CLARKE BEFORE HE DONNED BEERS GOGGLES

The Nose Knows: The Bombing of the Al Shifa Pharmaceutical Plant in Sudan is one of Clinton's lamest lies— but who cares? (Jason Vest, March 10 - 16, 1999, Village Voice)

[W]hile the Domestic Lie will draw the wrath of Congress and the independent counsel and whip the Fourth Estate into a frenzy that flings all else aside, the National Security Lie -- though more blatant and consequential -- will be granted and allowed to fly off into the horizon of memory.

Case in point: Last August's obliteration of the Al Shifa pharmaceutical plant in the Sudan. Two Fridays ago, the Al Shifa's owner, Salah Idris, filed lawsuits against the U.S. government in Washington and San Francisco to release millions of dollars the Treasury Department ordered frozen last year, not long after the Defense Department -- on instructions of the commander in chief -- destroyed Idris's Khartoum plant with 13 cruise missiles on the heels of Clinton's grand jury testimony in the Lewinsky matter. The grounds for converting the Al Shifa to rubble, some may recall, were that the plant was supposedly the weapons-of-mass-destruction arm of new U.S. foreign policy bogeyman Osama bin Laden's international terror empire, churning out precursor chemicals to concoct VX nerve gas. At first, the U.S. government asserted that Al Shifa was financed by Bin Laden; upon finding out it wasn't, the government said that Idris was a front man, a Bin Laden confederate, and, despite not being on the State Department's list of "designated terrorists" (yes, Virginia, there is such a thing), the Sudanese-Saudi banking and investment magnate would have to deal with his U.S.-held millions being put into stasis. [...]

Immediately after the bombing, the U.S. propagated the notion that Al Shifa had vats of lethal brew ready for action. Indeed, unnamed government sources told U.S. News & World Report that this was old news: that Al Shifa "had been in the Pentagon's inventory of targets for several years," and that "one final step" before loosing the Tomahawks was running "computer models of the risk that explosions at the chemical factory would unleash a plume of poison gas across Sudan." However, when it quickly became evident that the plant was not the "clear and immediate danger" that Clinton had declared it to be, backpedaling commenced: the scientific basis for the attack was a soil sample containing EMPTA, a non-lethal VX precursor.

No more details than that, sayeth the White House, in the name of protecting intelligence "sources and methods." However, everyone from an EMPTA authority at Oxford's chemistry department to the American Chemical Society has pointed out that the presence of commercially used EMPTA proves nothing. According to a recent issue of ACS's Chemical & Engineering News, the administration's refusal to examine the results of Professor Tullius's investigation, and its contention that intelligence activities would be "jeopardized by disclosing the amount found, the analytical techniques used, or the other chemicals detected . . . [serve] only to exacerbate people's disbelief of the U.S. government's claims."

No matter. On January 22, as demonstrated in The Washington Post, the government's story underwent yet another permutation. Currently, according to White House terrorism czar Richard Clarke, the U.S. is "sure" that the Iraqis were the sinister force behind Al Shifa, producing what the Post characterized as "powdered VX-like substance at the plant that, when mixed with bleach and water, would have become fully active nerve gas." This, says Professor Tullius, strains credulity: "Bleach is often used to detoxify nerve agents," he says. "Using bleach to activate an agent makes no sense." While the Iraqi and Sudanese militaries are known to have collaborated on limited munitions projects, says investigative reporter Frank Smyth, there is nothing linking these endeavors to Al Shifa or Bin Laden. "It looks like the administration acted based on inferences drawn from pieces of intelligence they presumed were connected," he says.

That seems to be about par for the Clinton foreign policy course. According to the intelligence agent who once hung his cloak and dagger in Khartoum, behind every intelligence failure is a policy failure, and, he says, one has to question the U.S. approach to Sudan. Currently controlled by a government with a horrible human rights record -- which is at war with Christian and animist rebels with somewhat less horrible human rights records -- the Khartoum government has been the focus of a hard-line approach by a clique of U.S. foreign policy officials: Berger, Clarke, Madeline Albright, and Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Susan Rice. This has been the case despite Khartoum's attempts at international outreach, through acts such as delivering Carlos the Jackal to the French and expelling Osama bin Laden for the U.S. ("The Sudanese aren't sweethearts, but even the Taliban in Afghanistan get more respect than Khartoum does," a rueful mid-level State Department official says.) If the U.S. government is serious about neutralizing threats of Islamist terrorism from Sudan, says former Sudanese foreign minister Francis Deng, it should try to understand this famine-plagued country and work to change it from the inside rather than bombing it.