The embarrassing recent FBI disclosure that it fired incendiary tear-gas rounds at a concrete outpost adjacent to the Branch Davidians� wooden compound near Waco, Texas, on the final day of the 51-day standoff, came after six years of staunch denials.

As U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno seeks the right person to head an independent probe into the matter, critics of the Department of Justice (DOJ) believe that the evidence that a cover-up was conducted offers an opening to probe more deeply into the "criminal culture" in the Criminal Division of the DOJ, going back more than 40 years.

Black people, specifically, must use the revelations on Waco, and the concern over police brutality, to get the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) to demand that any Congressional inquiry into Waco be broadened to include the crimes which fall under "Operation Fruehmenschen"�the name given to the 1980s DOJ�s covert war against Black elected officials�and current sting operations against Black elected officials, critics charged.

"The fact that we are paranoid about the FBI doesn�t make us wrong," said retired U.S. Congressman Mervyn M. Dymally (D-Calif.), once the target of an unsuccessful attempts by the DOJ to entrap him from 1974, when he was elected to the California State Senate, to 1992, when he retired from Congress. "The revelations of Waco offer a new opportunity to look into this web of deceit and corruption buried within the �Permanent Bureaucracy� of the (DOJ)."

DOJ officials, too, staunchly deny that the department discriminately targets or entraps, prosecutes and imprison Black elected officials as part of a long-standing, covert operation begun under late FBI director J. Edgar Hoover.

But from Adam Clayton Powell in the �50s to Chicago aldermen caught in "Operation Silver Shovel" in the 1990s, the DOJ has exhibited a pattern of unfairly targeting or entrapping Black officials through dirty sting operations, federal prosecutions, and imprisonment.

In Washington, D.C., former Clinton administration Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy, was acquitted last December on 30 charges he accepted gifts and organizations regulated by the department. He was forced to resign in 1994�a target of the DOJ�s nearly five-year-long investigation that cost him $1.5 million in legal bills and cost the government millions more.

"When we conclude that an agency that has no problem burning white children (in Waco) will have no problem targeting Black people, their leaders, and their organizations, we will know that COINTELPRO is alive," said former FBI agent Tyrone Powers, a 10-year veteran of the bureau. "We keep looking for evidence that the FBI have shown they are experts at hiding. So we continue to be targeted and the FBI maintain their motto of �Admit Nothing, Deny Everything, and Use a Pencil.� " COINTELPRO was an FBI operation that targeted Black Power and civil rights groups for disruption and set-up activists.

Mr. Dymally, who now heads his own consulting firm, Dymally International Group, Inc. in Inglewood, Calif., has fought for over 20 years to expose "dirty" DOJ policies against Black elected officials.

On January 27, 1988, Mr. Dymally, then Congressional Black Caucus chairman, testified before Congress about a sworn affidavit given by attorney Hirsch Friedman, who had worked with the FBI in Atlanta. Mr. Friedman alleged that the FBI had an established official policy that initiates investigations of Black officials without probable cause.