INNOCENTS DIE IN THE DRUG WAR

Of all the casualties claimed by the U.S. "war on drugs" in Latin
America, perhaps none so fully captures its senselessness and
injustice as the 2001 CIA-directed killing of Christian missionary
Veronica Bowers and her daughter Charity in Peru.

No one is suggesting that the CIA intentionally killed Mrs. Bowers
and her baby. It was an accident.

But according to Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R., Mich.), it was an accident
waiting to happen because of the way in which the CIA operated the
drug interdiction plan in Peru known as the Airbridge Denial Program.
Mr. Hoekstra says the goods to prove his charge are in a classified
report from the CIA Inspector General that he received in October.
Under the program, initiated by President Clinton, the CIA was
charged with identifying small civilian aircraft suspected of
carrying cocaine over Peru on a path to Colombia, and directing the
Peruvian military to force them down.

Strict procedures were put in place to minimize the risks to innocents.

But after viewing the IG report, Mr. Hoekstra -- the ranking member
of the House Intelligence Committee -- says that it is clear that
those procedures had gone out the window long before the April 20,
2001 tragedy. On that day the Bowers family was flying in a
single-engine plane over the Amazon toward their home in Iquitos.
Mrs. Bowers was holding the infant on her lap when a bullet fired by
the Peruvian Air Force, under direction of the CIA, hit the aircraft,
traveled through her back and into Charity's skull. The plane
crash-landed on the Amazon River. Mr. Bowers, his young son and the
pilot survived.

Neither the plane nor its passengers were found to be involved in any
way in the drug business and initial reports said that the mistaken
attack was a tragic one-time error.

The IG report looked at the Airbridge Denial Program from its
inception in 1995 until its termination in 2001 and took seven years
to complete.

In statements to the press last month Mr. Hoekstra said it
demonstrates every one of the 15 "shootdowns" that the CIA
participated in over the life of the program had "violations of
required procedures." He also said that the report "found that CIA
officers knew of and condoned the violations, fostering an
environment of negligence and disregard for the procedures." Equally
troubling, the congressman says, is the IG finding that after the
tragedy there was an attempt to cover up what had been going on in
Peru. He has also said that the IG report finds that there were
"unauthorized modifications" made to "the presidentially mandated
intercept procedures by people who had no authority to do so" and
that "there was effectively no legal oversight of the program." He
further charges that "there is evidence that CIA officials made false
or misleading statements to Congress," and that "the CIA denied
Congress, the NSC [National Security Council] and the Department of
Justice access to key findings of internal reviews that established
and documented the sustained and significant violations of the
required procedures."

"It was a rogue operation," he told me by telephone on Tuesday. "They
knew they weren't following the rules, and they never did anything
about it. They were callous about it." When I asked him to explain
further, he said: "My take on this is that they became obsessed with
the mission." The CIA says that director Michael Hayden has
"recognized the seriousness of [the report's] findings" and "is
absolutely committed to a process looking at systemic issues and
accountability that is as thorough and fair as possible." The office
of House Intelligence Committee Chairman Silvestre Reyes (D., Texas)
won't comment on the report.

But Mr. Hoekstra is calling for more of it to be declassified and for
the Justice Department to review "whether further criminal
investigation is warranted." Yet to honor the memory of Mrs. Bowers
and her daughter and spare innocent lives in the future, a broader
discussion in Congress about U.S. drug policy in the region is needed.

Consider the fact that Mr. Clinton's justification for the Airbridge
Denial Program was that drug trafficking was a threat to Peruvian
national security. Of course it was: Prohibition naturally produces
powerful criminal networks that undermine the rule of law. But as a
2001 Senate Intelligence Committee report found, the drug runners
learned to avoid detection by altering their routes via Brazil. It
also found that while Peru's coca business shrank, Colombia's took off.

Since then, U.S. interdiction has put the pressure on Colombia and
the problem is now resurging in Peru. The latest reports are that
Mexican cartels are teaming up with remnants of the Shining Path
terror network to rebuild the business, proving once again the
futility of the supply-side attack as a way of minimizing drug use in the U.S.