Bush orders flights by drugs traffickers to be shot down

President George Bush is preparing to order the resumption of the controversial policy of shooting down aircraft suspected of flying drugs to and from Latin America.

The CIA-run drugs interdiction scheme was suspended last year amid outcry after Peruvian air force fighter planes shot down a small aircraft over Peru, killing an American missionary, Veronica Bowers, and her seven-month-old daughter.

An American surveillance aircraft had helped to track the plane after its crew wrongly identified the Baptist missionaries as probable drug smugglers.

New interdiction operations could start over Colombia as soon as final approval is given by the President, according to US officials quoted yesterday in The New York Times.

The new scheme, which will be extended to Peru at a later stage, will be taken out of the hands of the CIA, apparently at the request of its director, George Tenet, who has insisted that the agency no longer wants to be associated with the programme. It will be managed instead by the State Department, with intelligence back-up from the Pentagon. Information on suspected drug flights would be gathered from ground-based radar and other sources, officials said.

Carelessness and lack of proper oversight were cited in a State Department investigation of the Peru incident, although it stopped short of blaming either the US or Peru for shooting down the plane.

Despite the report, and the outrage provoked by the deaths, the Bush administration seems intent on putting the policy back into operation as soon as possible. Colin Powell, the Secretary of State, is reported to be strongly supportive and planning is advanced.

Surveillance jets used by the CIA have already been upgraded and put under the control of the State Department. Colombian pilots, meanwhile, have been given flight interdiction training in the US. Colombian and Peruvian air force pilots will fly the surveillance aircraft, rather than contract crews hired by the CIA as in the past.

The main role of the US military will be to provide intelligence for the so-called interceptor missions. They will be flown by the Peruvians and Colombians and their pilots will have the final say in whether to fire on suspected drug smugglers.

The shooting or forcing down of drug aircraft started formally under the Clinton administration in 1995, to stop the air traffic in raw cocaine from Peru to Colombia for processing. The Peruvian air force shot or forced down at least 38 suspected drug traffic aircraft between 1995 and 2001. By the end of the 1990s most flights had stopped and traffickers had turned to ground or river transport. But the flights are believed to have resumed in the past year, particularly over Colombia.