Word: savak
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There is no longer any dispute that SAVAK practiced systematic torture. Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a member of Khomeini's Revolutionary Council, described to TIME'S Raji Samghabadi how SAVAK agents in 1964 lashed the soles of his feet with electric cable: "The flesh was torn apart, and the bones jutted out. There were multiple fractures." The agents, he says, also held a knife to his throat for hours, making small nicks and telling him to guess "when the blade might go all the way down and sever my head." Amnesty International in the 1970s described other methods...
William J. Butler, a New York lawyer who investigated SAVAK for the International Commission of Jurists in Geneva, spoke to Reza Baraheni, an Iranian poet who was held for 102 days by the secret police in 1973. Baraheni told of seeing in SAVAK torture rooms "all sizes of whips" and instruments designed to pluck out the fingernails of victims. He described the sufferings of some fellow prisoners: "They hang you upside down, and then someone beats you with a mace on your legs or on your genitals, or they lower you down, pull your pants up and then...
Some argue that the U.S. should be a sanctuary for all who are cast from their homelands. Why then did the U.S. not allow intellectuals critical of the Shah to even speak out with impunity here? Why did American intelligence services provide SAVAK with information on their activities in this country which lead to their deaths under torture when they returned to Iran...
...SAVAK conducted most of the torture, under the friendly guidance of the CIA. which set up SAVAK in 1957 and taught them how to interrogate suspects. Amnesty International reports methods of torture that included "whipping and beating, electric shocks, extraction of teeth and nails, boiling water pumped into the rectum, heavy weights hung on the testicles, tying the prisoner to a metal table heated to a white heat, inserting a broken bottle into the anus, and rape...
...sponsored coup meant for the Iranian nation 25 years of unparalleled brutality and suffering. Regrettably the complicity of the American government was a major factor in the maintenance of the Shah's regime. American advisors supported Savak, the dreaded secret police responsible for the torture and brutal deaths of untold numbers of Iranian citizens. The army was transformed into a brutal instrument of internal repression and a guardian of foreign interests in Iran and the Persian Gulf. What was called "economic development" in Iran during those 25 years was in reality the development of consumerism, quick profits for American...