A working directory of primary documents. Every entry names a source you can open yourself, states what the document establishes, and states what it does not.
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Crisis of Truth takes no money from anyone and answers to no one.
This page exists because the argument about Iran is almost always conducted without documents. People on both sides trade a handful of half-remembered grievances, and the person with the louder voice wins. That is not an argument. It is a volume contest.
So: here is the paper. Declassified presidential directives. CIA internal histories the agency fought for decades to keep sealed. Rulings from the International Court of Justice. Federal court judgments. Executive orders as printed in the Federal Register. Each entry links to the document, not to an article about the document.
Three tiers below, and a counter-ledger. The counter-ledger is not a disclaimer bolted on at the end. It is the same category of evidence pointed the other direction, and it is here because a directory that only collects one side's grievances is a brief, not a record.
Declassified U.S. documents, or findings by courts and tribunals with jurisdiction. These are not allegations. The dispute over them is about meaning, not occurrence.
U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952–1954, Iran, 1951–1954 (retrospective volume, released June 2017). Documents 169–308 cover planning and implementation of Operation TPAJAX.
The retrospective volume was compiled specifically to fill the gaps left by the 1989 Iran volume, which had been published with every reference to American and British intelligence involvement removed. It took four decades of internal fighting to release. The result is the government's own account of how it overthrew an elected prime minister.
What it does not settle. The volume documents U.S. and British planning. It does not establish that the coup would have failed without foreign help, and Iranian clerical and military participation is a live scholarly dispute.
National Security Archive, Electronic Briefing Book 435, CIA Confirms Role in 1953 Iran Coup, ed. Malcolm Byrne. Internal CIA history written in the mid-1970s, released under FOIA.
The agency's in-house historian wrote that the coup that removed Mosaddeq was carried out under CIA direction as an act of U.S. foreign policy. That sentence was blacked out when the document was first released in 1981. This is the version with the section restored.
Read alongside. The second link holds State Department memoranda showing the British approached the Truman administration more than once in late 1952 proposing Mosaddeq's removal. The initiative was London's; the execution was Washington's.
The White House, U.S. Policy Toward the Iran–Iraq War, NSDD 114, 26 November 1983. Declassified copy in the CIA Reading Room, CIA-RDP85M00363R000400740034-4. Implementation memo to Robert McFarlane, December 1983, at CIA-RDP85M00363R000400740033-5.
The directive that set U.S. policy for the remainder of the Iran–Iraq war. Read the December status memo beside it: it lays out the diplomatic and military steps taken to implement the strategy, and names Rumsfeld's Baghdad channel as one of them.
What it does not say. NSDD 114 is a policy directive on Gulf security and the protection of oil supplies. It does not mention chemical weapons, and it is not a authorization for them. Do not stretch it further than its text.
National Security Archive, Electronic Briefing Book 82, Shaking Hands with Saddam Hussein, ed. Joyce Battle. State Department cables on the December 1983 and March 1984 Rumsfeld visits, obtained under FOIA.
Rumsfeld, as Reagan's special envoy, opened the channel to Baghdad while the administration already knew Iraq was using chemical weapons against Iranian forces. The cable record of the 20 December meeting with Saddam contradicted Rumsfeld's later public account that he had raised the chemical weapons issue with Saddam directly; he raised it separately with Tariq Aziz.
CIA documents declassified 2007–2009, held at the National Archives, College Park. First published online in 2013 alongside Shane Harris and Matthew M. Aid, “Exclusive: CIA Files Prove America Helped Saddam as He Gassed Iran,” Foreign Policy, 26 August 2013.
The documents show senior officials, including DCI William Casey, were regularly briefed on the scale of Iraqi nerve gas attacks. In 1988 the U.S. passed satellite imagery of Iranian troop positions to Iraq while aware those positions would be hit with chemical weapons. The administration also declined to help Iran document the attacks internationally, and did not inform the United Nations.
Cite the documents, not the article. The first link is the document set itself. The Foreign Policy piece is the reporting that surfaced it and is paywalled. Anything sourced to the article alone is a tier weaker than it needs to be.
Lawrence E. Walsh, Final Report of the Independent Counsel for Iran/Contra Matters, 1993. Full text mirrored by the Federation of American Scientists and the Internet Archive; Walsh's working records are at NARA and are not online.
While backing Iraq, the same administration was secretly selling TOW and HAWK missiles to Iran. Walsh found that Weinberger and his closest aides were consistently informed of the shipments, contrary to their testimony to the Tower Commission and to Congress, and that Weinberger withheld the handwritten notes proving it until 1991.
This entry cuts against the page's own drift. Any account of the 1980s that presents the U.S. as simply pro-Iraq is wrong. Washington was arming both belligerents, secretly, at the same time. Leave this out and the record is propaganda.
Oil Platforms (Islamic Republic of Iran v. United States of America), Judgment, I.C.J. Reports 2003, p. 161. General List No. 90.
By fourteen votes to two, the Court held that the U.S. attacks on Iranian oil platforms on 19 October 1987 and 18 April 1988 could not be justified as measures necessary to protect essential U.S. security interests under the 1955 Treaty of Amity, read in light of international law on the use of force. The Court also found the U.S. had not discharged its burden of proving Iran was responsible for the missile attack on the Sea Isle City that the U.S. cited as the trigger.
Iran lost too. The Court rejected Iran's claim that the attacks breached the treaty's freedom-of-commerce provision, because the platforms were under repair and non-operational at the time. Reporting this ruling as a win for Iran is inaccurate. Both claims failed; only the self-defense reasoning was rejected.
Aerial Incident of 3 July 1988 (Islamic Republic of Iran v. United States of America), General List No. 79. Order of 22 February 1996 recording discontinuance. Includes U.S. preliminary objections and the ICAO Council's observations.
The USS Vincennes destroyed a civilian airliner. Iran filed at the ICJ; the U.S. contested jurisdiction; the parties settled and the case was struck from the list in February 1996 without any ruling on the merits. The ICAO Council deplored the incident and reaffirmed its standing policy condemning the use of weapons against civil aircraft in flight.
No court ever ruled on this. The settlement carried no admission of liability, and the case ended before the merits were reached. Anyone citing this as a judicial finding against the United States is citing something that does not exist. The third link is the U.S. account of the shootdown; read it before writing about the incident.
Executive Order 12957 (15 March 1995) declaring a national emergency; Executive Order 12959, “Prohibiting Certain Transactions With Respect to Iran” (6 May 1995), 60 Fed. Reg. 24757 (9 May 1995); consolidated by Executive Order 13059 (19 August 1997).
EO 12959 barred importation of Iranian-origin goods and services and exports from the United States to Iran. The emergency declared in EO 12957 has been renewed annually by every president since, and remains the legal foundation of the sanctions architecture.
Agnès Callamard, Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, Use of armed drones for targeted killings, A/HRC/44/38, presented to the Human Rights Council July 2020. Soleimani case study at Annex.
Callamard concluded the strike was unlawful, and that by killing Soleimani on Iraqi soil without first obtaining Iraq's consent the U.S. violated Iraq's territorial integrity. She noted it was the first known drone strike targeting the representative of a state's armed forces rather than a non-state actor.
A rapporteur is not a court. Callamard's report is the finding of an independent UN expert, not a binding judgment. Secretary of State Pompeo rejected it as spurious, arguing the strike deterred further Iranian attacks on U.S. forces. Both positions belong in any honest citation.
Serious reporting and researched NGO findings. Credible, sourced, and disputed. The U.S. government has confirmed none of it. Attribute these to the reporter or the organization, never to the record.
David E. Sanger, “Obama Order Sped Up Wave of Cyberattacks Against Iran,” The New York Times, 1 June 2012, adapted from Confront and Conceal (2012).
Sanger reported, sourced to participants in the program, that the cyberattack on Natanz began under Bush, was accelerated under Obama, was built jointly with Israel, and escaped onto the public internet in 2010 through a programming error. A later version brought down just under a thousand centrifuges.
Anonymous sourcing, no confirmation. No administration has acknowledged Olympic Games. The reporting is from unnamed officials to a reporter with a book coming out that week. Strong, but not a document.
Human Rights Watch, “Maximum Pressure”: US Economic Sanctions Harm Iranians' Right to Health, 47pp., 29 October 2019, researched and written by Tara Sepehri Far.
HRW found that broad restrictions on financial transactions, combined with U.S. officials' rhetoric, constrained Iranian entities' ability to finance humanitarian imports despite formal exemptions. Iranians with rare diseases requiring specialized treatment were among the worst affected. HRW reviewed correspondence from banks refusing to process humanitarian transactions.
The rebuttal is the third link. Michael Rubin argued the report predated the Swiss humanitarian channel opened in February 2020 and questioned whether HRW's anonymous interviewees represented a range of views. Separately: no mortality figure attributed to sanctions has ever been established to a standard this page would accept. Do not publish one.
Findings of U.S. federal courts, and the events that produced them. A record that collects only American wrongdoing is an argument wearing a record's clothes.
Peterson v. Islamic Republic of Iran, 264 F. Supp. 2d 46 (D.D.C. 2003) (Lamberth, J.); damages proceedings at 515 F. Supp. 2d 25 (D.D.C. 2007). Affirmed in relevant part, Peterson v. Islamic Republic of Iran, 627 F.3d 1117 (9th Cir. 2010).
241 American servicemen were killed. After a bench trial the court found Iran and its Ministry of Information and Security legally responsible for providing material, financial, and logistical support to Hezbollah in carrying out the attack, which it found was executed with massive material and technical support from the Iranian government.
Note the posture. Iran was properly served and declined to appear. These are default-posture findings under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, with no adversarial testing of the evidence. That is a real qualification and it should be stated whenever the case is cited — by the same logic this page applies to everything above.
52 American diplomatic personnel held 444 days. Adjudicated at the ICJ in United States Diplomatic and Consular Staff in Tehran (United States of America v. Iran), Judgment of 24 May 1980.
Unlike the Iran Air case, this one reached judgment. On 24 May 1980 the Court held that Iran had violated its obligations under the Vienna Conventions on diplomatic and consular relations. An earlier unanimous order of 15 December 1979 had directed that the embassy be returned and the hostages released. Any page that cites the ICJ approvingly on oil platforms and omits this one is selecting its courts.
Iran did not appear. It filed no pleadings and sent no representative, defining its position only in two letters from its foreign minister arguing the Court should decline the case because the hostage-taking followed years of American interference in Iran. So this judgment carries the same qualification as Peterson below: it was reached without the defendant contesting the evidence. State that both times or neither.
Active conflict. Everything here will be revised. Casualty figures, sequence of events, and legal characterization are all contested and all will change. Treat every claim as provisional.
Congressional Research Service, U.S. Conflict with Iran, R48887. House of Commons Library, US–Iran ceasefire and nuclear talks in 2026, CBP-10637.
The closest thing to neutral documentation currently available on the war that began 28 February 2026. CRS covers the military and sanctions picture, including the March 2026 General License U on Iranian petroleum. The Commons briefing covers the ceasefire track.
Both are government products. CRS writes for Congress; the Commons Library writes for MPs. Neither is neutral in the way a court record is neutral. Check the version number on the CRS PDF — these are revised continuously and the link may serve a newer file than the one cited here.
These entries are held back from the directory above. Do not cite, quote, or build on them until a primary source has been opened and confirmed. Remove each item from this block manually once cleared.
Every link on this page was opened and confirmed to resolve on the date in the masthead. Links rot. If one is dead, or if an entry misstates what a document says, write and it will be fixed here in public with the date and the nature of the error.