CIA Admits to Participating in 1953 Iranian Coup

It seems that the CIA has finally admitted its role in the infamous 1953 Iranian coup, according to the Guardian. There are declassified documents that show in detail how the CIA worked against Mohammed Mossadeq.

Says The Guardian:

The CIA has publicly admitted for the first time that it was behind the notorious 1953 coup against Iran's democratically elected prime minister Mohammad Mosaddeq, in documents that also show how the British government tried to block the release of information about its own involvement in his overthrow.

On the 60th anniversary of an event often invoked by Iranians as evidence of western meddling, the US national security archive at George Washington University published a series of declassified CIA documents.

"The military coup that overthrew Mosaddeq and his National Front cabinet was carried out under CIA direction as an act of US foreign policy, conceived and approved at the highest levels of government," reads a previously excised section of an internal CIA history titled The Battle for Iran.

More documents of this can be found in the National Security Archives, thanks to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)

And as to the UK, it still hasn't admitted its role in the coup, as that would be "very embarrassing" to do so. They went so far as to try to stop US officials from releasing the "embarrassing" documents.

The Guardian concludes their eye-opening report by showing that recently "Iranian politicians have sought to compare the dispute over the country's nuclear activities to that of the oil nationalisation under Mosaddeq: supporters of the former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad often invoke the coup. US officials have previously expressed regret about the coup but have fallen short of issuing an official apology. The British government has never acknowledged its role.

My own conclusion is that this should cause major rethinking of US foreign policy, and that this should be used as an example to revise the current, indoctrinated understanding of the US-Iranian conflict. If that doesn't, then maybe nothing will.

As Malcom Byrne said: "There is no longer good reason to keep secrets about such a critical episode in our recent past. The basic facts are widely known to every school child in Iran. Suppressing the details only distorts the history, and feeds into myth-making on all sides."

If those "evil," "nuke-loving" Iranians have better grasp on history than our "peace-loving" Americans, then something is very, very wrong.