by dbeach » Sat Oct 28, 2006 5:01 pm
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a prop for the big pigs..he possibly aided the Bush regime in the original OCT surprise in 1980<br><br>he is a minor actor going through a major part of the drama i.e. selling your nation into destruction as Sadam did as Bush is doing to the USA as one by one .. each nation will be 1984ed into a police state after some heavy bloodshed<br>withtthe rich and privleged livinga great life with a smalll <br>microchipped population .<br><br>cuz its good for business<br><br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.consortiumnews.com/archive/xfile10.html">www.consortiumnews.com/ar...ile10.html</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><br>"October Surprise: Time for Truth? Part 2<br>By Robert Parry <br><br>The diciest part of the October Surprise saga remains the allegations of secret Paris meetings between Republicans and Iranians in fall 1980. According to some of those alleging that the GOP sabotaged President Carter's pre-election hostage negotiations, the Paris meetings followed earlier contacts between William Casey and Iranians in Madrid; in effect, the Paris talks cemented the deal. <br><br>But what has made the Paris allegations so controversial is the claim by some that George Bush, the Republican vice presidential candidate and former CIA director, slipped away on the weekend of Oct. 18-19, 1980, and flew to Paris to assure the Iranians of high-level authorization. <br><br>The most adamant witness who has claimed to see Bush in Paris is former Israeli intelligence official Ari Ben-Menashe. An Iraqi Jew born in Iran, Ben-Menashe speaks fluent Farsi and served as an Israeli military intelligence operative for at least 10 years, from 1977-87. In sworn testimony before Congress in 1991-92, Ben-Menashe declared that he saw Bush and Casey at a downtown Paris hotel as they headed into a meeting with radical Iranian cleric Mehdi Karrubi. <br><br>Ben-Menashe's claim received partial support from a pilot, Heinrich Rupp, who said he flew Casey to Paris on that weekend and saw a man resembling Bush at LeBourget airport. Also buttressing Ben-Menashe was the recollection of Chicago Tribune reporter John Maclean who said he was informed by a well-placed Republican source in mid-October 1980 that Bush was flying to Paris to meet with Iranians about the 52 Americans then held hostage in Iran. Maclean passed on that news to a State Department acquaintance who dated their conversation as Oct. 18, 1980. [For more details, see Trick or Treason. ] <br><br>But in 1990-91, other October Surprise sources were leery about naming Bush, who was the sitting president of the United States and enjoying Persian Gulf approval ratings in the 90 percentiles. Jamshid Hashemi, an Iranian-American arms dealer who worked for the CIA in 1980, claimed publicly starting in 1990 that he and his banker brother Cyrus arranged a late July 1980 meeting between Casey and Karrubi in Madrid. But Hashemi was always coy when asked about Paris and Bush. <br><br>In my recent interview with Hashemi at a hotel near Heathrow Airport outside London [see The Consortium, May 5], Hashemi asserted that the Paris question still made him nervous. But for the first time, he indicated on the record that he did know that GOP-Iranian negotiations had occurred in Paris and had involved prominent Republicans. Pointedly, Hashemi declared, "I have never said ... in the press anywhere that Mr. Ben-Menashe lied. I've never said that. I think I should rest on that." <br><br>Hashemi also corroborated another part of Ben-Menashe's October Surprise account by describing a series of Israeli-connected military shipments to Iran in the weeks after the Madrid meetings. Hashemi said his late brother, Cyrus, organized the military shipments -- mostly artillery shells and aircraft tires -- from Eilat, in Israel, to Bandar Abbas, an Iranian port. To carry that materiel, Cyrus obtained a Greek ship. <br><br>"I do know for a fact the captain of the ship and the crew were all Greeks," Jamshid said. "They were told that each time [the ship] would go back and forth it would have a different name, so they would have a different name, documents, everything, delivered to them at each port that they would come in." Jamshid valued the military supplies in the tens of millions of dollars. Later, he said, the ship was scuttled in the Mediterranean Sea. <br>Corroboration<br>Other internationally prominent figures have added weight to the October Surprise story in recent years. In early 1996 in Gaza, Palestinian president Yasir Arafat informed ex-President Carter that Republicans had approached the PLO in 1980 seeking help in arranging an October Surprise deal. [For details, see Diplomatic History, Fall 1996] The chief of French intelligence, Alexandre deMarenches, also told his biographer that the French secret service had helped Casey arrange meetings with Iranians in Paris in 1980. [See Trick or Treason. ] <br><br>More confirmation came from Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, who was Iran's president in 1980. In a Dec. 17, 1992, letter to the U.S. Congress, Bani-Sadr said he first learned of the Republican "secret deal" in July 1980 after Reza Passendideh, a nephew of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, attended a meeting with Cyrus Hashemi and Republican lawyer Stanley Pottinger in Madrid on July 2, 1980. Though Passendideh was supposed to return with a proposal from the Carter administration, Bani-Sadr said Passendideh proffered instead a plan "from the Reagan camp." <br><br>"Passendideh told me that if I do not accept this proposal, they [the Republicans] would make the same offer to my [radical Iranian] rivals. He further said that they [the Republicans] have enormous influence in the CIA. ... Lastly, he told me my refusal of their offer would result in my elimination." Bani-Sadr said he resisted the threats and sought an immediate release of the American hostages. But Bani-Sadr said Khomeini, the wily Islamic leader, was playing both sides of the U.S. street. <br>GOP-Iran Tension<br>According to Bani-Sadr's account, the secret Republican plan to delay release of the hostages until after the U.s. elections became a point of tension between him and Khomeini, with Bani-Sadr threatening to expose the scheme. "On Sept. 8, 1980, I invited the people of Teheran to gather in Martyrs Square so that I can tell them the truth," Bani-Sadr wrote to Congress. "Khomeini insisted that I must not do so at this time. ... Two days later, again, I decided to expose everything. Ahmad Khomeini [the ayatollah's son] came to see me and told me, 'Imam [Khomeini] absolutely promises'" to reopen talks with Carter, a step which Khomeini took by dispatching his son-in-law, Sadegh Tabatabai, to West Germany to meet with Carter officials. <br><br>The Tabatabai initiative quickly led to a tentative agreement between Carter and Iran for release of the hostages. But back in Teheran, radical mullahs with close ties to cleric Mehdi Karrubi derailed the Tabatabai plan by boycotting sessions of the Iranian parliament so a quorum was absent. The political tension over the hostages also led to Bani-Sadr's ouster as president, a major victory for radicals who still rule Iran. The American hostages were not released until Jan. 20, 1981, minutes after Ronald Reagan was sworn in as president. <br><br>Though Bani-Sadr cited his first-person knowledge of the maneuvering inside Teheran, the House task force that examined the October Surprise issue in 1992 dismissed the ex-president's account as mere speculation reached "by a circuitous route." The task force concluded that "Bani-Sadr's analysis demonstrates how some Iranians may have mistakenly misled themselves to believe that Khomeini representatives met with Reagan campaign officials." <br><br>The task force also rejected the allegations of Paris meetings, accepting Bush's emphatic denials. In spring 1992, Bush reiterated those denials at two separate news conferences in response to unrelated questions. Then seeking re-election, Bush decried the October Surprise investigation as a "witch hunt" and demanded that he be cleared of allegations that he traveled to Paris. <br><br>In June 1992, the bipartisan House task force, chaired by the ever-accommodating Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-Ind., did as Bush wished. The task force cited partially censored Secret Service records which seemed to back Bush up. Those records indicated that Bush arrived home in Washington on Saturday night, Oct. 18, 1980. Then, on Sunday morning, he went to the Chevy Chase Country Club in the morning and, along with his wife Barbara, visited someone's residence in the afternoon, the records indicated. The name of the afternoon host was deleted. "<br><br><br><br><br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/meast/06/30/iran.president/">www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/me...president/</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><br><br>"Former hostages allege Iran's new president was captor<br><br><br><br>NEW YORK (CNN) -- The White House said Thursday it is taking seriously the allegations by former hostages that Iran's hardline president-elect, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was one of their captors at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran a quarter century ago.<br><br>President Bush told foreign reporters he has "no information, but obviously his involvement raises many questions." <br><br>"As soon as I saw the face, it rang a lot of bells to me," Don Sharer, who served as the embassy's naval attache at the time, told CNN. <br><br>"...Take 20 years off of him. He was there. He was there in the background, more like an adviser."<br><br>Abbas Abdi, the man well-known to be the leader of the 1979 hostage-takers, told CNN that Ahmadinejad, the Tehran mayor, "absolutely was not" part of the event that involved the captivity of 52 people.<br><br>Abdi later became a supporter of reformist President Mohammed Khatami and was recently released from jail for advocating closer ties with the United States."<br><br> <p></p><i></i>
