The CIA has finally acknowledged its role, along with British MI6, in the overthrow of the democratically elected Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mossadeq in 1953, replacing him with the despised Reza Pahlavi who adopted the grandiose title of the Shah of Iran. That event poisoned relations between the two countries ever since. Iranians deeply resented the foisting of the despotic Shah on them who, with massive US support, ruled until his overthrow in 1979.
Of course, people all over the world knew that the CIA was behind the military coup all along so why act as if it was a secret for so long? The answer is that if the US government treats something as secret, then the US media tends to not report it directly and merely alludes to it obliquely. We have seen this play out numerous times, the ‘secret’ bombings of Laos and Cambodia being two of the most egregious examples.
The net result of this government-media collusion is that the general American public tends to not know the truth, though the elites do, and that is the purpose of this ‘secrecy’. Then the US government can act aggrieved when the Iranians call the US ‘The Great Satan’ and they and the media can endlessly speculate on “Why do they hate us?” and ascribe it to irrational dislike of ‘our freedoms’. This game has been played repeatedly and continues to this day.
busterggi says
I guess we can expect the CIA to announce that shit is not Shinola soon too.
CGM3 says
And that we have always been at war with Eastasia.
Happiestsadist, opener of the Crack of Doom says
I didn’t even know the CIA had been denying it. I thought it was admitted, it was so well-known.
richardrobinson says
Right there with you. Though I know plenty of people who can’t make the leap from, “We fucked with their country so we could keep getting their shit for cheap.” to “They might have a legitimate reason to be pissed with us.”
Marcus Ranum says
You also get the media adopting the chosen vocabulary of washington, which allows for tremendous manipulation. Thus you get “ethnic cleansing” (to allow the world to stand by and watch Rwanda collapse into genocide) and “collateral damage” (area bombing of civilians in direct contravention of the Geneva Conventions) or “enhanced interrogation” (torture) — the media is incredibly complicit in goverment crimes by allowing them to be redefined semantically to non-crimes.
colnago80 says
It is my information that the CIA field director for the operation was a man named Kermit Roosevelt who subsequently bragged about it at every opportunity. Nothing new here, move along.
left0ver1under says
They’re still denying at least half the stuff that Philip Agee exposed in “CIA Diary”, despite near all of it being widely accepted by most as true. Meanwhile, the US public still believes the lie that Agee “outed” CIA spies in Greece, leading to their murder by mobs of pro-communists. Agee did no such thing, but why let the facts get in the way?
Agee is also worth mentioning in light of Edward Snowdon and Julian Assange. After his book came out in 1975, the US told similar hollow lies about “due process” if Agee ever returned to the US, attempted to lure Agee to Spain (which was still pro-US and fascist at the time), and similar harassment happened to Agee when he tried to obtain residence in England. Agee eventually crossed borders illegally and obtained refugee status in West Berlin, using laws intended to protect West German deserters from military service and protect East German defectors. He eventually moved to Cuba where he ran a tourism company until he died.
Don’t read the wikipedia entry on Agee, it’s full of crap. His own book “On The Run” is far more enlightening, as is the Third World Traveller website and interviews you can find on youtube.
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/CIA/CIA_Diary_Agee.html
http://youtu.be/nvZQa0hkfgw
left0ver1under says
So this info is finally coming out. It was promised in 2007. Maybe the US government hoped that people would forget by now and not read it. Teabaggers wouldn’t but people who believe in democracy are still interested.
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/06/22/2030
twosheds1 says
I wonder if Iran, or any other country, has actually called the US the Great Satan. We have to trust the media to report that, since most of us don’t speak Farsi, and even if we did, it’s not like they play those speeches on TV in the original language.