Pacific Free Press was launched in March 2007 by Dutch-Canadian Richard
Kastelein of V.O.F. Expathos, in the Netherlands along with Chris Cook- CFUV radio journalist and Editor in Chief of Pacific Free Press. Cook is based in , Victoria, British Columbia.
The mission of Pacific Free Press is simple: to dig out nuggets of truth from
the slag-heap of lies, ignorance and witless diversion that has buried
public discourse today. Pacific Free Press provides a new venue for
disseminating hard news and insightful, fact-based analysis of the
harsh realities too often ignored or distorted by the mainstream press.
“Perhaps we should get some perspective by imagining how we might react if the Iranians had occupied France and were patrolling the English channel,” runs a post on the UK Telegraph, responding to the capture of 15 British sailors by Iran.
Indeed. But I can think of one better.
Perhaps we’d get some perspective if we realized MI6 and the CIA plotted against the democratically elected government of Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953.
“If there had not been a military coup, there would not have been 25 years of the Shah’s brutal regime, there would not have been a revolution in 1979 and a government of clerics,” Ibrahim Yazdi, a former foreign minister and leading member of a political party that traces its origins to Mossadegh’s National Front, told the Christian Science Monitor on the 50th anniversary of the coup and installation of the Shah.
“Now it seems that the Americans are pushing towards the same direction again. That shows they have not learned anything from history.”
“When Iranians rose up against the Shah with cries of ‘Death to
the American Shah!,’ when their new regime emerged as bitterly
anti-American, and when a group of them took American diplomats hostage
in 1979, many Americans wondered how this could have happened in a
country they had always considered friendly,” Stephen Kinzer, author of
All the Shah’s Men, told the History News Network. “Once they
understand what the United States did to Iran in 1953, they will
understand why so many Iranians became angry at the United States.”
“For
many Iranians, the coup was a tragedy from which their country has
never recovered. Perhaps because Mossadegh represents a future denied,
his memory has approached myth,” Dan De Luce writes for the Guardian.
“Beyond Iran, America remains deeply resented for siding with
authoritarian rule in the region.”
Of course, the average
American, who likely would have a difficult time finding Iran on a map,
is almost completely ignorant of these historical facts. He does not
know that the Shah’s secret police, SAVAK, trained by the CIA and
Israel’s Mossad, “became a law unto itself, having legal authority to
arrest and detain suspected persons indefinitely” and “operated its own
prisons in Tehran (the Komiteh and Evin facilities) and, many
suspected, throughout the country as well. SAVAK’s torture methods
included electric shock, whipping, beating, inserting broken glass and
pouring boiling water into the rectum, tying weights to the testicles,
and the extraction of teeth and nails,” according to the Federation of
American Scientists
Finally, Britain’s largest newspaper, in
fact the highest circulation newspaper in the world, neocon Rupert
Murdoch’s Sun, amidst banner ads of naked women showing off curvy
derrieres, declares Leading Seaman Faye Turney “was forced on the
orders of ranting president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to write a letter of
apology to the Iranian people.”
Even if true, this is a shade
better than being kidnapped in Afghanistan, Iraq, or on the streets of
Milan, Italy, and “extraordinarily” rendered by the CIA and sent to
Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Morocco, or Uzbekistan to be tortured.
No
doubt Ahmadinejad’s alleged rant is mild when compared to water
boarding or the sort of severe trauma inflicted on prisoners at the
Bagram torture facility (said to be comparable to being run over by a
bus) or for that matter rape by way of chemical light at Abu Ghraib.
Writings 
“Perhaps we should get some perspective by imagining how we might react if the Iranians had occupied France and were patrolling the English channel,” runs a post on the UK Telegraph, responding to the capture of 15 British sailors by Iran. 
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