All the Obama conspiracies have one thing in common. They are ways of saying that they don’t want a black in the White House without actually saying it.
OCTOBER SURPRISE
In January 1979, the Shah of Iran was forced to flee the country after mass streets protests. His place as ruler was taken by the Islamic opposition leader Ayatollah Khomeini, returned from exile in Paris.
The Shah had been America’s Man, the Ayatollah was most certainly not. Neither were his followers who in the following November seized the US embassy in Tehran, took more than sixty staff hostage and announced that they would only be released when the Shah was returned for trial and the US unfroze $12 billion in Iranian assets held in Stateside banks.
The plight of the hostages exercised the American public—but not as much as it exercised American politicians. The year 1980 was presidential election year, and the hostage crisis went to the top of the political agenda. White House incumbent Jimmy Carter faced a strong challenge from Republican candidate Ronald Reagan, and his VP running mate, George Bush, former head of the CIA. Polls put Reagan and Carter neck and neck, and Bush went on record that he feared an “October Surprise” whereby the Democrats suddenly achieved the release of the hostages and got a poll boost.
Alas for the hapless Carter he did not secure the hostages release. The spectacle of Uncle Sam looking powerless against an uppity country difficult to find on a map did not play well with the American electorate, so Governor Reagan took the prize of the White House.
In his inauguration speech on January 20, 1981, Reagan promised a patriotic new birth for America: “Let us begin an era of national renewal. Can we solve the problems confronting us? Well, the answer is an unequivocal and emphatic ‘yes’.”
The Great Communicator was not joking. Minutes later, it was announced that the hostages had been freed.
Reagan was clearly a more efficient, ass-kicking Pres than Carter… or had there been skulduggery? The “October Surprise” conspiracy theory alleges that it was the Republicans—
The conspiracy theory states that in October 1980, Bush and Reagan’s campaign manager, William Casey, held negotiations with Iranian officials in Paris and Madrid to
What proof, your honour, for the October Surprise conspiracy? It is tantalizing but circumstantial. A congressional probe in 1983 declared that Honest Ron Reagan’s campaign had set up a network to spy on Carter and his negotiations with the Iranian regime. And there are witnesses for the prosecution, the most eminent being former Iranian president Abol-Hassan Bani-Sadr, who claimed to have received a message from the Iranian foreign ministry about the direction of discussions with the Reagan camp. A host of arms dealers and private spooks over the years have stepped forward to state they organized the discussions between the Reaganites and the Iranians, including Jamshid and Cyrus Hashemi, Ari Ben-Menashe and Ahran Moshell.
It should also be noted on the rap sheet that during the Iran– Contra scandal Reagan grudgingly admitted that the US had ransomed hostages by illegally selling arms to Iran (using the profits to fund Nicaraguan right-wing rebels). If Team Reagan could do a dodgy deal in office why not out of office?
That said, any fair-minded judge would find the spook and gun-runner “witnesses” for the October Surprise theory as suspect a bunch as you could wave a gavel at. Ari Ben-Menashe will serve to damn the lot; this supposed former Mossad agent Ben-Menashe claims to have fitted Saddam Hussein’s nuclear reactor at Osirak with a homing beacon—an espionage stunt that would have tested Tom Cruise in
By 1992, the October Surprise brouhaha had reached such a crescendo that the House of Representatives investigated the charges. The subsequent report, “The ‘October Surprise’ Allegations and the Circumstances Surrounding the Release of the American Hostages Held in Iran”, found that “the credible evidence now known falls far short of supporting the allegation of an agreement between the Reagan campaign and Iran to delay the release of the hostages”. The House investigation did find that William Casey, an ex-OSS/CIA bigwig, had been fishing in very murky waters. There was no “credible” evidence that Casey had been in Madrid when the meeting with Iranians was alleged to have taken place—but then the key pages from his desk diary had been torn out.
The phrase “now known” is the rub. One suggestive piece of evidence was forwarded too late for conclusion. It was sent from Moscow—and disclosed that the Kremlin’s spooks had monitored the October Surprise deal between Reagan’s team and the Iranians.
The stink of conspiracy still hovers over the timing of the release of the US hostages from Tehran.
Robert Parry,
Gary Sick,
THE OCTOPUS
A “unified field theory” is the Higgs boson of conspiriology, the presumption that there is one entity holds everything together. Danny Casolaro a 44-year-old freelance journalist from Virginia believed that he had found the omnipotent underground cabal that ran the planet. Casolaro called the transnational master conspiracy “the Octopus”.
In the early afternoon of 10 August 1991, a nude male body was found in the bath of room 517 in the Sheraton Inn in Martinsburg, West Virginia. There were a dozen slashes to his wrists, and the blood had sprayed over the walls. Near the corpse was a note that read “Please forgive me for the worst possible thing I could have done.”
The cadaver was that of Danny Casolaro. Martinsburg’s boys in blue immediately concluded that it was a routine suicide, and so the county coroner decided against an inquest and released the body to a mortician. Casolaro’s body was embalmed that evening, before the next of kin had been notified. This was illegal. It was certainly unfortunate, because had Danny Casolaro’s family been notified they would certainly have asked for an autopsy. When eventually informed of his brother’s death, Anthony Casolaro, a medical doctor, announced that Danny had gone to Martinsburg to interview a “Deep Throat” who would give him the final proof of the Octopus’s existence. Danny had also told his brother, “If anything happens to me, don’t believe it was accidental.”
Danny Casolaro had named the Octopus well. He had, he claimed, first discovered its existence whilst researching October Surprise, the alleged deal between Reagan and Iran to hold the fifty-two US hostages in Tehran until after the 1980 presidential election so as to embarrass Jimmy Carter, but gradually realized that the mega-cabal had tentacles in the BCCI banking scandal, the Inslaw/PROMIS theft of surveillance software, the Medallin drug cartel, Iran–Contra—to name just a few of its long-reaching arms. In a draft of a book on the Octopus, Casolaro portrayed the Octopus as “a web of thugs and thieves who roam the earth with their weapons and their murders, trading dope and dirty money for the secrets of the temple”.
Casolaro’s overwrought, overexcited manuscript does little to advance his case for the Octopus’s existence.
