An article in yesterday's Washington Post provides a perfect example of the obtuseness of the mainstream press to the U.S. deep state and its dark-side practices. The article is entitled "Iran's Hostage Factory" by Jason Rezalan.

Rezalan's article revolves a condemnation of Iran's dictatorial regime. No surprise there. Criticizing Iran, which is considered an "enemy" or "opponent" or "rival" by the U.S. deep state, has become standard fare for critiques by the U.S. mainstream press, just like Russia and China.

What's fascinating about Rezalan's article, however, is how he fails to draw parallels in his article with the dark-side policies and practices of the U.S. deep state.

Rezalan details many of the horrors committed by the Iranian government, such as taking hostages for political purposes, holding people without charges or trial, denial of due process of law, forced confessions, and other such things. He writes that Iran takes hostages to use as bargaining chips to extract political concessions from other countries.

One of the things he doesn't mention is that it is the U.S. deep state, and specifically the CIA, that is indirectly responsible for the existence of Iran's tyrannical regime.

Not surprisingly, Rezalan brings up the Iranian revolution in 1979, when radical Iranian students stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and took U.S. diplomats hostage. He says that that hostage-taking episode laid the seeds for later episodes of Iranian hostage-taking.

What he doesn't say, however, is why those radical students took those American diplomats hostage. Why doesn't he? Surely he's familiar with the story. And yes, it would involve criticism of the U.S. deep state, but why should that matter? Why should the U.S. deep state be given a pass for its dark-side policies and practices in the context of criticizing the dark-side policies and practices of the Iranian regime?

Those radical Iranian students took those American diplomats hostage because they were afraid that U.S. officials were conspiring to return their brutal dictator, the Shah of Iran, to power in Iran. That's what their revolution was all about it — ousting the Shah from power and making sure he couldn't be returned to power by the U.S. government.

Why were they concerned about that possibility? Because the U.S. deep state, specifically the CIA, was the one that had placed the Shah into power in Iran in the first place!

In 1953, Iran had a working democracy. A man named Mohammad Mossadegh was elected by the Iranian parliament to be prime minister. Mossadegh was highly admired in Iran. Time magazine named him its "man of the year."

The CIA didn't like Mossadegh because he dared to nationalize British oil interests in Iran. In the eyes of the U.S. deep state, that made Mossadegh a Soviet-Union-leaning communist, one who had to be targeted for ouster.