CONSERVATIVE: Iran hostage release the day of Reagan's inauguration "not a coincidence"

[alp227]

Thomas Sowell, an influential conservative economist and commentator, sometimes publishes "Random Thoughts" columns about current events. Among them from his 2/12 edition:

Does anyone think that Iran and North Korea would be as threatening as they are if Ronald Reagan were President? I don't think it was a coincidence that the Iranians freed their American hostages just hours before Reagan took the oath of office.

To Sowell's usual audience this translated (tl;dr): "Republicans tough Democrats soft on foreign policy".

However, if you're familiar with William Casey, this bolded sentence may spark some thought.

[elleng]

1. It was clear at the time, to anyone who paid attention,

but nothing to do with tough/soft. Bribery. 'They' hated Carter.

[Lugnut]

3. Yes.

The release of the hostages was their final humiliation of Carter. I will never forget it.

[green for victory]

2. Q: Why didn't Ted Koppel mention the 1953 US/UK Iran coup d'etat even once in 444 days?

Because it was still classified! Who says the Feds can't keep a secret?

[alp227]

6. I recently found this guest opinion article Koppel wrote for the Wash. Post in 2011.

30 years after the Iran hostage crisis, we're still fighting Reagan's war

We in the American news media have a tendency to obsess over one crisis at a time, often to the exclusion of other important issues. Indeed, I can hardly overlook my own role in this. The title that ABC News gave to its nightly coverage seemed hyperbolic at first, but it proved frighteningly prescient: "America Held Hostage." The story held America's interest so tightly and for so long that our specials on ABC eventually morphed into a regular program - "Nightline."

Iran watched and learned. They realized that the fixations of the American media could lead to shifts in U.S. policy. They observed how the hostage crisis cost Carter a second term, and they would soon learn that what influenced one administration could be applied to another.

On Oct. 23, 1983, a truck loaded with explosives was driven into a barracks building in Beirut housing U.S. Marines, who were there as part of an international peacekeeping force. The driver died in the suicide attack, as did 241 American military personnel. Eventually, the bomber was identified as a member of an organization called Hezbollah, which was believed to have been funded and trained by members of Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Iran saw how a devastating attack could force America out of Lebanon, with little outcry back home and no retaliation for the bombing. And just as hostages had proved useful to Iran during the Carter administration, they would be used again to manipulate the Reagan White House. Dozens of Americans and Europeans were kidnapped in Lebanon and held hostage during the early and mid-1980s. Again, Hezbollah was believed responsible, and Iranian patronage was more firmly established.

[RobertEarl]

4. Sowell is a lying cheap labor liar

I'd sure like to meet him one day... have a little talk... set him straight... edumacate him. He'd leave feeling a bit different than when he came. But he is in a protected cocoon.

As for Reagan and the hostages, Reagan told Iran to hold them until he got elected. Carter just about had the situation taken care of until Reagan and his goons got involved. Later, Reagan traded arms and money with Iran and got caught. I wonder if Sowell remembers that?

[HiPointDem]

9. he doesn't do it cause he's dumb and needs education. he does it because he's a paid shill.

smart, but just another shill.

After his discharge, Sowell worked a civil service job in Washington, D.C. and attended night classes at Howard University, admitted on the basis of his General Education certificate. His high scores on the College Board exams and recommendations by two professors helped him gain admission to Harvard University, where he graduated magna cum laude in 1958 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics.[2][6] He received a Master of Arts from Columbia University the following year, and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago in 1968.[6]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Sowell

[RobertEarl]

10. He needs an education

So that he learns not to be a paid shill. And I'd be so happy to be the person to give it to him. But he's a cloistered chicken hawk weannie. I bet he trembles at the thought of having to be around real men like me. Bookworm learning is only part of having a real education.

[HiPointDem]

12. whatever else sowell is, he didn't come from privilege. at least judging from his bio, he's

experienced the world from both sides. He grew up poor & worked his way up, and was also lucky to be born in time to come of age in the post-war boom when doors were opening for black americans.

and he likes being among the elite. he's completely 'educated' and nothing you or anyone else says is going to change him, i'd bet. lots of self-made people are like that.

Sowell was born in Gastonia, North Carolina. His father died shortly before he was born, and his mother, a housemaid, already had four children. A great-aunt and her two grown daughters adopted Sowell and raised him.

In his autobiography, A Personal Odyssey, he said his childhood encounters with white people were so limited that he did not believe blond was really a hair color. When Sowell was nine, his family moved from Charlotte, North Carolina to Harlem, New York City.

He attended Stuyvesant High School, the first in his family to study beyond the sixth grade. However, he was forced to drop out at age 17 because of financial difficulties and problems in his home.

He worked at a number of jobs, including at a machine shop and as a delivery man for Western Union,[4] and tried out for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1948.[5] Sowell was drafted in 1951, during the Korean War, and was assigned to the United States Marine Corps. Because of his experience in photography, he became a Marine Corps photographer; he also trained Marines in .45-caliber pistol proficiency.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Sowell

[RobertEarl]

13. Sowell is a lying piece of ..(R$^^&(*%

I've read his dogshit for years and that's what I think of him.

I'm sure he appreciates your concern?

[HiPointDem]

18. it's not concern; i just don't think he's in need of, or susceptible to, 'education'. i thought

my point was pretty self-evident.

[RobertEarl]

21. He doesn't need to be educated?

You saying he is correct? That he knows, and you agree he is correct? That he doesn't need to be corrected?

Everyone is susceptible to education. To say otherwise is plain idiotic. Especially about a fascist warmongering pig like Sowell.

[Blue_In_AK]

5. Of course, it wasn't a coincidence.

A set-up deal through and through.

[Selatius]

7. Reagan's boys eventually started selling the Iranians weapons during the Iran-Contra affair.

Of course, Reagan was supplying weapons to Saddam Hussein in Iraq as well.

If you were an arms dealer in those days shuttling those weapons and supplies, you made money no matter whose blood was being shed on the desert sand or in the jungles of Central America.

[patrice]

8. That's referred to as the October Surprise, but there was another one before this one and it

was when Nixon was running against Hubert Humphrey. Lyndon Johnson discusses what is going on with Evert Dirksen on the phone. Thom Hartmann plays a recording of their discussion. Johnson tell Dirksen that Nixon is fucking with his peace negotiations to end the war in Vietnam, in order to make Johnson and, by extension, Humphrey look bad. Dirksen outright calls Nixon's behavior treason.

Nixon, using Johnson's "ineptness" with the peace negotiations as a back drop, says some relatively progressive campaign stuff about peace with Vietnam. He beats Humphrey badly, gets to the White House, and promptly puts the war in Vietnam out of his mind. The war continues about another 8 years, taking another 30K American lives and something around another 100K Vietnamese lives.

Call Thom Hartmann up sometime and ask him to play the recording of President Johnson talking to Evert Dirksen about Nixon.

[RobertEarl]

11. And another one

In 1999, Clinton had been hard at work getting peace in the Middle East. Bush, campaigning against Gore, told Israel to NOT go through with making peace, because once Bush was elected the peace process of Clinton's would be dumped. And it was.

[patrice]

15. Which set the stage for 9/11 and the War on Iraq, to grab the oil and to act as a proxy attracting

and killing at least some of Ayman al-Zawahiri's radicals in the region, thus re-establishing & consolidating Saudi Arabia's influence triangulating Iran against Israel, so they can look like they are standing up for Palestine, when they aren't and never have, and reducing our influence, except as a threat to Iran, whom we'd be at war with right fuck now if John McCain had won in 2008.

[patrice]

19. I forget what the breakdown is but those Islamic religious tribes in the region are living in at

least 3 different countries, Iran, Iraq, & Saudi Arabia, and their ties as religious factions are stronger than their national ties, since those national borders were drawn by the British after WWI. So the smallest but most radical fundamentalist contingent, of the Shia, I believe, are living in Saudi Arabia, where they are a pain in the ass to the royal family, because being religious fundamentalist they criticize the hell out of the religiously corrupt house of Saud in the press and the royals can't do much about it because its religious matters. The War on Iraq united those transnational factions against us, got the radical off of the house of Saud's back, for a while anyway, and gave the Sauds plenty of opportunities to look like the sympathetic neighbor, thus pressuring Iran to improve its own status by sabre rattling at Israel.

Some of that is in (DU's and Truthout's) William River's Pitt's book War on Iraq and some of it Seymour Hersh published in 2003 or '04.

[patrice]

24. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, in my last series of posts to you: the KOCH bros were in the IRAN

faction of this whole scenario doing SWEET (and I do mean **SWEET**) OIL DEALS with one of these religious tribes whose members live in BOTH Iran and IRAQ, thus destabilizing BOTH countries in a the KOCH'S own struggles to get at that IRAQI OIL.

This is why, whatever else you hear about the War on Iraq, the FACT is that it is/was a war for OIL.

[alp227]

14. He plays it whenever discussing Iran/Contra or 1980.

Most prominently he did so on 9/25/12.

[WhoIsNumberNone]

16. Of course it waasn't

It was the Iranians sticking to the letter of the agreement.

If only more Americans had been in on the big picture at the time...

[pinboy3niner]

17. Interesting also how conservatives jump to blame Carter for the rescue attempt's failure...

...while denying any credit to Obama for the success of the Bin Laden raid. Apparently the President is always responsible for the result--except when he's not.

[Motown_Johnny]

20. Has everyone forgotten Iran - Contra?

Of course it wasn't a coincidence. Reagan knuckled into pressure from Muslim Extremists (aka Islamic Terrorists).

This is proof that the (R)s are weak and do damage to our security. The very idea that this was a sign of strength is insane. Now all the (R)s want to go to war with the very same people Reagan helped get weapons to secure their hold on the country of Iran.

These people just keep getting crazier and crazier every freaking day.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Contra_affair

^snip^

The Iran–Contra affair (Persian: ایران-کنترا?, Spanish: caso Irán-Contra), also referred to as Irangate, Contragate or the Iran-Contra scandal, was a political scandal in the United States that came to light in November 1986. During the Reagan administration, senior administration officials secretly facilitated the sale of arms to Iran, the subject of an arms embargo.[1] Some U.S. officials also hoped that the arms sales would secure the release of hostages and allow U.S. intelligence agencies to fund the Nicaraguan Contras. Under the Boland Amendment, further funding of the Contras by the government had been prohibited by Congress.

The scandal began as an operation to free seven American hostages being held by a group with Iranian ties connected to the Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution. It was planned that Israel would ship weapons to Iran, and then the United States would resupply Israel and receive the Israeli payment. The Iranian recipients promised to do everything in their power to achieve the release of the U.S. hostages. The plan deteriorated into an arms-for-hostages scheme, in which members of the executive branch sold weapons to Iran in exchange for the release of the American hostages.[2][3] Large modifications to the plan were devised by Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North of the National Security Council in late 1985, in which a portion of the proceeds from the weapon sales was diverted to fund anti-Sandinista and anti-communist rebels, or Contras, in Nicaragua.[4][5]

[RobertEarl]

22. Yeah

And the first Bush pardoned all those traitorous criminals. I'm sure Sowell will start being truthful any day now and expose the republicans for what they truly are; Criminal traitors to America.

[sofa king]

23. No, this is the October Surprise.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_surprise_conspiracy_theory

It predated Iran-Contra, though the principals involved overlapped considerably. After decades of relentless searching around a meticulously expunged record, it has now been established that Reagan campaign officials--the very same ones involved in Iran-Contra--quite probably did meet with Iranian officials to delay the release of 52 Americans being held hostage in Teheran. The Carter Administration was working furiously to secure the release of the hostages before the election; Reagan officials appear to have instead negotiated the fucking opposite of a hostage release, timed to hold the Americans in captivity for another 100 days, the remainder of Carter's term.

"Bud" McFarlane in particular developed the same memory problems he had during the Iran-Contra investigations, the ones that instantly turned into a suicide attempt when it was revealed that Reagan-era emails were copied and saved in a way with which the co-conspirators were unfamiliar.

However, because the October Surprise was (yet another) election theft attempt by Republican campaign officials, not yet government officials, and the documentary trail was deliberately destroyed, and Reagan-era officials and their lackeys continue to fight this story tooth and nail with a vehemence that only treason could fuel, it has not been "proven" in the eyes of silly people who cannot rationally conclude that the cover-up itself is all the evidence one needs to know that a crime occurred. The cover-up definitely exists. That's all we really need to know, and probably most of what we can know.

Journalist Robert Parry has been on the case for nearly thirty years now, and has produced documentary evidence to show meetings between McFarlane and Iranians, and more recently uncovered evidence that Bill Casey did indeed meet with Iranians in Europe.

Every explanation Reagan officials offered was a lie built upon the fragmentary evidence available at the time, and virtually all of them have since proven to be untrue.

In hindsight, with the scandal firmly book-ended by Watergate and Iran-Contra scandals, both of which were but a watery prelude to the undiluted evil of the Bush the Stupider Era, it seems silly to doubt it happened anymore. The results and what the alleged co-conspirators did afterward allow us now to conclude that the train sure as hell went into that tunnel, and sure as hell came out the other end.

[patrice]

26. Thanks very much for reminding us!! about Reagan SUBVERTING THE CONSTITUTION

and then possibly feigning Plausible Deniability or copping for real to Alzeheimers. We'll never know now that William Casey is dead.

[Festivito]

25. See! Cons aren't dumb or stupid, just incredibly SLooooooOW.

Years, decades, centuries, millenia mean so little to these Conservatives.

Many years, many decades, in two centuries and even in two milienia.

And, HE FINALLY GOT IT!