Demonic_ How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America - Ann Coulter [45]
Needless to say, Secret Service records established the precise location of vice presidential candidate Bush throughout the 1980 campaign. And he wasn’t in Paris. Once that was confirmed, the conspiracy theorists simply dropped Bush from their imaginary meeting but were otherwise undaunted. The dates of the alleged meetings kept changing, depending on what could be proved about William Casey’s whereabouts in the fall of 1980. By process of elimination, the wackadoodles finally settled on three days in October for which there appeared to be no evidence of Casey’s whereabouts.
With the conspirators having finally decided that October 17—20 were the absolutely, positively definite dates for the alleged October Surprise meetings, it turned out Casey’s whereabouts could be proved after all. He was at a conference in London, “The Anglo-American History of World War II.” Unfortunately for the conspirators, the conference director kept detailed notes on who attended each session. Not only was Casey present at nearly every talk, including his own, but there were credit card receipts establishing Casey’s presence in London even during brief periods when he left the conference. In all, Casey’s precise location could be proved for nearly every minute of the three-day period. And he wasn’t in Paris, either.
Then it turned out that even fake CIA agent Brenneke was not in Paris during the alleged October Surprise meeting. Having placed himself at the center of the secret meetings in Paris, Brenneke planned to capitalize on it by “writing” a book. So he turned over all his notes and diaries—8,000 pages in all—to his ghostwriter, Peggy Adler Robohm. One can imagine Robohm’s surprise when she came across credit card receipts, signed by Brenneke, proving that he had attended—believe it or not—a Star Trek Convention in that week. Okay, it wasn’t actually a Star Trek Convention. Brenneke was attending a martial-arts tournament in Seattle on the crucial dates from October 17 to 19.
Robohm promptly contacted Representative Lee Hamilton (D-IN), who was chairman of the congressional committee spending millions of taxpayer dollars to investigate the October Surprise. But Hamilton wasn’t interested. So she sent Brenneke’s files to Snepp at the Village Voice.
At least Brenneke had a good explanation for the credit card receipts placing him at the Seattle martial arts tournament during the crucial meeting in Paris. When Snepp asked him about the receipts, Brenneke said, “No comment.” This was the conspiracy that Jimmy Carter demanded a blue-ribbon commission to investigate and on which millions of taxpayer dollars were wasted.18
Interestingly, many of the same screwballs pushing the October Surprise nonsense have popped up in more recent conspiracy theories. Brenneke became a star witness in the Mena, Arkansas, cocaine conspiracy by claiming to have flown drugs for the CIA from Mena when Bill Clinton was governor of Arkansas.19 Honegger is the originator of the peculiar 9/11 conspiracy theory holding that all the clocks stopped at the Pentagon at 9:32 on 9/11, thus proving that the plane could not have hit at 9:37. Oswald LeWinter—another of Gary Sick’s critical sources for his book October Surprise—attempted to sell forged documents to Mohamed al-Fayed in 1998, allegedly proving that the British intelligence service was involved in the death of Diana, princess of Wales. I’m pretty sure he also started the urban legend about how you can cook an egg with an activated cell phone.
But despite the fact that the October Surprise conspirators made Dan Rather’s source on the Bush National Guard story look like Eliot Ness, major mainstream media such as ABC’s Nightline, PBS’s Frontline, and the New York Times ferociously promoted the October Surprise using these