United Nations to stop “continued activity of torture places of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib and America’s secret prisons in different countries”. The US Senate on Wednesday called for Iran’s powerful ideological army, the Revolutionary Guards, to be officially designated as a “foreign terrorist organisation,” after the House of Representatives passed a similar measure.

Iran has condemned as “worthless and invalid” the designation, which if adopted by the US government, would open the corps and affiliated companies to economic sanctions.

US military officials and lawmakers have accused the Revolutionary Guards of arming Shia militias in Iraq and supplying sophisticated roadside bombs used to kill US soldiers there.

Washington also accuses Iran of seeking to build an atomic bomb under the cover of a civilian nuclear programme, a charge Tehran denies.

The Bush administration said in August it would designate all or part of the Guard as a terrorist organisation.—AFP