Preston King

Preston King

Tortured Confessions Summary 73-123

In the pages 73-123 the book begins with the ruling of Muhammad Reza Shah and how he developed into the role as a leader. His main focus was truly military based and it was the one thing that he really had full control over in Iran at the time. He began to lose interest in the people's needs and did not put any focus into the country. Society became very upset about this because things needed to be done within the nation but nothing was happening. Reza Shah seem to only care about what he did with Iran's military and where they were going to be in the future. One of the Shah's main oppositions was Dr. Mohammad Mossadeq whom was a major political figure for the Tudeh Party. The Shah banished hime back to his home town but Mossadeq soon began stirring the nation by talking bad about the royal family and starting to turn the society against the Shah.

The coup in 1953 changed society and the secret police called the SAVAK were created to torture Tudeh activists and others who spoke out against the Shah and what he wanted to do. Their main goal with the torturing of these men was to find out information, safe houses, printing presses, and contacts within the armed forces that would leak information. The torture that these men went through was extremely crude and was truly awful. They were beaten, whipped, and even had chairs broken over their bodies. Many of the members of the Tudeh party were put in prisons and although the prisons were harsh and extremely terrifying they managed to get through by reading and writing books.

In 1971 the younger generation felt that the older generation had hit a dead end and that they need to step up and change what was taking place by starting a Guerrilla warfare group. They decided to take up arms and fight back. Many of these men lost their lives in gun fights or by being captured and then killed by firing squad. Many of these young men were from the group intelligentsia. With the Guerilla groups being arrested the change in prison life followed. With younger prisoners many which were students began to preach different things within the prisons which intrigued the older generations. Torture became used a lot more periodically and methodically against the younger prisoners. The most famous thing that the Shah did when it came to the prisoners and torturing them was to air confessions