The April 20 shootdown in Peru of a private plane carrying Baptist missionaries – killing American Veronica Bowers and her 7-month-old daughter, severely wounding pilot Kevin Donaldson – was seen at the time as a tragic mistake, collateral damage in the War on Drugs. A new State Department report

shows the entire U.S.-Peruvian program to interdict drug traffickers’ airplanes was a horrific blunder waiting to happen.

The program, initiated by the Clinton administration in 1994 as Plan Colombia

and soon expanded into the Andean Initiative, was intended to combine the CIA’s surveillance expertise with Peruvian military personnel to interdict cocaine flights to the United States. At first, there were multiple layers of failsafe procedures to ensure no loss of innocent lives.

The State Department report describes, in bland bureaucratese that cannot disguise the awful truth, how those procedures were “abbreviated” over time. A rigorous four-step protocol for spotting, contacting, warning and finally intercepting suspect aircraft was pared down to a hasty three steps best summed up as “ready, fire, aim.”

The specific blunders in this case include not checking the missionary aircraft’s registration numbers, though they were clearly printed on the tail and wing; and not taking into account that the small aircraft was flying into Peru, the wrong way to smuggle cocaine into the United States. The Peruvian military jet did not fly ahead of the small aircraft and waggle its wings in the international symbol to land, and warning shots were fired upward and from behind, where Donaldson could not see or hear them. Further, CIA officials in a trailing plane knew Donaldson was using a radio that could not receive the warning the Peruvian plane was broadcasting – the small local airstrip he was flying to required it – but their attempt to radio that information to the Peruvian pilot was foiled by a language barrier, chatter and even a radio playing music in the background.

Besides the specific blunders of this case, the report found that key U.S. and Peruvian officials had systematically narrowed their particular command and control roles, so that no one person or organization ultimately was responsible for mistakes. The possibility that innocent people might die if a wrongly targeted plane was shot down was recognized at the start of the program, but President Clinton and Congress approved the program after receiving solid assurances that ample safety protocols were in place. Neither Mr. Clinton nor Mr. Bush, much less Congress, were ever given any indication that those protocols had been “abbreviated.”

This collapse in procedure and accountability occurred on Mr. Clinton’s watch; his administration must shoulder the blame for losing track of a program capable of such deadly outcome. The Bush administration, though, has not handled the aftermath well.

Immediately after the shootdown, the Bush administration promised Congress a thorough investigation would be completed within weeks so it could be used to evaluate the air interdiction program. Instead, it took months.

Congress, frustrated by the lack of accountability, and with no information by which to prescribe corrective action, last month voted to withhold $65 million in aid to Peru, severely harming that struggling country’s attempts to free itself from the powerful drug cartels. Also being withheld is the U.S. surveillance expertise, which has led to the nearly complete cessation of drug-trafficking air interdiction efforts on both Peru and Colombia. That is, Veronica Bowers and her 7-month-old baby were collaterally damaged in vain.