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| Millions Sought From U.S. in Plane Downing |
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Posted by FoM on February 22, 2002 at 21:42:03 PT By Ellen Nakashima, Washington Post Staff Writer Source: Washington Post 
American missionaries whose small plane was mistaken by CIA contract employees for a drug-runner's and was shot down over Peru last year are seeking $35 million in compensation from the U.S. government. They say they are frustrated by the lack of a response, and, if there is no settlement soon, they will sue.The husband of Veronica Bowers, who was killed with their infant daughter, Charity, in the incident; injured mission pilot Kevin Donaldson; and the Association of Baptists for World Evangelism Inc., which owned the plane, are upset that the government has not responded to the claim they submitted in June, said their attorney, Karen Hastie Williams. Jim Bowers saw his wife and daughter killed by a bullet, and then-7-year-old Cory Bowers, who was also on board the flight, watched his mother's body float in the Amazon River after their Cessna 185 single-engine plane was identified by a CIA surveillance crew as a drug carrier and was gunned down by a Peruvian fighter jet in April. Donaldson survived, but the loss of the group's floatplane has hindered his mission into the remote areas of the Amazon in Peru, the Baptist group said. The missionaries' press for a settlement comes as President Bush is scheduled to visit Peru next month. Neither government has apologized to the missionaries or admitted liability for the downing, Williams said. The White House is expected to announce within weeks the resumption of the drug interdiction flights, which were suspended after the incident. "The issue here is what is our government doing about the situation, which is really quite unusual and should have been resolved months ago," Williams said. The loss of the plane and of "Roni" Bowers has had a "devastating impact" on the mission in Peru, said Don Davis, the Baptist group's corporate counsel. No one has replaced the Bowerses, who taught the Bible and trained locals in church leadership, and a family that had been working with them in remote regions has left. "Kevin Donaldson [who has returned to Peru] has decided he doesn't want to fly down there anymore," Davis said. "He just lacks confidence that it'll be safe as long as drug interdiction efforts continue." A CIA spokesman, Bill Harlow, said settlement discussions are "continuing." "There's certainly no desire on the part of anybody to slow things down," he said. The Justice Department, which is representing the government in the negotiations, did not respond to requests for comment. Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R), whose western Michigan district includes Fruitport, where the Bowerses lived and where the church that sent them to Peru is located, has been trying to expedite a settlement. He said he believes the CIA wants the claim settled. "Everybody wants to get this thing taken care of so that the missionary organization and the Bowers family can move forward," he said. He said it would be "unfortunate" if, by the time Bush reached Peru on March 23, "our government had not taken care of the Bowers family and the Donaldsons." Williams said she has provided the government information on similar cases involving federal entities, private companies and foreign governments in which individual damage amounts were often higher than what the Bowerses and the Donaldsons are seeking. (Williams declined to release the individual amounts the families are asking for.) In Hurd v. United States, for example, a federal judge last year awarded a woman $6 million for each of her two sons killed in a boating accident in which the Coast Guard was found to have been negligent in its rescue effort. Williams, who has met with CIA and State and Justice department officials on this matter only once -- in June -- said the missionaries were not seeking compensation from the Peruvian government at this time. She said the State Department requested that it be allowed to deal with the Peruvian government. A State Department spokeswoman last night said the missionaries' concerns were relayed to Peruvian officials last week. She did not elaborate. Last April 20, two CIA contract pilots flying a routine surveillance mission over northern Peru as part of a U.S.-Peruvian drug interdiction program spotted a floatplane they mistook for a drug carrier. A Peruvian Air Force officer, or "host rider," on board, following standard procedure, alerted a Peruvian A-37B "Dragonfly" fighter and guided it to the Cessna. Program rules call for a series of warning actions before a suspect flight is shot at, but those procedures were truncated and the Cessna received no warning. The Pentagon-owned CIA plane tailed the Cessna for nearly an hour. Although the two American pilots began to express doubts in the minutes before the downing that the Cessna was a drug flight, they were unable to communicate with the Spanish-speaking Peruvian officer, who was engrossed in a conversation with his ground station, or with the fighter pilot. Roni and Charity Bowers, who was in her mother's arms, were killed by a single bullet that passed through the fuselage. Kevin Donaldson's left leg was shattered by bullets, but he managed to land the crippled plane on one pontoon in the Amazon. While not assigning blame, a review conducted by the State Department and the Peruvian government concluded in August that the program, operated in Peru by the CIA, had become sloppy in its implementation and that procedures designed to prevent mistakes had been dropped. In October, a Senate Intelligence Committee investigation found that the U.S. government had been lax in managing the program and that the Peruvian military had shown a "tragic" lack of judgment. It recommended that the CIA stop running the interdiction flights. For the White House, former U.S. ambassador to Colombia Maurice Busby conducted a review of the overall air interdiction policy. The results of his report, completed last fall, were not released. An interagency working group led by the National Security Council is reviewing the Busby findings and preparing a revised regional code of operations that will allow the resumption of the interdiction program, State Department officials said. Staff writer Karen DeYoung contributed to this report. Note: CIA-Guided Peru Action Killed Woman and Infant, Hurt Pilot. Related Articles & Web Site: Colombia Drug War News U.S. To Start Peruvian Drug Flights Peru To Press for Drug Flights U.S. Shares Fault In Peru Incident Home Comment Email Register Recent Comments Help |
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| Comment #11 posted by Hope on February 25, 2002 at 15:21:21 PT |
| Many others have been shot down and probably many without drugs....and probably many suddenly "had" drugs after the shoot down. If this hadn't been a woman and child....if they hadn't been well known and American missionaries, if there hadn't been survivors, we would never have heard about this. It's hard to believe that this horror only held up these shootdowns for 7 months. Itchy trigger fingers and budget writers had to get their way again faster than I ever imagined they would. [ Post Comment ] |
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Comment #10 posted by freddybigbee on February 25, 2002 at 13:01:58 PT:
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| The shoot-down only goes to show you how destructive illegal drugs are compared to legal drugs, leading as they do to murder and all. Noone gets shot down over legal drugs. Bad illegal drugs. Oh, there were no drugs involved? That's ok, it's like the property seizures with no conviction; just chalk it up to drugs regardless. Don't bother to distinguish between deaths caused by law-enforcement and deaths caused by black-market competition (caused by prohibition). Deaths are deaths. Chalk them up to illegal drugs. Bad illegal drugs. And if the govt. pays out $35M; chalk it up to the costs to society of illegal drugs. Bad illegal drugs. The media have been consolidated as subsidiaries of multi-national giants to such an extent that journalists are effectively gagged on the costs of prohibition. After all, why allow your minions to write anything that could jeopardize the prohibition that stifles competition by hemp with your (oil, corn, cotton, pharmaceutical...) business? [ Post Comment ] |
| Comment #9 posted by Hope on February 25, 2002 at 09:07:42 PT |
| At their website http://www.abwe.org/ I learned that ABWE hasn't filed a lawsuit yet....but they may simply because the governments have not responded to their losses at all. No one has paid for their plane, a big loss financially for them, or any medical bills or taken any responsibility for the tragedy at all. I was horrified 7 months ago, when the shocked Bowers was saying all that about God's will. I think they may be waking up a little to the truth of the treachery of our government in this situation. I wrote them then about what I thought was the situation and I wrote them again Saturday using the same basic words that I used in the post below. [ Post Comment ] |
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Comment #8 posted by kaptinemo on February 25, 2002 at 05:25:11 PT:
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| But as to the motivations of those religious groups who were either silent or vocal supporters of the War on Some Drugs and the interdiction flights, I do have some questions. Now these people want 'justice'...as in money. As E_J had mentioned, the poor husband was originally running around with folded hands and piously saying "It's God's Will". (I am sure a lot of DrugWarriors were breathing quiet sighs of relief at those pronouncements; the sheep were still malleable, after all.) But, something has changed; something has caused this man and his people to strike back...at a politically inopportune time for the White House. This comes after a decade of passive and tacit support for the increasingly dangerous interdiction flights. (I mean, only terrorists kill innocent people, right? Not the sainted US government; it doesn't murder or maim or conspire against it's own citizens, right? Noooooo, we all know it doesn't do that...and it's unAmerican of you to even think such terrible things about our country! You better wave that flag and buy-on-command if you don't want the terrs to win!) Evidently, now that some of theirs have been sacrificed upon the Church of the Holy DrugWar's altar, now they decide the cost is too high...as if it never had been too high before. (It's a sad fact that no one knows how many innocent people have died as a result of the shootdowns; the pilots and their controllers were judge, jury and hangman all conveniently rolled into one neat little US-funded package.) It seems each generation gets to learn the same lessons all over again; history books don't seem to help at all. I've long held that until the elite and the middle class of this society once again (as they did in the 1970's with the marijuana laws) sees that the laws meant to keep the underclass in check can negatively affect themselves, the laws will not change. These people are finding this out the hard way, again. [ Post Comment ] |
| Comment #7 posted by Hope on February 23, 2002 at 16:14:09 PT |
| He's Pentecostal. That's why he can claim to be a minister, too. All Pentecostals consider themselves to be "ministers"...so when the media says he's a "minister" of the church...it's the same thing as a Baptist being a "member" of the church. The Bible says for members to settle their disagreements among themselves, not with lawsuits against each other in a court of law. Our government is far from being a member of the body of Christ. I'd say suing the government means, hopefully, that Mr. Bowers has finally awakened to what I expect is the "real" truth. I don't believe that God caused these deaths, but I have an odd suspicion He let it happen,not just because of freewill, I believe He could have prevented it, but, probably, because in her passion for Him, Ronni Bowers probably offered to die if He ever needed her to. Personally, I "lay down my life" for others in all kinds of ways, mostly by doing something for others when I really want to do something else or not do anything at all. I "lay down" my life as far as going ahead and doing what I might actually, lazily, fearfully, or selfishly, desire not to do. My feeling in conversations with God, run to, "Jesus was a sacrifice, once for all time, and I being inclined to not wanting to be killed, would prefer not to be a bloody martyr to any cause.....but that I would if He absolutely required it and couldn't find another way....other wise...I prefer that God protect and guide and have mercy on me and all of mine, family, friends, neighbors, and other believers, whenever possible, but of course, that His, and not my will be done...but hopefully that they would correspond....if possible. I'm pretty sure that she offered herself completely, fearlessly...and that the "evil" of prohibition and it's hell-bent practitioners killed her....but that God would use her, and her child's, death and our loss for good....mainly to end the needless bloodshed...blood sprayed all over the world in the name of stopping people from using drugs. I'm glad Mr. Bowers and his church are responding to the monsters of the misled and self-righteous prohibition movement and I hope he realizes God's call to lead many out of the darkness and death of prohibition. I don't mean lead them to do drugs...or that being a heroin addict is a good thing to be....I mean to lead people who think themselves righteous out of the evil of prohibition at any cost. If we've said it once, we've said it a thousand times, "He (Jesus) saith unto them, "Are ye so without understanding also? Do ye not perceive that whatsoever thing from without entereth into the man, it cannot defile him.... That which cometh out of the man, that defileth the man." (Mark 7:18-20) [ Post Comment ] |
| Comment #6 posted by E_Johnson on February 23, 2002 at 10:53:22 PT |
| The Justice Department, which is representing the government in the negotiations, did not respond to requests for comment. What would Jesus do, John? Pour some corn oil on your head and ask him. [ Post Comment ] |
| Comment #5 posted by FoM on February 23, 2002 at 09:56:43 PT |
| A young mother and child were killed. Mistake or not it's wrong and our government is responsible. How many others have been shot down that we never hear about. Shooting down planes or polluting a countries environment with horrible herbicides shouldn't be allowed. All to stop drugs! Kill people and destroy countries to stop drugs. It makes absolutely no sense to me. Drug prevention starts and should stay in each families home. Parents are the teachers or they should be. [ Post Comment ] |
| Comment #4 posted by E_Johnson on February 23, 2002 at 09:49:39 PT |
| Right after the murder (it was a murder, they just murdered the wrong victims, but the intent of the shoot down was murder in cold blood no matter who was in the plane) the group seemed to be taking the "God's plan" route, it's God's plan that this tragedy happened and it's not for us to question it. Maybe they decided it was God's plan for them to sue and hold these murderers accountable. God has plans for everyone I guess, even lawyers. Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R), whose western Michigan district includes Fruitport, where the Bowerses lived and where the church that sent them to Peru is located, has been trying to expedite a settlement. He said he believes the CIA wants the claim settled. This must be more than a little upsetting to the Republican Party. "Everybody wants to get this thing taken care of so that the missionary organization and the Bowers family can move forward," he said. He said it would be "unfortunate" if, by the time Bush reached Peru on March 23, "our government had not taken care of the Bowers family and the Donaldsons." A Republican threatening the President with a scandal? They'd better settle this soon if they don't want this story displacing the "drugs fund terrorist" coverage, which is getting more than a little repetitive as the the nation's journalists continue to send out rewritten DEA press releases as their supposed personal creative accomplishments in journalism. Even the shameless hacks who do the mainstream drug war coverage have to be getting sick of themselves by now. [ Post Comment ] |
| Comment #3 posted by JR Bob Dobbs on February 23, 2002 at 08:32:19 PT |
| Everybody could join one gigantic lawsuit against the government for drug-war damages. I'm sure every citizen has a good reason for wanting compensation - living in a police state and paying half your earning for it seems like enough to me. [ Post Comment ] |
| Comment #2 posted by goneposthole on February 23, 2002 at 06:26:53 PT |
| the Baptists got a taste of 'drug war' medicine. 35,000,000 dollars is a little low. Every assault related to drug interdiction where innocent people have been victimized throughout the United States and the rest of the world should be mentioned in the lawsuit. Let's do the math. Let's use this example: 700,000 marijuana arrests per year for (let's say) 15 years just to cost average. 700.000 x 15 x 35,000,000 equals 3,675,000,000,000,000 or 3 quadrillion, 675 trillion dollars total on the lawsuit. A 2 trillion dollar yearly budget for the US Govt, it is going to take 1,837.5 years to settle the lawsuit. Providing every tax dollar is used to pay the settlement in the lawsuit. It is too bad that the US Gov't will have to pay. They are fortunate it is so liitle. Not to mention the 98 million appropriation for Occidental Petroleum to operate a fettered oil field. Now 35,000,000 more to settle a wrongful death lawsuit. It can only only be a beginning, I hope lawsuits are plunked down on desks for a long time to come. The US Gov't should quit while is ahead. They can't. They're hooked on drug war money. [ Post Comment ] |
| Comment #1 posted by freedom fighter on February 23, 2002 at 01:28:16 PT |
| to the people who go to churches about it. Pass the packages of few seeds around and announce that we all can be arrested for it. Remind the folks that whatever compensation Bowers do get, we pay for it. This is never about being gettin high. ff [ Post Comment ] |
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