Don't Forget The Victims Of al-Shifa

How The U.S. Casually Committed A 9/11 Esque Attack On A Medical Facility

Imagine some alien civilization that had vastly superior military technology to the U.S.. They claimed to be peaceful and preached human rights. However, at one point, which was far from an isolated incident, they bombed half of U.S. pharmacies. They claimed that they did this because of terror risks. Such claims were subsequently debunked. This mass murder wasn’t much of an issue in alien politics. A few op eds were written, some outrage surrounded it, but ultimately it paled in comparison to an alien sex scandal in terms of its political ramifications. The victims of the bombings were ignored—the campaign of carnage was called a tragedy rather than an atrocity.

The event was mostly discussed as a strategic error, rather than a campaign of murder. The kids who died were never discussed—investigations of it were covered up. I think it would be safe to say that the aliens did not come in peace. They may not have come specifically for the aim of conquest, but they see American lives in much the same way one sees their troops in a game of risk—a resource to be disposed of for strategic game. A domain in which losses are strategic errors rather than coldblooded murder. A policy that thinks “The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic.” This is, however, very similar to what we did at al-Shifa, and it’s something we should not forget.

In 1998, the Clinton administration conducted an airstrike on the al-Shifa medical facility in Sudan. They claimed that al-Shifa was creating chemical weapons and had ties to al-Qaeda. This turned out to be pure fabrication.

As Lacey says

Indeed, officials later said that there was no proof that the plant had been manufacturing or storing nerve gas, as initially suspected by the Americans, or had been linked to Osama bin Laden, who was a resident of Khartoum in the 1980's.

Barletta reports, in a detailed report discussing the details of the bombing

In response to the U.S. attack and allegations, Sudanese Interior Minister Abdul Rahim Mohammed Hussein said that the facility was “a factory for medical drugs” and that “we have no chemical weapons factory in our country.” 40 Sudan’s head of state, Omar al-Bashir, said that the Sudan would ask the United Nations to create “a commission to verify the nature of the activity of the plant.” 41 Although there are sound reasons to be wary of accepting Sudanese government claims, officials’ actions in the wake of the attack are not what one would expect if their statements were mere propaganda. Government ministers arrived at Shifa while the plant was still burning from the attack, which presumably would have been personally hazardous if the plant had been involved in CW production. 42 Press accounts indicated no government or other effort to deny access to the facility, and contrary to their past practice of impeding foreign access to the Sudan, officials began approving visas for journalists almost immediately upon request. 43

Contrary to U.S. allegations, it is now clear that the plant was not a closed, secretive, or military-run facility. Irish film producer Irwin Armstrong, who visited the plant in 1997, said, “the Americans have got this completely wrong. In other parts of the country I encountered heavy security but not here. I was allowed to walk about quite freely.” 44 Bishop H.H. Brookins of the African Methodist Episcopal Church of Nashville and Arkansas businessman Bobby May told New Yorker reporter Seymour Hersh that they had toured Shifa days before the U.S. attack and were free to move about the plant as they observed workers packaging medicines. On learning of the attack, Brookins said he believed “somebody made a mistake,” while May recounted watching CNN coverage of the attack from the Khartoum Hilton: “I’m lying in bed and watching the White House talking about this place being a heavily guarded chemical factory. I couldn’t believe my ears. Until then, I had a lot of faith in our intelligence services.” 45 Other accounts indicated that the facility often received guests, including the president of Niger, the British ambassador to the Sudan, and groups of Sudanese schoolchildren. Foreigners were allowed to enter the facility freely, it had no special security constraints, and prominent road signs directed visitors to al-Shifa. 46

Testimony that the plant produced medicine and was not heavily guarded contradicts some initial U.S. claims, but does not preclude the possibility that the Shifa facility may also have been involved in CW production. However, U.S. allegations that the Shifa plant produced a chemical weapon precursor have also been disputed by many sources that are independent or critical of the Sudanese government.

Foreign engineers and managers familiar with the construction and operation of the plant said that it was not suitably designed or operated to permit CW production. The U.S. consultant who designed Shifa, Henry R. Jobe, said that it was not constructed with equipment necessary for nerve agent production. 47 The plant’s Italian supplier, Dino Romanatti, said that he had full access to the facility during visits in February and May 1998, and saw neither equipment nor space necessary for CW production. Romanatti described plant resources as very limited; “the availability of tools in the factory was close to zero. You couldn’t get a piece of steel, a screw, a saw. To imagine a plant that makes chemical weapons is absolutely incredible.” 48

Thomas Carnaffin, a British engineer who served as technical manager for the plant’s construction from 1992 to 1996, said that he never saw any indication of suspect activities at the plant. He told The New York Times, “I suppose I went into every corner of the plant. It was never a plant of high security. You could walk around anywhere you liked, and no one tried to stop you.” 49 Carnaffin told The Guardian that “unless there have been some radical changes in the last few months, it just isn’t equipped to cope with the demands of chemical weapon manufacturing. You need things like airlocks but this factory just has doors leading out onto the street.” 50 The Chicago Tribune quoted Carnaffin as saying, “it was a very simple mixing, blending, and dispensing pharmaceutical facility.” 51

A Jordanian engineer who supervised plant production in 1997, Mohammed Abul Waheed, said “the factory was designed to produce medicine and it would be impossible to convert it to make anything else.” 52 The former co-owner of Shifa, Salem Ahmed Baboud, likewise said the plant was designed only to manufacture particular medicines, and could not have been used for any other purpose. 53

Some diplomats on the scene agreed with these sources. An unidentified senior European diplomat in Khartoum with experience in tracking CW proliferation said that the Sudan has never been detected attempting to circumvent the international system for monitoring exports of sensitive materials and equipment used in CW production. 54 The German Ambassador to the Sudan, Werner Daum, reported to Bonn by coded telex the evening of the U.S. attack that the plant was neither secret nor disguised. The report said Shifa could “in no way be described as a chemical plant,” but was instead “Sudan’s largest pharmaceutical plant,” and that it used materials imported from China and Europe. 55 Moreover, unidentified senior diplomats in Khartoum told the Financial Times that they had no reason to believe the plant produced anything other than pharmaceuticals, and they do not believe that it was linked to bin Laden. 56 Finally, while some Sudanese opposition figures echoed U.S. allegations regarding Shifa, other leaders and the anti-government Democratic Unionist Party stated that they believe Shifa only produced pharmaceuticals. 57

Thus, according to foreign consultants and diplomats familiar with its recent operations and some independent Sudanese sources, there were no indications of suspicious activities and Shifa apparently had neither equipment nor space for CW production. These multiple accounts, the size of the plant, and the diversity of its pharmaceutical production together suggest that it is highly unlikely that large-scale CW production could have been under way at Shifa.

However, most of these eyewitnesses are not CW specialists and it is possible that their knowledge is incomplete. Hence, their observations do not exclude the possibility that, at some point in time, some portion of the plant was used in small-scale or pilot production of a chemical weapon precursor. Indeed, Will D. Carpenter, a CW expert and former chemical company executive, said that production of a quantity of CW precursor chemicals sufficient for terrorist use might require only “a wide range of available glass-lined equipment that can be tucked away in a small part of a building.” 58

However, the available evidence does contradict many of the initial U.S. assertions. The factory was neither closed, nor secretive, nor guarded by Sudanese troops, nor in any discernible way part of Sudan’s “military industrial complex.” Likewise, no evidence has emerged of any direct financial or other obvious link between bin Laden and the plant. 59

U.S. officials acknowledged a month after the attack that they had no evidence directly connecting bin Laden to Shifa when President Clinton ordered the factory’s destruction. Their account of the target selection process, moreover, suggests that desire to act swiftly led them to draw firm conclusions from inconclusive evidence. U.S. officials explained that intelligence officers searched commercial databases and Sudanese internet sites, including Shifa’s, for information. Because they did not find any list of medicines for sale by the plant, they mistakenly concluded that it did not produce pharmaceuticals. U.S. officials have also admitted to uncertainty as to whether their own evidence indicated that precursor chemicals were produced at Shifa, or only stored or shipped through the plant. 60 And Clinton administration officials eventually acknowledged that the factory did produce pharmaceuticals. 61

As Hitchens wrote

• Vials of medicine and other evidence of civilian pharmaceutical manufacture were visible in photographs of the first day's debris. The German ambassador to Sudan, Werner Daum, sent a sarcastic cable to Bonn saying that he knew this all along. The British engineer who built the plant, Tom Carnaffin, attested that the plant had no space for the off-the-record experimental work. Other engineers and architects pointed out that the factory had no air-sealed doors, essential if poison gas is to be on the menu. The Sudanese government called loudly for an international inspection, which the Clinton administration -- once so confident -- declined to endorse. By the first week in September, Defense Secretary William Cohen admitted that he "should have known" that Al-Shifa made medical and agricultural products.

• Secretary Cohen also admitted in the same statement that there was no longer any "direct" financial connection to be asserted between bin Laden and the plant. But he was still pretty sure that there were indirect ones. That could be. There are also many straightforward connections between the turbanned one and Saudi Arabia. But does anyone believe that the United States would rocket a Saudi Arabian target and let the monarchs find out about it from CNN, or when the missiles fell?

• The presence of EMPTA (O-ethyl methyl phosphonothoic acid) proves nothing on its own, whether found in the soil near a factory or inside the factory itself. I spoke to Professor R.J.P. Williams, who is Professor of Inorganic Chemistry at Oxford and considered something of an authority on biological systems and on EMPTA. It can be an intermediate in the production of VX gas, he told me, but it can be an intermediate for dealing with agricultural pests and for myriad other purposes. "We must be told where the compound was found, and in what quantity it is known to have been produced, and whether there is any ascertainable link to nerve-gas production. 'Trace' elements in adjacent soil are of no use. Either the administration has something to hide, or for some reason is withholding the evidence."

So much for the legitimacy of the "legally accurate" target. But suppose that all these suspicions could be dissolved, and that we knew the factory was run by Doctor No or Herr Blofeld of Fu Manchu. It still could not have been folded like a tent and spirited away in a day or so. And the United States has diplomatic relations with Sudan. (It even used these relations, not long ago, to press successfully for the deportation of bin Laden.) Was there a demarche made between the State Department and the Sudanese regime? (We want to see inside this factory right away and will interpret refusal as a hostile act.) There was not. Even Saddam Hussein was and is given more warning than that.

Well then, what was the hurry? A hurry that was panicky enough for the president and his advisors to pick the wrong objective and then, stained with embarrassment and retraction, to refuse the open inquiry that could have settled the question in the first place? There is really only one possible answer to that question. Clinton needed to look "presidential" for a day. He may even have needed a vacation from his family vacation. In any event, he acted with caprice and brutality and with a complete disregard for international law, and perhaps counted on the indifference of the press and public to a negligible society like that of Sudan, and killed wogs to save his own lousy Hyde (to say nothing of our new moral tutor, the ridiculous sermonizer Lieberman). No bipartisan contrition is likely to be offered to the starving Sudanese: unmentioned on the "prayer-breakfast" circuit.

This is why I agree with those who say that we must put Monica behind us, and stop our comic obsession with sex (or "sex" as the president's filthy-minded and incompetent lawyers are still compelled, for perjurious reasons, to call it in their briefing). Clinton must not resign, nor should he be impeached. He and his fans have earned the right to serve out their whole sentence.

And these air strikes don’t work for counterterror. Malvesti says

An evaluation of the United States' three previous CT military air strikes (henceforth referred to as CT strikes) reveals that this option is a blunt, ineffective instrument that creates a cycle of vengeance with minimal gains at best.

So to recap, coincidentally at the height of the Lewinsky scandal Clinton made a now debunked claim that

1. al-Shifa was creating chemical weapons.

2. The time to act was right at that moment—coincidentally as Hitchens says “on the night of Monica Lewinsky's return to the grand jury.”

3. This policy of airstrikes in response to terrorism doesn’t work well, as has been shown repeatedly. The war on terror in general has been a disaster.

It’s hard to assess whether or not this was purely a diversion from the sex scandal. But the fact that it’s unclear is truly a tragedy. If killing thousands of people distracts from sex scandal’s, making it politically advantageous, rather than sex scandals distracting from mass murder of Sudanese people, that says something rather dismal about our politics.

The humanitarian toll of this was enormous. As Human Rights Watch Reports

Famine
Finally, we wish to draw your attention once more to the famine gripping southern Sudan, where the U.N. estimates that 2.4 million people are at risk of starvation. Unfortunately for this devastated population, the U.S. bombing has had the unintended effect of leading to a disruption in assistance. For instance, all U.N. agencies based in Khartoum have evacuated their American staff, as have many other relief organizations. As a result, many relief efforts have been postponed indefinitely, including a crucial one run by the U.S.-based International Rescue Committee in the government garrison town of Wau in southern Sudan, where more than fifty southerners are dying daily. We urge you to remain mindful of this terrible crisis as you continue to assess U.S. policy in Sudan.'

Copelyn et al report

In reality, the factory was producing all of the country’s TB medication and roughly half of its anti-malarial drugs – among other crucial medicines. It is thus unsurprising that the estimated death toll was in the tens of thousands. To make matters worse, no connection between al-Shifa and Osama has ever been established, nor were any illicit materials found.

The U.S. tried to cover it up, as Barletta notes.

In an uncharacteristic and unprecedented move, the government of the Sudan proposed that the U.N. Security Council conduct an on-site inspection of the Shifa facility, to determine whether it had been used to produce CW or precursor chemicals. The appeal was particularly surprising because the U.N. Security Council had explicitly condemned the Sudan and imposed air travel sanctions against it in 1996 for failing to cooperate with an investigation of an attempt to assassinate Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. 168

In a similarly peculiar response, the United States opposed and sought to block an international investigation of Shifa’s production.

We will never know how many people died in the attack on al-Shifa.

We will never know with certainty why the U.S. launched the strike.

We will never know the names of the victims of al-Shifa—those who died because of the medicine that wasn’t there. We’ll never know the names of the children who died of malaria, the mother’s who cried over their dead children, the kids who starved because the U.S. was willing to carry out a 9/11 esque attack based on lies and fabrication. We would never conduct such an attack on American soil—had the al-Shifa victims been from the U.S. rather than Sudan, it would have been the scandal of the century.

And we should never forget the victims of al-Shifa.