A few days ago Banisadr published an article about Argo:

‘Argo’ helps Iran’s dictatorship, harms democracy

http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/Global-Viewpoint/2013/0305/Argo-helps-Iran-s-dictatorship-harms-democracy/%28page%29/2

A day  after that Robert Parry, the renowned American investigator published an article in support of Banisadr's claim about October Surprise which he made in his recent article about Argo:

http://consortiumnews.com/2013/03/07/october-surprise-and-argo/

And now Barbar Honegger, another renowened author has supported Banisadr and Parry's argument about October Surprise and attempts for cover up:

In this excellent article, Bob Parry places major importance on the Dec. 17, 1992 letter by the then-former president of Iran Abolhassan Bani-Sadr to the House October Surprise Task Force describing Bani-Sadr’s ongoing knowledge of and battles within the Iranian government over the Reagan-Bush campaign’s attempts to interfere with the release of the U.S. hostages to President Carter. The letter is rightly presented as a critical part of a “flood of last-minute” incriminating evidence implicating the Reagan-Bush campaign in delaying the hostage release that led Task Force Chief Counsel Lawrence Barcella to ask its chairman Rep. Lee Hamilton to extend the inquiry for an additional three months, which Hamilton refused. But Parry’s account misses a huge part of what happened in Washington
on that historic day by apparently being unaware of the source of the vast majority of the “flood” of “last-minute” evidence that led Barcella to make that request to Hamilton. Parry apparently does not know that Mr. Bani-Sadr, whom I had interviewed at his home outside Paris, coordinated the date and arrival of his letter to the Task Force with a two-hour press conference I put on that very morning at the National Press Club revealing and distributing literally reams of incriminating evidence on the October Surprise and its cover up, including Mr. Bani-Sadr’s Dec. 17 letter, to which Barcella sent a representative who took those reams of incriminating documents back to the Task Force. The press conference was videotaped, a copy of which I will send shortly to consortium news, and a digitized version will soon be available on the net, the link for which I will post in a comment here as well as a comment to Bani-Sadr’s commentary in the Christian Science Monitor, as soon as it is available.
To give a feel for the force with which the documented evidence distributed at that Dec. 17, 1992 press conference must have hit Barcella and Hamilton early that afternoon, when I also gave sworn testimony to the Task Force, these are just some of the tips of the iceberg of that evidence, the timing of whose delivery was coordinated with Mr. Bani Sadr’s letter:
1) a videotape of Houshang Lavi, the Iranian-American arms dealer who met with top Reagan-Bush campaign officials in the fall of 1980, was played, and its transcript distributed, in which Lavi states that the key Iranian October Surprise witness, Cyrus Hashemi, who double dealt Carter in meetings with Khomeini’s representatives,
was murdered, and that U.S. Customs official Joseph ‘Joe’ King was instrumental in his death; and that Joseph King had been brought onto the House October Surprise Task Force by Hamilton and Barcella, clearly for the purpose of chilling and walking back the until-then truthful testimony of Jamshid Hashemi, Cyrus’ brother. Incredibly, due to these revelations at the National Press Club on Dec. 17, Joseph King was conspicuously absent among the Task Force staff members introduced at the Jan. 1993 press conference in the House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing room at which the final Task Force report was released; and even more incredibly, the copies of the report made available to the media at that press conference, at which I also got a copy, “just happened” to be missing the pages about Cyrus Hashemi and Joseph King. Proving that this was no mistake, I took my copy with the missing pages to the Task Force office that afternoon, Jan. 13, 1993, and showed the missing pages to the staff member in the outer office, without stating why they were important. Astonishingly, the Task Force staff member then handed me a second version of the report with the missing pages, and tried to take back the incomplete copy I already had, which I kept. There
is only one possible explanation for these facts: The Task Force had to have printed two versions of the public report, one with the pages mentioning King, and one without, proving that the order for at least the version without the pages mentioning King had to have been placed after Dec. 17, even though page III of the published report states that the Task Force approved the report [as published] on Dec. 10, a week earlier. And what could “justify” this absurd and major additional taxpayer expense more than the fear that one or more members of the press who had been at my Dec. 17, 1992 press conference where Lavi’s videotape implicating Task Force King in the murder of Cyrus Hashemi was played might also be at the press conference releasing the Task Force report.
At the Dc. 17, 1992 press conference, I also discussed and distributed:
2) the transcript of ‘The Smoking Gun’ audio tape of a conversation between two men which Oliver North, in his Iran/Contra expose book Under Fire, claimed was the single most important piece of evidence showing that “Reagan knew” everything about his Iran/Contra operations, and therefore that it exonerated him of charges of having illegally acted rogue. I distributed the written forensic analysis of this audio tape, which tape Ted Koppell had played on ‘Nightline,’ showing that ‘Man B’ on the tape was my own former White House boss Martin Anderson, Reagan’s first chief domestic policy adviser, and, though I had been a White House Domestic Policy Adviser, that I was personally referred to on the tape as Anderson’s ‘secretary.’ In his book and on Nightline, North claimed that ‘no one’ — neither the FBI nor the White House – had been able to identify either voice on the tape, and a request was actually put out on that Oct. 21, 1991 Nightline program for any information that could identify either man. Literally as the program ended, I called ‘Nightline’ to let them know that I’d identified ‘Man B’ as Reagan’s former White House chief domestic policy adviser, which was met with an astonishing absence of interest. It was after this that I hired the forensic voice analyst who identified Man B’s voice as that of my former White House mentor and supervisor to the highest degree possible by scientific analysis, and sent a copy of his written analysis to both ‘Nightline’, still to deafening silence, and to Barcella at the October Surprise Task Force, after which an appointment was made for me to give sworn testimony there, which I did at 4:00 p.m. on the afternoon of Dec. 17, 1992, further coordinated with the arrival of Bani Sadr’s letter of the same date and of my a.m. press conference at the National Press Club in the late morning and early afternoon. That afternoon I also arranged the sworn testimony at the Task Force office of the 1980 Reagan-Bush campaign’s chief Iran expert, Michel ‘Mickey’ Smith, who testified that the campaign had, indeed, been approached by Iranian-American arms dealer Houshang Lavi.
These are only a few of the two hours worth of “last-minute evidence” – in addition to Bani Sadr’s coordinated letter – that Barcella became aware of no later than 2:00 p.m. on Dec. 17, 1992, when my press conference ended and his staff member returned to the Task Force offices with the reams of documents I distributed there implicating the Reagan-Bush campaign in secret and illegal dealings with the radical Islamist Khomeini regime to delay the release of 52 American hostages, extending their suffering in Iran for additional months, to sabotage President Carter’s attempts to free them and thereby illicitly gain the White House.
At the end of his article, Parry states, ‘…by the time the [Bani Sadr’s Dec. 17, 1992 ] letter and the other evidence arrived, the leadership of the House Task Force [Chief Counsel Barcella and Chairman Rep. Lee Hamilton] had decided to simply declare the Reagan campaign innocent. The facts, however, do not support this timing. We know the Task Force was still open for business and still taking testimony on Dec. 17, as that was the date it took my own and Michel Smith’s sworn testimony beginning at 4:00 p.m., and it had to have been either on or shortly after Dec. 17, 1992 that Barcella asked Hamilton for an additional three months to follow up the last-minute evidence pointing to Reagan-Bush complicity that literally flooded into its offices that day due to my press conference coordinated with the arrival of Bani Sadr’s letter. Yet page III of the Task Force Report states that “The [this] report was approved unanimously by the Task Force on December 10, 1992,” a week earlier, though Barcella had made the appointment to take my testimony and had received the written forensic analysis that ‘Man B’ on Oliver North’s ‘Smoking Gun’ Iran/Contra audiotape had been my White House boss Martin Anderson before making the appointment. As ‘The report” in this sentence has to refer to the published printed text that wasn’t released until Barcella and Hamilton’s press conference of Jan. 13, 1993, which I attended and where I obtained a copy, and as the order to print the version missing the pages mentioning Joseph King had to have been made on or after Dec. 17, the Dec. 10th date for approval of the report has to be false. In addition, the report was not ‘unanimously’ approved, as Task Force member Rep. Dymally was so certain that the published version was a white wash and cover up that he drafted a Minority Report, which Hamilton bullied him into not releasing on the threat of firing of his entire Congressional staff, which Hamilton then did in any case. The evidence, therefore, supports that it was the Dec. 17th ‘flood’ of evidence incriminating the Republican 1980 presidential campaign itself that caused Hamilton, almost certainly in collusion with the Task Force’s Republican lead Rep. Henry Hyde, to suddenly and prematurely close down the Task Force, which had previously announced that its work would end on Dec. 31st. Further, the very mention of Bani Sadr’s Dec. 17th letter in the public Task Force report proves that its text could not have been finalized, and therefore that it could not have been approved, a week earlier on Dec. 10, as claimed in the published report. And although an ‘annex’ to the Task Force report includes the Bani]Sadr letter, there is no mention in either the report or the ‘annex’ of the “flood” of incriminating evidence that Barcella’s staffer brought back from the National Press Club press conference the same morning that Bani Sadr’s letter arrived in the Task Force offices.
It’s unfortunate Bob Parry hasn’t been aware of the source of the vast majority of the “other” evidence he refers to — a literal “flood” of “last-minute” evidence incriminating the Reagan-Bush campaign that came into the House October Surprise Task Force on the same day as Bani Sadr’s letter – but that will be remedied shortly when he receives the videotape of my Dec. 17, 1992 National Press Club press conference which was coordinated with the delivery of that letter; and anyone who wants to see the volume of compelling converging evidence of Reagan-Bush-Casey complicity in delaying the release of the hostages will soon be able to watch the videotape of the Dec. 17 press conference online when I post the link in a new comment here in the near future.
I also strongly agree with both Mr. Bani-Sadr and Bob Parry that the real purpose and timing of ‘Argo’, as well as why the ‘Big Picture’ context of the October Surprise is still taboo, is to demonize Iranians in the eyes of the American public to ‘prepare the ground’ to support war against Iran should Iran’s nuclear program reach a “point of no return,” which Prime Minister Netanyahu has said “will happen this summer, at the latest.” The Big Picture that can stop this war is for the American, Israeli and Iranian people to all realize that the October Surprise is real, that Israel was the middleman in that treasonous arms-for-hostage-release-delay deal, that Israel then secretly delivered billions of dollars worth of weapons to the fundamentalist Iranian Islamic regime of which it professes to be an enemy; that Israel and Iran have a long, complex, and secret relationship that belies that they are real enemies; that after the Aug. 8, 1988 cease fire in the Iran-Iraq War which Vice President and then presidential candidate George Bush Sr. forced Khomeini to ‘take the poison pill’ to accept under threat that proof of the October Surprise and the secret relationship between Israel and Iran, let alone between the U.S. and Iran, would be revealed, the U.S. then re-started the war against Iraq which Iran had had to fight alone before the cease fire; that the main outcome of the U.S. ‘coalition’s’ second Iraq War was to bring Shiites sympathetic to Iran to power making Iran the No. 1 beneficiary of trillions of dollars worth of U.S. military expenditures; that the U.S. and Iran fought on the same side with the Northern Alliance against the Taliban in Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11; that the U.S. relies on a credible growing threat of future Iranian nuclear-armed missiles to pressure reluctant former Soviet bloc countries in central and eastern Europe to accept anti-missile defenses against Russia; and therefore that the real relationship between the U.S. and Iran, and thus also almost certainly the real relationship between Israel and Iran, is not what the governments of any of the three countries want their publics to realize, understand and act upon.
Barbara Honegger
bshonegg@gmail.com
Please use the Subject line: Bani Sadr revelations