OUTRAGE OVER PERU

Roni Bowers became "collateral damage" in a hysterical war on drugs
last Friday.

Two lamentations leap instantly to mind as the unmitigated tragedy
unfolds surrounding the American missionary killed with her baby over
Peru.

The first lament is how difficult it seems to be to get reliable
information about such incidents, even in this day and age of global
communications and 24-hour news networks.

We still don't know who was at fault over the South China Sea when
U.S. and Chinese planes collided April 1. Did the U.S. propeller
plane suddenly bank to the left, as some reports have said? Or did
the Chinese pilot simply get too close?

All we're getting at this point is a childish video-fueled "did so,
did not" between the United States and China.

Now we get vastly disparate versions of the outrage over Peru, when
U.S. missionary Veronica "Roni" Bowers, 35, was shot and killed along
with her 7-month-old daughter, Charity, on Friday.

Their single-engine plane, well known at the jungle airport in
Iquitos, and having permission to land, according to the victims'
relatives, was fired upon and downed by the Peruvian Air Force --
perhaps with the complicity of U.S. authorities in a counter-drug
surveillance plane, although that, too, is not certain.

All that is certain is that Bowers and her daughter are now innocent
victims in a hysterical war on drugs that begins to make very little
sense at this point.

Of course, neither they nor the other victims in the plane -- pilot
Kevin Donaldson's leg was shattered by a bullet before he ditched the
plane in the Amazon, saving himself and Bowers' husband and son --
are the only innocents to suffer from the war on drugs. And even the
guilty sometimes suffer needlessly: low-level drug users who,
truthfully, are victims more than criminals, yet who often spend more
time in prison than murderers.

We've already sacrificed an incredible amount of rights in this, the
freest nation on Earth, for this ill-fated war on drugs. Police can
break into a house in search of drugs, in a twist that might horrify
the founding fathers. Potential employers are sadly compelled to test
your system for drugs, even without cause. Law enforcement agencies
can seize assets -- vehicles, boats, what have you -- if they even
suspect the assets are connected to the drug trade. A few years back,
the courts were even asked to sanction random, warrantless searches
for drugs on city buses.

That last assault on our freedoms was turned back, thankfully. But
many more have not been.

Now, Roni Bowers and her daughter -- unable to even walk or talk yet
- -- were found guilty of drug trafficking and summarily executed in
the skies over Peru.

Any innocent lives lost in this way would be tragic. But the salt in
this wound is the fact that the people so recklessly fired upon were
missionaries, devoting their lives to others. How grotesquely tragic.

If this isn't hysteria, what qualifies? If firing on "suspect" planes
and downing them and killing people aboard without absolute certainty
of their connection to criminal activity isn't considered a form of
reefer madness, then how much more insanity awaits us? How many more
innocents will stumble in-between the "good guys" and the "bad guys"
at the wrong time?

Accidents happen. Horribly tragic accidents happen. Just ask the
skipper aboard the U.S. sub that capsized a Japanese fishing trawler
and killed nine.

This outrage over Peru was no accident. It was a preposterously
feeble, incompetent and irresponsible act of lunacy, brought on by
drug-induced delirium.

It's getting difficult to tell the good guys from the bad.