THE FINE LINE BETWEEN INTERDICTION AND MURDER

Remember that family of Baptists that got shot up in the Amazon in March of
this year? Having concluded a bout of evangelizing among the Indians along
the Peruvian Amazon, this same family was halved in size after a bullet
from a Peruvian fighter plane fatally pierced Veronica and Charity Bower
(mother and 7-month infant), while wounding Cessna pilot Kevin Donaldson
and sparing Jim Bower and his son Cory.

The Peruvian Air Force fighter pilot was ordered to fire by a high- ranking
Peruvian officer on the ground. This officer was getting his info, or
misinfo, relayed to him by the CIA, in the sub-contracted guise of a plane
owned by Aviation Development Corporation, based at Maxwell AFB in
Hunstville, Ala. The CIA-sponsored plane containing three Anglos and one
Peruvian (not able to talk to each other very well owing to language
barriers), was monitoring the Cessna containing the missionaries and
relaying its observations of the missionaries' position to the Peruvian Air
Force.

This same CIA plane had originally been alerted to the unidentified Cessna
by a long-range U.S. radar crew, based in Vieques, Puerto Rico. And
monitoring the whole scene from its war room in Key West was U.S. Southern
Military Command, which later tried to deny it had anything to do with the
disaster. What a very large mass of people and resources to be watching one
small plane!

But on what legal basis is it now possible for the United States, as made
manifest through the CIA, to supervise the shooting down of small
airplanes thousands of miles outside its jurisdiction? The answer comes in
the form of a decision memorandum signed by President Bill Clinton in June
of 1994, bringing "closure," to use a fashionable term, to acrimony within
the administration on this issue. The documents in question are all
available from the National Security Archive, whose Kate Doyle sued for
them under the Freedom of Information Act.

As the Archive's preamble to the documents narrates, the United States
began sharing real-time aerial tracking information with Colombia and Peru
in July of 1990. When the Colombians told the United States they were
thinking of a shoot-down policy for suspected drug planes, the U.S. State
Department got nervous about possible legal ramifications if U.S. advisers
were involved, as they undoubtedly would be. So the State Department
proclaimed piously that both U.S. and international law precluded the use
of weapons against civilian aircraft, except in self-defense. The
Colombians said they wouldn't give up on the idea but would shelve it, at
least for a while.

Peru adopted a force-down policy in 1993, and at the end of that year, the
Colombians (probably after back-channel prodding from the U.S. shoot-down
faction) said they would now implement the shoot-down strategy formulated
in 1990. A U.S. interagency group began a review of the new policies in
January 1994. On May 1, the Clinton administration, led by the Department
of Defense, announced a suspension on the sharing of real-time aerial
tracking data with the two governments.

This was the signal for savage hand-to-hand bureaucratic combat inside the
U.S. government. On the one side were ranged those departments and agencies
deriving funding and a sense of mission in life from the War on Drugs: the
State Department's bureaus of International Narcotics Matters (INM) and
Inter-American Affairs (ARA), not to mention DEA, CIA, Customs, and so forth.

On the other side were the teams at the State Department's legal department
and at Justice, offering the view that it was a perilous strategy to shoot
down civil planes and that "mistakes are likely to occur under any policy
that contemplates the use of weapons against civil aircraft in flight, even
as a last resort."

Veterans at State remembered the tremendous, self-righteous stink raised by
the United States after the Soviet Union shot down a Korean airliner (KAL
007) that had penetrated its air space. The State Department cited a 1984
amendment of the Chicago Convention on civil aviation--adopted in the wake
of the KAL incident--banning the use of force against civil aircraft.

In the end, Clinton characteristically tried to please both factions, while
going along with the hawks. On June 21, l994, he secretly OK'd U.S.
cooperation with Colombia and Peru's shoot-down force-down policies,
allowing U.S. aerial tracking data to be used in operations against
suspicious aircraft "if the president has determined that such actions are
necessary because of the threat posed by drug trafficking (sic) to the
national security of that country and that the country has appropriate
procedures in place to protect innocent aircraft."

As one bureaucrat happily noted, this Solomonic compromise would "reduce
the (United States government's) exposure to criticism that such assistance
violates international law."

Colombia and Peru would be instructed that one way to cope with the
difficulties presented by international agreements against shooting down
civil aircraft would be to declare a "national emergency," as permitted
under the relevant conventions. Another stratagem contemplated a campaign
to convince nations deemed "aviation partners" to accept a "narrow
exception" to international law in cases where "drug trafficking threatens
the political institutions of a state and where the country imposes strict
procedures to reduce the risk of attack against non-drug trafficking aircraft."

It turns out the CIA, the subcontractors, Southcom, Colombia and Peru have
been responsible for downing anywhere from 25 to 30 small planes over the
passage of the years since 1994. Who were they? No one seems to know, and
please, the occupants of these planes weren't murdered in acts of
international terrorism and piracy. No, they were "successfully
interdicted," thus bringing a glow of satisfaction to the cheeks of those
waging the war on drugs.

By the way, the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association did think the policy
was a lousy idea.