The drug plague is an area in which the national interest requires results. Illegal narcotics
are one of the most important causes of the dissolution of American society at the present
time. To interdict the drug flows and to prosecute the drug money launderers at the top of
the banking community would have represented a real public service. But Bush had no
intention of seriously pursuing such goals. For him, the war on drugs was a cruel hoax, a
cynical exercise in demagogic self-promotion, designed in large part to camouflage
activities by himself and his networks that promoted drug trafficking. A further shocking
episode that has come to light in this regard involves Bush's 14-year friendship with a
member of Meyer Lansky's Miami circles who sold Bush his prized trophy, the Cigarette
boat Fidelity.
Bush's war on drugs was a rhetorical and public relations success for a time. On February
16, 1982, in a speech on his own turf in Miami, Florida, Bush promised to use
sophisticated military aircraft to track the airplanes used by smugglers. Several days later,
Bush ordered the US Navy to send in its E2C surveillance aircraft for this purpose. If
these were not available in sufficient numbers, said Bush, he was determined to bring in
the larger and more sophisticated AWACS early warning aircraft to do the job. But
Bush's skills as an interagency expediter left something to be desired: by May, two of the
four E2C aircraft that originally had been in Florida were transferred out of the state. By
June, airborne surveillance time was running a mere 40 hours per month, not the 360
hours promised by Bush, prompting Rep. Glenn English to call hearings on this topic. By
October, 1982 the General Accounting Office issued an opinion in which it found "it is
doubtful whether the [south Florida] task force can have any substantial long-term impact
on drug availability." But the headlines were grabbed by Bush, who stated in 1984 that
the efforts of his task force had eliminated the marijuana trade in south Florida. That was
an absurd claim, but it sounded very good. When Francis Mullen. Jr., the administrator of
the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) criticized Bush for making this wildly inaccurate
statement, he was soon ousted from his post at the DEA.
In 1988, Democratic Congressman Glenn English concluded that Bush's "war on drugs"
had been fought with "little more than lip service and press releases." English wrote:
"There has been very little substance behind the rhetoric, and some of the major
interdiction problems have yet to be resolved. The President assigned...Bush to
coordinate and direct federal antidrug-abuse programs among the various law
enforcement agencies. However, eight years later it is apparent that the task has not been
accomplished." [fn 1] No observer still stationed in reality could dispute this very
pessimistic assessment.
But the whole truth is much uglier. We have documented in detail how the Iran-contra
drug-running and gun-running operations run out of Bush's own office played their role
in increasing the heroin, crack, cocain, and marijuana brought into this country. We have
reviewed Bush's relations with his close supporters in the Wall Street LBO gang, much of
whose liquidity is derived from narcotics payments which the banking system is eager to
recycle and launder. We recall Bush's 1990 meeting with Syrian President Hafez Assad,
who is personally one of the most prolific drug pushers on the planet, and whom Bush
embraced as an ally during the Gulf crisis.