Al-shifa Pharmaceutical Factory

On ). The administration of President Bill Clinton justified the attacks, dubbed Operation Infinite Reach , on the grounds that the al-Shifa plant was involved in producing Chemical Weapon s and had ties with the violent Islamist Al Qaeda group of Osama Bin Laden , which was believed to be behind the embassy bombings. The August 20 U.S. action also hit Al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan , to where Bin Laden had moved following his May 1996 expulsion from Sudan .

The key piece of physical evidence linking the al-Shifa facility to production of chemical weapons was the discovery of EMPTA in a soil sample taken from the plant during a CIA clandestine operation. EMPTA, or O-ethyl methylphosphonothioic acid, is classified as a Schedule 2B compound according to the Chemical Weapons Convention and is a VX Precursor . Although several theoretical uses for EMPTA were postulated as well as several patented process using EMPTA, such as the manufacture of plastic, no known industrial uses of EMPTA were ever documented nor any products that contained EMPTA. It is, however, not banned by the Chemical Weapons Convention as originally claimed by the US government.

missiles sent on the Al-Shifa factory]]

Under-Secretary of State and former National Security Advisor Sandy Berger also noted the facilities alleged ties with the former Iraqi government. Clarke also cited Iraq’s $199,000 contract with al Shifa for veterinary medicine under the UN’s Oil For Food Program .

The Khartoum attack was noted for its outstanding precision, as successive missiles all but levelled the al-Shifa works with minimal damage to surrounding areas, although one person was killed and ten wounded in the attack. But the factory is today widely thought to have had no connections with weapons-related production or with Bin Laden , and the presence of EMPTA at the facility has never been credibly confirmed. It is also widely believed that some sort of activity involving chemical weapons was taking place in or around Khartoum during the 1990s, but these suspicions revolved around much easier to produce Mustard Gas and other facilities in the area.

Directly after the strike the Sudanese government demanded that the UN Security council conduct an investigation of the site to determine if it had been used to produce chemical weapons or precursors. Such an investigation was from the start opposed by USA, in a surprising reversal of its policy of inspections in Iraq. Nor has USA ever let an independent laboratory analyze the sample allegedly containing EMPTA. As a result there is no evidence the al-Shifa factory was ever involved in production of chemical weapons, and it is known that many of the initial US allegation were wrong {Link without Title} .

The factory was a principal source of , who has direct field experience in the Sudan, published in the Boston Globe another article with the same estimate. By that time, however, the U.S. had changed its sanctions policy to allow commercial sales of medical products to embargoed destinations, so the Sudanese were allowed to buy pharmaceutical supplies from U.S. companies. {Link without Title}

The strikes were criticized by many as being motivated at least in part by a desire to deflect attention from President Clinton 's ongoing domestic (in both senses of the word) troubles in the Lewinsky Scandal , coming only three days after Clinton admitted to his affair with Lewinsky. Nonetheless, opponents to this ' Wag The Dog ' theory raise the fact that concurrent strikes against al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan disprove this theory, given that an additional strike would do nothing to divert attention that the Afghanistan strike might have already achieved.

The Sudanese government wants the plant preserved in its destroyed condition as a reminder of the American attack and also offered an open door to the U.S. for chemical testing at the site, however, the U.S. refused the invitation. Sudan has asked the U.S. for an apology for the attack but the U.S. has refused on the grounds it has not ruled out the possibility the plant had some connection to chemical weapons development. {Link without Title}

The bombing of the al-Shifa factory resurfaced in the news in April, 2006 due to the firing of former CIA analyst Mary O'Neil McCarthy . McCarthy was against the bombing of the factory in 1998, a fact that was published in the ''New York Times'' soon after her arrest. However, despite the claims by the government of Sudan that the factory produced only pharmaceuticals, McCarthy came to the view the plant was used in chemical weapons development. Thomas Joscelyn quotes Daniel Benjamin, a former NSC staffer:

The report of the 9/11 Commission notes that the National Security staff reviewed the intelligence in April 2000 and concluded that the CIA's assessment of its intelligence on bin Laden and al-Shifa had been valid; the memo to Clinton on this was cosigned by Richard Clarke and Mary McCarthy, the NSC senior director for intelligence programs, who opposed the bombing of al-Shifa in 1998. The report also notes that in their testimony before the commission, Al Gore, Sandy Berger, George Tenet, and Richard Clarke all stood by the decision to bomb al-Shifa.

EXTERNAL LINKS

A series of pictures of the Al-Shifa factory

Monterey Institute of International Studies links to related sites

Chemical Weapons in the Sudan. Allegations and Evidence

The CIA in Khartoum by John Ryle - Reply by Gary Wills New York Review of Books

The New McCarthyism

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Al-shifa Pharmaceutical Factory