What we do is hand off the intelligence to that country's military, and it's really up to them what they do with it. Peru has chosen to shoot down. It's often called jokingly the "You fly, you die" policy. Colombia says they shoot down, but they don't do it very often. What they do more often is just sort of force down planes and then strafe them on the ground. Venezuela hasn't done much of anything lately. But the real air transit point is between Peru and Colombia, from the growing areas to the processing areas.

Why does Peru have that policy?

I imagine they adopted that policy with a lot of encouragement from the United States back in the mid-'90s. Certainly we were pleased when [disgraced former President Alberto] Fujimori and [fugitive former spy chief Vladimiro] Montesinos adopted that policy.

What do you make of all the confusion between the Cessna, the CIA plane and the Peruvian jet?

We're not going to know that for a while; that's going to be for the investigation. When we hand over this sort of intelligence to the Peruvians, though, there's either an implied or a specific agreement that they are going to follow procedures -- trying to communicate with the plane, dipping your wings, shooting a warning shot. It doesn't look like they did any of that.

It looks like they just fired?

That's what we're hearing from the first eyewitness accounts. If that's true, than it's more than just a few miscommunications. It's a complete neglect of what they've been told to do. We're just not going to know until they do a real investigation.

If this mission was part of our anti-narcotics aid to Peru, why was the CIA involved?

It's inter-agency, they like to say. The defense department is supposed to be in the lead on this, but of course the CIA are one of the many agencies involved. And since they have access to a lot of the good equipment, it makes sense that that was a CIA plane. I'm not sure, but I think there was a private contractor involved too, whether they own the plane or whether they were pilots -- pilots are always in short supply -- I'm not sure yet what their role was. But there were CIA and contractors and a Peruvian air force official on board the plane that was watching that gave the information to the jet.

What does this tragedy draw our attention to?

More than anything, I think it just draws attention to the militaries we're working with in that region. The fact that this was done with U.S. intelligence, with a plane given by the U.S., by pilots and airmen trained and equipped by the U.S. -- everything there was paid for, bought and sold by us. The A-37 was given to Peru for counternarcotics purposes.

It's time that we started looking a little more closely at who we're giving this stuff to. These are institutions with long histories of corruption and human rights abuses. So that obviously calls into question their professionalism and what they can be relied on to do. We may be lucky that this hasn't happened before.

Are these interdiction missions part of Plan Colombia?

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