More Bernie gems for GE

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAVAK

SAVAK (Persian: ساواک‎, short for سازمان اطلاعات و امنیت کشور Sāzemān-e Ettelā'āt va Amniyat-e Keshvar, literally "National Organization for Security and Intelligence was the secret police, domestic security and intelligence service in Iran during the reign of the Pahlavi dynasty. It was established by Mohammad Reza Shah with the help of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)[2] and the Israeli Mossad.[3] SAVAK operated from 1957 until the Iranian Revolution of 1979,


Writing at the time of the Shah's overthrow, Time magazine on February 19, 1979, described SAVAK as having "long been Iran's most hated and feared institution" which had "tortured and murdered thousands of the Shah's opponents."[26] The Federation of American Scientists also found it guilty of "the torture and execution of thousands of political prisoners" and symbolizing "the Shah's rule from 1963–79." The FAS list of SAVAK 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."[27][28]

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We did not find any public statements by Sanders on the subject of the Iran hostage crisis, so the claim that he expressed support for Khomeini was false, and a clear case of “guilt by association” with the utterances of Pulley and the SWP being transferred on to Sanders because of his links to both.

A spokesperson for Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign indicated he was opposed to SWP policy on Iran at that time, telling Snopes: “Senator Sanders did not think the hostages were spies nor did he support their captivity. Any suggestion otherwise is nonsense.”

However, Sanders’ disagreement with Pulley and the SWP on the Iran hostage crisis was demonstrably not strong enough to prompt him to sever ties with either, given that the future U.S. representative and senator continued to speak at SWP campaign events after the hostage crisis and supported the party’s presidential candidate four years later. "

The progressives pressing the senator's case may not care, but the general electorate will: Sanders has a bizarre radical past. It would not only set him back on his heels in a general election campaign, it would completely neutralize the potent charge that Trump cozies up to Russian President Vladimir Putin and other dictators.

Just consider, to begin with, one issue from Sanders’ political career, highlighted by the historian Ronald Radosh in The Daily Beast. When Iranian Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and his minions seized dozens of American hostages in 1979 and held 52 of them for 444 days, Americans across the spectrum were united in outrage and in seeking their safe return. Sanders, at the time, was a backer of an obscure Marxist-Leninist political party that pledged support for the Iranian theocracy and defended the hostage-taking. In line with Iranian propaganda, the party alleged that the captured diplomats and other U.S. Embassy workers were likely CIA agents.

This at the very moment when those Americans were being abused and tortured for precisely that charge.

Sanders, who was a Vermont elector for the party in 1980 and spoke at rallies for its candidates at least twice, in 1982 and 1984, has never had to answer either for these views or for his association with this radical fringe group.