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July
24, 2001
Pirates
of the Air and Seas
Scenes from
the Drug War
Imagine, you're flying at a height of
34,000 feet somewhere over the Persian Gulf; you see a fighter
plane with what appear to be Saudi markings not far off on the
port side. Next thing you know, the fellow next to you, with
whom you'd been drinking gin and tonic only a moment before,
is slumped forward with a machine gun bullet through his heart.
The plane's depressurized from the bullet breaking the window
but the pilot manages to land. Two are dead from the salvo, which
many witnesses aboard your plane agree came from that Saudi plane.
Of course there's a big stink
because the dead guys are both American. In the end it turns
out that, under certain secret protocols in Saudi law, craft
(whether maritime, airborne or terrestrial) suspected of harboring
substances forbidden by the Koran, like alcohol, can be subject
to "interdiction", i.e. shot up or down. The Saudi
pilot claimed he'd waggled his wings at the passenger plane,
indicating that it should follow him. Only after repeated efforts
to signal had finally fired the fatal.
All a fantasy of course. True,
the Saudi royal family doesn't endorse public consumption of
alcohol, but it isn't in the business of shooting down booze-laden
planes, however well informed the Saudi Royal Air Force might
be about the consumption of gin aboard the suspect plane. And
who knows, the Saudi royal family might even have reservations
about the prudence, not to mention legality, of firing on civil
aircraft.
But suppose the drug in question
isn't booze but cocaine. And suppose the shooter's sponsor and
legal protector isn't the puny Saudi royal family but the Government
of the United States?
In that case we have as policy
guide the 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 U.S. began sharing real-time aerial
tracking
information with Colombia and Peru in July of 1990. When the
Colombians told the US they were thinking of a shootdown policy
for suspected drug planes, the US State Department got nervous
about possible legal ramifications, if US advisors 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 US shootdown faction) said
they would now implement the shootdown 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 US 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 US after the Soviet Union shot down a Korean Airliner
(KAL 007) which 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 okayed US cooperation with Colombia
and Peru's shoot-down/force-down policy, allowing US 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 [US 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."
One element was conspicuous
by its absence. Nowhere in the torrent of US advice to Peru and
Colombia was there any hint that military and intelligence assistance
from the US might be conditioned on a solution to the international
legal problems. Significantly, the document notes that, "The
President explicitly did not condition the resumption of assistance
on a solution to the international law problems associated with
the USG's provision of such assistance." As the US State
Department proudly (but of course secretly) boasted to President
Samper of Colombia in December of that year, the Clinton administration
had made "a tremendous legal and administrative effort"
to get the intelligence sharing arrangements back on track. Ambassador
Busby was told to tell President Samper, that "Because narcotics
is very important to us, the administration expended a great
deal of effort to change U.S. law and permit us to resume our
cooperation."
By the way, the Aircraft Owners
and Pilots Association did think the policy was a lousy idea.
The world took notice in March
of this year when a family of evangelical Baptists, having concluded
a bout of predatory spiritual rampages among the hapless Indians
along the Peruvian Amazon, was halved in size, after a bullet
fatally pierced Veronica and Charity Bower (mother and 7-month
infant) while wounding Cessna pilot Kevin Donaldson and sparing
the Baptist paterfamilias, Jim Bower, and his son Cory.
Magnanimously, Bower he had
``no hard feelings'' and could see God at work in their deaths
from gunfire by the Peruvian air force. "Cory and I are
experiencing inexplicable peace, and to me that's proof that
God is in this," Bowers told about 600 mourners at the funeral
of his wife and daughter. "Our attitude toward those responsible
is one of forgiveness. Is that not amazing? It shouldn't be amazing
to us Christians.' ``Roni and Charity were instantly killed by
the same bullet. To me that's pretty amazing. That bullet stayed
in Charity's head, not going through Kevin's back, causing the
rest of us to die." By sparing him, his son and Donaldson,
Bowers said God must have something bigger in mind for them,
although he didn't know what it was.
Of course, if an Amazonian
Indian shaman had successfully aimed a heat-seeking missile at
the Bowers on the very reasonable grounds (sustainable by profuse
historical evidence) that the evangelical Baptists were a threat
to the national security of his tribe, there would have been
no end of trouble for the shaman.
But this was no shaman, this
was the Peruvian Air Force, ordered to fire by a high ranking
Peruvian officer on the ground. And this was the CIA, in the
sub-contracted guise of Aviation Development Corp, out of Maxwell
AFB in Alabama, flying above the Amazon (two Anglos and one Peruvian,
not able to talk to each other very well owing to language barriers)
telling the Peruvian Air Force that an unidentified plane was
approaching Iquitos. And this was long-range US radar based in
Vieques, Puerto Rico, advising the CIA subcontractors about the
unidentified plane. And this was US Southern Military Command,
monitoring the whole scene from its war room in Key West. What
a very large mass of people and resources to be watching one
small plane which, if you believe Mr Bower, was also being tracked
by the mightiest radar of them all, the Big Fellow himself.
It turns out the CIA, the subcontractors
and Southcom and 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.
Okay. Now you're in your cruise
ship, in the Indonesian archipelago, still sipping at your gin
and tonic. Muslims board the boat, ransack your possessions.
Yes, they're dead set against booze
We'll cut the satirical parable
short and remind you that in mid May the US Coastguard ecstatically
announced the largest haul in US maritime drug enforcement's
history: an alleged $1 billion's worth of cocaine, (13 tons)
found after five arduous days' search aboard a freighter in the
eastern Pacific the Svesda Maru, a 152-foot trawler flying the
flag of Belize. Two Russians and 10 Ukrainians were charged with
drug smuggling and jailed at the federal prison in downtown San
Diego.
On March 4, another Belize-flagged
fishing ship, the Forever My Friend, with 8.8 tons of cocaine,
had been towed into San Diego after being seized 250 miles west
of Acapulco.
Count up the seeming breaches
of laws and treaties here, starting with piracy on the high seas
and use of US Navy ships for law enforcement. But it turns out
when US Customs or Coastguard is alerted by the US Navy or Air
Force to suspicious craft outside territorial waters, they phone
the State Department, which phones the nation under whose flag
the suspect is floating and gets the green light. So Belize is
going to say No?
And just to cope with the Posse
Comitatus Act forbidding the US military to be involved in civil
law enforcement there was a Coastguard unit aboard the Navy's
ship. You want to ask about the likelihood of a fair and speedy
trial for those Russians and Ukrainians now in the federal pen
in San Diego?
Want to have the spring's drug
headlines wrapped up for you? The US Supreme Court defies the
clear intent of voters in nine states and says medical marijuana
is a no-no and a London newspaper reports that in London in 1995
a gram of cocaine cost around $120, but the same amount can now
be picked up for about $80. The new drug czar, John Walters,
picked after three months by former cocaine dealer George Bush
(at Yale, in ounce bags according to one source) says the war
on drugs can be won.
Gin and tonic, anyone? CP
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