| Dinesh D'Souza |
| "But what about US backing for Latin American, Asian, and Middle Eastern dictators, such as Somoza in Nicaragua, Marcos in the Philippines, Pinochet in Chile, and the shah of Iran? It should be noted that, in each of these cases, the United States eventually turned against the dictatorial regime and actively aided in its ouster." |
| I found this whopper absurdity on page 165 of D'Souza's book What's so great about America |
| My knowledge about the above-listed dictatorships is mainly limited to the Shah's. What D'Souza has written here, claiming that the USA aided in the Shah's ouster, is so comically absurd and completely contradicted by all other sources of information I've ever seen that I simply must believe that D'Souza doesn't believe it either. He can't be that stupid. I will phone him soon and ask him about this [and I will report my findings here] I've read many (at least 10) different sources giving descriptions of the Shah's last days in power. I've never seen any claim that would support (however faintly) D'Souza's claim that our goverment aided in the "ouster" of the Shah, at any time during his decades-long rein of power. On the contrary, our government gave firm support to the Shah during his entire rein. Incidentally, D'Souza's claim here is one that exploits "information overload" of the American people. How many people have enough time to investigate such claims about events in distant countries, especially when the author (in this case, D'Souza) expects total trust by the reader and fails to supply any reference information? This is some history that I'm familiar with: Our government installed the Shah of Iran in 1953 (about a week after he was ousted by persons led by the popular leader Mossagdah). Later, in 1957, our CIA together with Mossad (Israel's "CIA") installed the SAVAK police force, as a means to help "our" dictator stay securely in power. SAVAK was an extremely brutal secret police force. I sincerely believe that they were even more brutal and cruel than were the Nazis during Nazi-led Germany. The 1976 yearly report by Amnesty International (one of their workers told me that the worst human rights abuses of the SAVAK occurred in that year, and are documented in this year's report) describes: --total censorship of any complaints about the Shah --machine-gunning of crowds of anti-Shah protesters. Time magazine (in a issue appearing 3 weeks after the Nov 4, 1979 seizure of hostages by Iranians protesting the US admitting the Shah into the US for cancer treatments) estimated that somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 protesters were murdered in this way by SAVAK machine gunning. --total violation of privacy (including random selection of, and searching of homes) in search of anti-Shah literature --torture of political prisoners by means of twisting a broken coke bottle up the rectum --torture of political prisoners by means of burning them severely on a white-hot "grill" made for such a purpose --torture so severe that one political prisoner had his nervous system overloaded with pain, destroying nerves, making him incapable of entering a courtroom except by crawling |