Could this be real ??? , are republican presidents as corrupt as folks ay this one is , when it comes to using US civilians as pawns in the political game .makes one wonder does it not ??? NEW DETAILS ON REAGAN’S ‘OCTOBER SURPRISE’ HOSTAGE DEAL A former Iranian president provided new details about the deal that Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign struck with Ayatollah Khomeini in 1980 to delay the release of 52 American hostages until after Reagan was elected. In a critique of the inaccuracies in the Oscar-winning movie, Argo, a fictionalized version of a CIA operation to get embassy employees out of the country, Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, who was was elected president of Iran in February 1980 and learned of the deal between the ayatollah and Reagan’s representatives, wrote in the Christian Science Monitor (3/5) that the occupation of the embassy originally was regarded by the Iranian government as a short-term protest of the shah’s admittance to the US and Iran’s government opposed the hostage taking. He and the other major candidates for president supporting releasing the hostages. He won election with 76% of the vote and he added that 96% of the votes went to candidates who were against the hostage-taking. “Hence, the movie misrepresents the Iranian government’s stand in regard to hostage-taking. It also completely misrepresents Iranians by portraying us as irrational people consumed by aggressive emotion,” he wrote. “I was deposed in June 1981 as a result of a coup against me. After arriving in France, I told a BBC reporter that I had left Iran to expose the symbiotic relationship between Khomeinism and Reaganism,” he wrote. “Ayatollah Khomeini and Ronald Reagan had organized a clandestine negotiation, later known as the ‘October Surprise,’ which prevented the attempts by myself and then-US President Jimmy Carter to free the hostages before the 1980 US presidential election took place. The fact that they were not released tipped the results of the election in favor of Reagan.” Robert Parry, who broke many of the Iran-Contra stories writing for the Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s, noted at ConsortiumNews (3/7) that Bani-Sadr has talked and written about the Reagan-Khomeini collaboration before, but he added in his commentary on Argo that “two of my advisors, Hussein Navab Safavi and Sadr-al-Hefazi, were executed by Khomeini’s regime because they had become aware of this secret relationship between Khomeini, his son Ahmad, the Islamic Republican Party, and the Reagan administration.” “Over the years, Republicans have adamantly denied that Reagan or his campaign struck a deal with Iranian radicals to extend the hostage crisis through the 1980 election. But substantial evidence has built up supporting Bani-Sadr’s account and indicating that the release of the 52 hostages just as Reagan was taking the oath of office on Jan. 20, 1981, was no coincidence, that it was part of the deal, he wrote. “In December 1992, when a House Task Force was examining this so-called October Surprise controversy – and encountering fierce Republican resistance – Bani-Sadr submitted a letter detailing his behind-the-scenes struggle with Khomeini and his son Ahmad over their secret dealings with the Reagan campaign,” Parry wrote. “Bani-Sadr’s letter was dated Dec. 17, 1992, and was part of a flood of last-minute evidence that implicated the Reagan campaign in delaying the hostage release. However, by the time the letter and the other evidence arrived, the leadership of the House Task Force had decided to simply declare the Reagan campaign innocent.” Lawrence Barcella, who served as Task Force chief counsel, later told me that so much incriminating evidence arrived late that he asked Task Force chairman, Rep. Lee Hamilton, a centrist Democrat from Indiana, to extend the inquiry for three months but that Hamilton said no. (Hamilton told [Parry] that he had no recollection of Barcella’s request.)” Parry noted that Bani Sadr’s letter meshed with accounts of Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, who was acting foreign minister in August 1980 when he informed Iran’s Majlis that “We know that the Republican Party of the United States in order to win the presidential election is working hard to delay the solution of the hostages crisis until after the US election.” Former Defense Minister Ahmad Madani later told Parry he discovered that Iranian financier Cyrus Hashemi, who was supposed to be arranging negotiations on the hostage release, was double-dealing President Carter by collaborating with the Republicans. “In an interview with me in the early 1990s, Madani said Hashemi brought up the name of Reagan’s campaign chief William Casey in connection with these back-channel negotiations over the US hostages,” Parry wrote. In the Task Force’s final report, issued on Jan. 13, 1993, Barcella’s team simply misrepresented Bani-Sadr’s letter, mentioning it only briefly, claiming that it was hearsay, and then burying its contents in a little-noticed annex to the report along with other incriminating evidence, Parry noted [See Parry’s report at ConsortiumNews as well as his book, America’s Stolen Narrative.
Posted on: Tue, 02 Jul 2013 14:14:10 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015