Despite the fact that the key Republican alibi cited by Newsweek and The New Republic proved false and the evidence kept growing that the Reagan/Bush campaign indeed had struck a secret deal with Iran in 1980 the congressional inquiry swept much of this evidence under the proverbial rug.
Then, after Bush's loss to Bill Clinton in 1992, the congressional investigators saw even less reason to press ahead. The desire was for this ugly incident to go away.
So, the congressional inquiry ended with a finding of Republican innocence, a resolution warmly embraced by Official Washington, which made fun of anyone who didn't go along. After reviewing the investigative report, however, I wrote a story for the Nation magazine pointing to some of the irrational alibis and conclusions that the inquiry had used to "clear" the Reagan/Bush campaign. The article opened me to attacks from other journalists for not falling into line.
This is perhaps a long way of explaining that I felt that a major violation of journalistic standards and a gross miswriting of American history had occurred in the dismissal of the October Surprise allegations. Though I went on to work on other stories (like the political crisis in Haiti), I felt a special responsibility to do what I could to correct this falsification of the public record.
After all, very few people knew the details to this scandal as I did. If I had simply acquiesced to the false conventional wisdom, I feared the history might be permanently distorted.
As years passed, I was able to access more and more evidence that contradicted the official findings. In 1995, I founded the Consortiumnews.com Web site, in part, as a way to get this new evidence to the American people and the world public.
Though Official Washington and the major U.S. news media have never been willing to reconsider the October Surprise issue, a much fuller and more accurate account of what happened at least exists on the Internet.
2 - Do you believe that it would come to fruition someday?
I really don't know if the facts that we have assembled will ever change Washington's conventional wisdom. Many powerful people both in politics and in media have a stake in maintaining the status quo, and almost no one has an interest in doing the hard (and unrewarding) work that would be involved in fully setting the record straight.
Much depends on whether people of other countries, including Iran, have the courage to ferret out evidence that may exist in their archives.
3 - What is the importance of this issue for US history?
The 1980 election was pivotal for the United States and the world. For all his shortcomings, President Carter had begun to address the environmental and energy crises facing America and was prepared to pressure Israel to accept a Palestinian state during his second term.
However, by Election Day 1980, the prolonged hostage crisis had eroded Carter's political support and cleared the way for a landslide victory for Reagan and the Republicans. Not only was a right-wing Republican put into the White House but reformist Democrats were defeated in Congress.
In office, Reagan ignored environmental and energy concerns and stopped pressuring Israel's Likud leadership (which was playing a middleman role in the U.S.-to-Iran arms shipments). Instead of peace with the Palestinians, Likud launched an invasion of Lebanon with the goal of annihilating the PLO.
Under Reagan, many innocent people around the world from Central America to the Middle East died horrible deaths. With his impressive communications skills, Reagan also made war seem acceptable, even fun, to the American people.
Three decades later, the world is in a far worse place than it might have been if President Carter had been allowed to resolve the Iranian hostage crisis earlier.
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