the PLO] if I could arrange to keep the hostages in Iran until after the [U.S. presidential] election, Arafat said, according to Brinkleys article in the fall 1996 issue of Diplomatic Quarterly.As recently as this past week, former Iranian President Abolhassan Bani-Sadr reiterated his account of Republican overtures to Iran during the 1980 hostage crisis and how that secret initiative prevented release of the hostages.In a Christian Science Monitor commentary about the movie Argo, Bani-Sadr wrote that Ayatollah Khomeini and Ronald Reagan had organized a clandestine negotiation ... which prevented the attempts by myself and then-U.S. President Jimmy Carter to free the hostages before the 1980 U.S. presidential election took place. The fact that they were not released tipped the results of the election in favor of Reagan.Though Bani-Sadr had discussed the Reagan-Khomeini collaboration before, he added in his commentary that two of my advisors, Hussein Navab Safavi and Sadr-al-Hefazi, were executed by Khomeinis regime because they had become aware of this secret relationship between Khomeini, his son Ahmad, ... and the Reagan administration.In December 1992, when a House Task Force was examining this so-called October Surprise controversy and encountering fierce Republican resistance Bani-Sadr submitted a letter detailing his behind-the-scenes struggle with Khomeini and his son Ahmad over their secret dealings with the Reagan campaign.Bani-Sadrs letter dated Dec. 17, 1992 was part of a flood of last-minute evidence implicating the Reagan campaign in the hostage scheme. However, by the time the letter and the other evidence arrived, the leadership of the House Task Force had decided to simply declare the Reagan campaign innocent. [See Consortiumnews.coms October Surprise and Argo.]Burying the HistoryLawrence Barcella, who served as Task Force chief counsel, later told me that so much incriminating evidence arrived late that he asked Task Force chairman, Rep. Lee Hamilton, a centrist Democrat from Indiana, to extend the inquiry for three months but that Hamilton said no. (Hamilton told me that he had no recollection of Barcellas request.)Instead of giving a careful review to the new evidence, the House Task Force ignored, disparaged or buried it. I later unearthed some of the evidence in unpublished Task Force files. However, in the meantime, Official Washington dismissed the October Surprise and other Iran-Contra-connected scandals, like Contra drug trafficking, as conspiracy theories. [For the latest information on the October Surprise case, see Robert ParrysAmericas Stolen Narrative.]As with Watergate and Nixon, Official Washington has refused to rethink its conclusions absolving President Ronald Reagan and his successor President George H.W. Bush of guilt in a range of crimes collected under the large umbrella of Iran-Contra.When journalist Gary Webb revived the Contra-Cocaine scandal in the mid-to-late 1990s, he faced unrelenting hostility from Establishment reporters at the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times. The attacks were so ugly that Webbs editors at the San Jose Mercury News forced him out, setting in motion his professional destruction.It didnt even matter when an internal investigation by the CIAs inspector general in 1998 confirmed that the Reagan and Bush-41 administrations had tolerated and protected drug trafficking by the Contras. The major