Many questions to be answered about plane crash

With the United States and Peru at odds over the shooting down of a missionary airplane by a Peruvian air force plane in a joint drug interdiction operation, the decision by both nations to suspend the program until the matter can be sorted out is the only viable option.
The question of why the order was given to fire on the Cessna seaplane -- resulting in the death of a Michigan woman and her baby daughter -- is not the only one that must be answered. Americans should also be told why the Central Intelligence Agency is flying surveillance missions in Latin America, and how it was possible for a Peruvian officer on the surveillance plane to give the order to the Peruvian warplane to open fire on the missionaries while the smaller plane's identity had not been determined.
History: Since 1994, Peru, with the help of the United States, has been shooting down the aircraft of drug smugglers in a program that former drug czar Barry McCaffrey told CNN "darn near put a stop to air smuggling of drugs."
So the U.S. State Department has another plane crash involving Americans to contend with -- this time in Peru -- and at least the Peruvian air force wasted no time in issuing its sincere apologies for the shooting deaths of Baptist missionary Veronica Bowers and the 7-month-old baby she held in her lap. Bowers husband and son, also aboard the plane, were unharmed, but the leg of the pilot, Kevin Donaldson of Pennsylvania, was shattered by the gunfire. Donaldson still managed to land the plane in the Amazon River.
Now the United States is assembling a task force of State Department, CIA, the U.S. Coast Guard and Customs officials to conduct a joint investigation of the incident with the Peruvian government -- and we would imagine to get their stories straight.
Dispute: The Association of Baptists for World Evangelism, the missionary group of which the Bowers family was a part insists that pilot Donaldson had filed a flight plan, which Peru disputes, and had already been cleared to land when the Peruvian fighter opened fire.
Since the Bowers family had been in Peru for some years and Donaldson had been a missionary there since 1983, there can be no claims of language problems.
The devout may see God's will in this tragedy. We see instead, gross human error, and expect the Bush administration to provide the American people with a full and accurate accounting of what happened.