Excerpt from State Department Daily Briefing, October 3, 2002

Excerpt from State Department Daily Briefing, October 3, 2002
1:14 p.m. EDT, OCTOBER 3, 2002

STATE DEPARTMENT REGULAR BRIEFING

BRIEFER: RICHARD BOUCHER, DEPARTMENT SPOKESMAN

Q Colombia. There was a report today that the interdiction program would resume. Can you reassure us that yet again this is not the case?

MR. BOUCHER: The program remains as we've described it before. There's been no final decision made on the resumption of the interdiction program in Colombia and Peru. We announced on April 29th that we would work with the governments of Colombia and Peru on the process to restart the air-bridge denial program. It doesn't include actual operations, which under U.S. law will require a presidential determination.

Under the revised concept of operations, non-commercial aircraft flying in specially designated and publicly declared areas of Colombia and Peru could be subject to special scrutiny by U.S., Colombian and Peruvian ground and aerial detection equipment to determine whether the aircraft is reasonably suspected to be engaged in drug trafficking. But carefully developed safety procedures for intercepting and interdicting such aircraft will be incorporated into the safety checklist.

So at this point, we are taking the steps to put all this in place, to get ready to be able to tell the president that we have done all the preparations to restart the program in a safe manner, but we won't conduct any actual operations until we have a presidential determination.

Q Could you just clarify that? Is it just the presidential determination? Is everything kind of waiting on his desk or are there more steps --

MR. BOUCHER: No. No, it's a matter of we're doing training, we're putting in place procedures, we're getting everything set up. And once it is set up, then we'll go to the president and say, "Okay, this is what we've done to ensure a program that can be done safely and carefully." And, you know, on the basis of the work that we have done to prepare, we'll ask for the presidential determination. We're not there yet. We're still in the training and set-up phase.

As of October 7, 2002, this document was also available online at http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/dpb/2002/14107.htm