by Joseph Debro
Congresswoman Maxine Waters waged a more successful war on drugs than the entire U.S. government. Maxine was concerned with those who made enormous profits from this trade, such as Ronald Reagan. He used those profits to fight a war for which the Congress would not pay. He flooded urban America with that poison. South Central Los Angeles was one of its targeted destinations. South Central is the heart of Maxine’s district.
“Former President George Bush, while serving as vice president in the Ronald Reagan administration in 1981-89, presided over a Nicaraguan Contra cabal that was responsible for flooding the streets of Los Angeles’ South Central district with crack cocaine and fueling a murderous cycle of gang violence,” wrote Jeffrey Steinberg in the Sept. 13, 1996, issue of Executive Intelligence Review. This is the most important conclusion to be drawn from “Dark Alliance,” a series of articles by Gary Webb published in the San Jose Mercury News on Aug. 18-20, 1996, and later as a book.
Maxine Waters was concerned about this high-level drug business. She invited Gary Webb to Washington to testify. I arranged for his airline ticket. Gary was ignored by the committee investigating the issue, a committee headed by Porter Goss.
“Mercury reporter Gary Webb provided a detailed account of how the Nicaraguan Democratic Forces (FDN, the Contras) financed their 1980s war against the Sandinista regime in Managua, through a cocaine pipeline that went from Colombia, to the San Francisco Bay Area, to the streets of Los Angeles, placing crack cocaine and guns into the hands of the Crips and the Bloods,” Steinberg continues. For this piece of work, Gary was fired from the paper.
All the time that this crack epidemic was being unleashed by the Contras, Vice President Bush was the man in charge of the Reagan administration’s Central America drug trading program, overseeing all of the activities of the CIA, the Pentagon and every other government intelligence agency. “Some of Bush’s most immediate subordinates,” Steinberg reported, “including his National Security Adviser Donald Gregg, National Security Council staffer Lt. Col. Oliver North, and ‘ex’-CIA officer Felix Rodriguez, were major players in the day-to-day cocaine-Contra operations.
“As the result of wide public exposure of the San Jose Mercury charges, U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) called for a full federal investigation of the Contra-crack connections. Sen. Boxer, on Aug. 28, wrote to CIA head John Deutch, asking him to investigate the Mercury allegations, which emphasized the role of the CIA in directing the FDN. On Sept. 4, Deutch wrote Boxer that he had ordered the Agency’s Inspector General to conduct an internal review of the allegations and report back to him within 60 days.” No such report was ever seen.
In 2004, Gary Webb was found dead from two gunshot wounds to the head, which the coroner’s office called a suicide.
Prior to the Mercury series, there was massive evidence that the Reagan-Bush-North Contra apparatus was involved in flooding the United States with cocaine, through Mena, Arkansas, and other locations. Repeated efforts by Maxine Waters and honest agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration and other law enforcement agencies to investigate were systematically suppressed by Porter Goss for “national security” reasons. Maxine appeared before the Goss committee many times in her effort to unmask the drug kingpins that were in the U.S. government and the major banks of the United States.
Porter Goss, now a non-member of the United States Congress, is co-chair of the ethics committee investigating Maxine Waters. If Mr. Goss is as successful in investigating her as he was in covering up the drug misdeeds of two presidents, Maxine is in deep doo-doo.
Maxine is the go to person for Black and Brown people who seek economic justice. The National Bankers Association went to her for access. She arranged the access. She had no authority in the decisions made by the government. She had no control over the claims made by the bankers. She had made disclosures about her interest on several public occasions in the required venues.
Joseph Debro is president of Bay Area Black Builders, co-founder of the National Association of Minority Contractors, a general engineering contractor and a bio-chemical engineer. He can be reached at transbay@netzero.com.
Rep. Waters speaks out on current ethics charges
Congresswoman Maxine Waters was the guest for a 39-minute interview Aug. 18, 2010, on KPFA’s Letters to Washington, hosted by Mitch Jeserich. They discussed the allegations of ethics rules violations she currently faces and the ethics investigation process.
When the Nicaraguan Contras began to covertly fund their war against the Sandanistas by selling drugs and guns to California street gangs, the Central Intelligence Agency turned a blind eye. While Black neighborhoods were being ravaged by the crack cocaine plague, CIA operatives actively participated in this devastating drug explosion, protected from prosecution by a secret agreement between the Department of Justice and the CIA. – Video: http://www.prisonplanet.com/
On March 16, 1998, the House Intelligence Committee heard testimony concerning a report on CIA involvement in drug trafficking. The testimony of Congresswoman Maxine Waters is recorded in these four videos.
