25 apr 1980 anni - Skip's Interview

Descrizione:

Iranians are eager to talk with Americans visiting Tehran, Iran, to assure them they have "no quarrel with the American people."

Franklin P. "Skip" Glenn brought that holiday message back from Iran when he visited Spokane for a New Year's family reunion.

"The express affection for an admiration of American people and the principles for which this country allegedly stands," said Glenn, an attorney from Los Angeles who headed an unofficial delegation of six Americans to show support for "the Iranian people's struggle against us imperialism."

This is not a government propaganda message. That's a very heartfelt perception on my part, Glenn said. "They asked us to 'Please go back and tell the American people the truth.'"

Glenn and the five men and women who he traveled with have attempted to do just that - tell Americans what they saw in Iran -- and, although he was exhausted after his 9-day tour of Iran and as many days of interviews, news conferences, speeches, and lectures since their return, Glenn said it all one more time in an interview with The Spokesman-Review.

Noting that Americans now in Tehran are treated "better than some Iranians here (in the United States)," Glenn said he thinks the national news media has created a distorted picture of the situation in Iran.

"I, with my blue eyes and my obviously American jacket, could walk down the streets of Tehran, a city of five million people, without a single incident of hostility, verbal or otherwise," he said.

Glenn and his companions accused the national press of "consciously distorting the truth about Iran and helping anti-Iranian hysteria in the United," States" in a flyer distributed in Seattle.

He complained about news coverage of his group's press conference in New York City to publicize documents taken from the US embassy in Tehran which they said "exposed the role of the United States" in a coup to establish Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi's behaves government in Iran in 1953.

"Nobody disputes it was the CIA coup which disposed a popular government in Iran in 1953 and.. replaced it with a monarch whose ring had to be kissed or you die," Glenn said.

The documents also show us officials "deliberately provoked" the current crisis in Iran, Glenn said in "hope of staging yet another coup and Iran" to ensure a government there that would ally with the United States in our West European allies.

The news conference in New York was covered by "all the major networks and newspapers" yet "no national network gave airtime to it," Glenn and his companions complained. "There seems to be a double standard when we get all excited about Soviet activity and Afghanistan," Glenn said.

Americans need to "read between the lines" and be aware of film editing of news accounts for my ran, he warned.

"It's not the working press" in Iran, Glenn said in explaining his criticism of the news coverage reaching the American public.

Conversations with American journalists and Iran convince Glenn that their accounts of the situation are "being re-written in offices in the United States."

He believes although he admitted he couldn't prove, reports that one television crew quit and "went to Canada to make a documentary" of what "really is happening in Iran."

Glenn said his "real quarrel" is with ABC correspondence who dismissed testimony from former advisors to the Shah, now in prison in Iran, who said members of the Shah's secret police were "secretly trained" in the United States. He said the ABC correspondence was unimpressed because all the men could say was that they flew in American planes, with the windows covered, for three hours and 20 minutes.

"My whole career has depended upon judging the credibility of witnesses," said Glenn, who believed the Iranian's story told at a news conference Glenn attended at an Iranian prison. He noted that his first professional experience with international strife was in Vietnam where he was a U.S. Marine Corps defense council in "My Lai-style atrocity" trials he called another "phenomena largely withheld in the US press for 3 years."

Glenn said he sympathizes with the plight of the American hostages in Iran but after visiting Iran he agrees with their captors that it was the "only way to capture world attention."

Glenn paid his own airfare to Iran after he was contacted by an Iranian student organization in California because, he said, "I'm known as a basically open-minded person. I have some credibility by virtue of my (legal) connections and my Marine Corps experience."

Glenn said he's the first to admit he's "no expert on Iran," before or after his trip there, and he had "great difficulty with the hostages' issue" before deciding to go to Iran.

"Obviously I have sympathy for the hostages. I'm opposed to the death penalty here or there.. but once you familiarize yourself with the Shah's regime you realize that taking the hostages was a relatively mild approach."

Glenn said officials of the Shah's government who now our political prisoners are treated much better than some political prisoners in this country. He was referring to members of the American Indian Movement he has defended, including Paul Sky Horse who spent three and a half years in confinement before he was acquitted in California in 1977 after the defense proved that the charges of murder were an FBI-inspired frame-up, according to Glenn.

Like the dozens of Nixon-era politicians who were jailed during the Watergate investigations, political prisoners in Iran now are "treated well in terms of food, reading material and restraint ... it's a lot more civilized than the L.A. County Jail," Glenn said.

"I, for one, cannot for the life of me, see why our government hasn't responded more favorably to the Iranian's offer to set up an international grand jury.. give our embassy people absolute clemency or immunity from future prosecution... and let them testify about what they were doing in Iran - essentially espionage."

- 1980-01-02 - "Returning American Charges press distorting Iran Picture," McBride, The Spokesman-Review (Spokane, Washington) 02 Jan 1980, p. 10

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