The October Surprise

No, we're not talking about the Great Pumpkin. According to Wikipedia, "in American political jargon, the October surprise is a news event deliberately created to influence the outcome of an election, particularly one for the U.S. presidency."

Wikipedia also reports that "In the 1980 presidential election, Republican challenger Ronald Reagan feared that a last-minute deal to release American hostages held in Iran might earn incumbent Jimmy Carter enough votes to win re-election. As it happened, in the days prior to the election, press coverage was consumed with the Iranian government's decision—and Carter's simultaneous announcement—that the hostages would not be released until after the election."

"It was first written about in a Jack Anderson article in The Washington Post in the fall of 1980, in which he alleged that the Carter administration was preparing a major military operation in Iran for rescuing U.S. hostages in order to help him get reelected. Subsequent allegations surfaced against Reagan alleging that his team had impeded the hostage release to negate the potential boost to the Carter campaign."

"After the release of the hostages on January 20, 1981, minutes after Reagan's inauguration, some charged that the Reagan campaign had made a secret deal with the Iranian government whereby the Iranians would hold the hostages until after Reagan was elected and inaugurated."

"Abolhassan Banisadr, the former President of Iran, has also stated that the Reagan campaign struck a deal with Teheran to delay the release of the hostages in 1980, asserting that by the month before the American Presidential election in November 1980, many in Iran's ruling circles were openly discussing the fact that a deal had been made between the Reagan campaign team and some Iranian religious leaders in which the hostages' release would be delayed until after the election so as to prevent President Carter's re-election. He repeated the charge in My Turn to Speak: Iran, the Revolution & Secret Deals with the U.S."

That is what the real October Surprise was about. The allegation that Earl Brian along with George Bush Sr. and William Casey from the CIA met with Iranians in Paris and bribed them to keep the hostages until after the election so President Reagan and Vice President Bush could get elected over Jimmy Carter. The allegations include the claim that the money they used to bribe the Iranians to delay the release of the hostages was from the $50 million Earl Brian embezzled from Nesbitt Thompson clients in Canada. That was the real October surprise. Which forces the question, if they bribed them to delay the release of hostages, did they set the whole thing up and bribe them to take the hostages in the first place just to win the election?

Iran contra was not about selling Iran arms to release hostages. The New York Times reported that "Congress moved quickly to get to the bottom of the affair, in which the Reagan Administration sold arms to Iran and diverted some proceeds to the Nicaraguan rebels." Iran contra was about selling Iran arms to fund the contra rebels in Nicaragua.

They were selling chemical weapons including mustard gas to Saddam Hussein and arms to Iran both at the same time. It had nothing to do with supporting democracy. It was about making money. The Gary Webb story showed the CIA was also letting their contra assets bring cocaine into the US to raise money for their cause creating the US crack epidemic. The exact same time George Bush Sr. was leading the war on drugs in the media he in reality created the problem.