The Origin of Robert Parry’s Consortium News

[Octafish]

34. Real-Life 'National Treasure' -- in Reverse

By Robert Parry
May 6, 2005

The “October Surprise mystery” – did Republicans strike a secret deal with Iran in 1980 to sabotage Jimmy Carter and win the White House for Ronald Reagan? – has similarities to the storyline of the action movie “National Treasure,” only in reverse.

Walt Disney’s “National Treasure” is the imaginative tale of a search for a treasure hidden by America’s Founding Fathers to keep it away from the British monarchy. To find the treasure more than two centuries later, the hero – played by Nicolas Cage – travels from city to city in pursuit of complicated clues, including some concealed in invisible ink on the back of the Declaration of Independence.

The search for the truth behind the October Surprise mystery has seemed almost as unlikely at times, except the narrative is nearly the opposite: today’s American rulers destroy clues that otherwise might lead to knowing whether the democratic process – arguably the greatest national treasure – was stolen in plain sight.

At the center of this October Surprise “treasure hunt in reverse” has been the creation of bogus or dubious alibis for key participants in alleged meetings between Republicans and Iranians in 1980 when Iran’s Islamic fundamentalist government was holding 52 American hostages and President Carter was desperately seeking their release.

SNIP...

Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-Ind., the chairman of the House October Surprise task force, wrote an Op-Ed article for the New York Times, entitled “Case Closed.” It cited the supposedly solid Casey alibis as key reasons why the task force findings “should put the controversy to rest once and for all.”

CONTINUED...

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2005/050605.html

If the news media did half the job Robert Parry did, Ronald Reagan never would have darkened the doorway of the Oval Office, nor George Herbert Walker Bush and his smirking offspring and all the rest of their connected warmonger and bankster cronies.