Damning as this might sound:

Yet Ledeen played a central role in brokering the sale by Israel to Iran of highly advanced weapons as part of the Reagan administration's Iran-contra shenanigans in the 1980s. A military confrontation with Iran would likely subject U.S. troops to attack from the very same nasty weapons which Ledeen and his friends provided to Iran during a time when, Ledeen and neoconservatives now insist, Iran was waging war on the U.S. As Scott Lemieux, among many others, has noted, providing arms to a country "waging war against the U.S." -- as Ledeen did with Iran in the 1980s if his central premise is to be believed -- is called treason.

It gets worse. US-approved arms shipments from Israel to Iran began almost as soon as Reagan took office, as Robert Party has long reported:

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2000/110500b.html

History on the Ballot

....

Covering Up Iran-Contra

While allegations of Republican shenanigans in 1980 were left in this haze of evidence and denials, the lingering hostage crisis clearly damaged Carter’s political standing in November 1980.

Reagan won a solid electoral victory. Then, immediately after Reagan’s inauguration on Jan. 20, 1981, the Iranians released the American hostages.

It’s also clear that the Reagan-Bush administration followed up release of the hostages with a secret policy of permitting Israel to ship U.S. military hardware to Iran.

Senior State Department officials learned of the secret policy in summer 1981 when an Argentine plane carrying U.S. military supplies from Israel to Iran strayed off course and was shot down over the Soviet Union.

Nicholas Veliotes, assistant secretary of state for the Middle East, investigated the strange case and said he learned from “people on high that indeed we had agreed that the Israelis could transship to Iran some American-origin military equipment. … I believe it was the initiative of a few people [who] gave the Israelis the go-ahead. The net result was a violation of American law.” [For details, see Parry’s Trick or Treason,]

The clandestine U.S. relationship with Iran took other turns in the months ahead. Israel invaded Lebanon, followed by a Reagan-Bush decision to introduce American troops and then to begin shelling Moslem villages. Islamic extremists retaliated by seizing more American hostages.

None of this was really hidden, due to the shoot-down of the Argentinian plan (Reagan had us in bed with the architects of Argentina's "Dirty War" that "disappeared" 30,000 "leftist students" up until the Falklands War). It was simply ignored.

But why? Why had Reagan green-lighted such an arrangement? The reason--only suspected at the time--was a secret deal with Iran to elect Reagan in 1980 by holding the hostages until after the election. Evidence of this plot accumulated gradually, but inexorably over the course of the Reagan/Bush years, finally culminating in a Congressional investigation overseen--and undermined--by the ultra-serious Lee Hamilton.

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2006/102506.html

The Original October Surprise

October 25, 2006

History turned in December 1992 when the truth about what happened in the pivotal 1980 presidential election might finally have been revealed to the American people. Just a month after Bill Clinton defeated George H.W. Bush, the dam that had held back the 12-year-old secrets finally gave way.

An investigative House Task Force was putting the finishing touches on a report intended to debunk the longstanding October Surprise allegations of Republican interference with the Iranian hostage crisis in 1980. The bipartisan Task Force planned to treat the story as a conspiracy theory run wild.

But suddenly the Task Force found itself inundated by a flood of new evidence going the other way, indicating that the long-whispered suspicions of a grotesque Republican dirty trick a dozen years earlier were true.

Task Force chief counsel Lawrence Barcella, who had been onboard for the debunking, was stunned by the late surge of new evidence. He concluded that it couldn’t be ignored and that it justified extending the investigation at least a few more months.

Years later, Barcella told me that he recommended a three-month extension to the Task Force chairman, Rep. Lee Hamilton, but the Indiana Democrat rejected the idea of taking the extra time to check out the new evidence. An extension would have required getting approval from the new Congress being seated in 1993.

Plus, Hamilton, who was about to ascend to the chairmanship of the House International Affairs Committee, had other priorities. He treasured perhaps more than anything his reputation as a respected centrist figure in a capital city torn by partisanship.

Hamilton, with his no-nonsense butch haircut and home-spun eloquence, was a candidate for one of Washington’s highest unofficial honors, the title of Wise Man. Indeed, Hamilton’s passion for bipartisanship had made him the Democrat that the Republicans most wanted to run an investigation into Republican wrongdoing.

When Hamilton was chosen in late 1991 to chair the October Surprise Task Force, Republicans hailed his selection. Hamilton then selected investigators who weren’t inclined to press too hard, even as Hamilton’s GOP counterpart, Rep. Henry Hyde, staffed his side with tough-minded partisans.

At one point, in a gesture of bipartisanship, Hamilton even granted Republicans veto power over the choice of a Democratic staff investigator. Hyde exercised this extraordinary offer by blocking the appointment of House International Affairs Committee chief counsel Spencer Oliver because Oliver suspected the October Surprise allegations might just be true.

The key evidence came from Soviet intelligence. Because of length, I will post it separately as follows....