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Politics : Bill Clinton Scandal - SANITY CHECK
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To: Les H who wrote (820)8/27/1998 10:48:00 PM
From: Les H   of 67261
 
Embarrassing Questions Abound

It's now widely understood that the Shifa plant was added to
the target list literally hours before the attack.
And U.S. officials can offer precious little evidence of a
direct link between Bin Laden and the plant other than
assertions of his ties to the Sudanese military industrial
complex, that the plant was part of that complex and that the
precursor was found there.
When asked about the bin Laden connection on the day
of the attack, Cohen offered this explanation:
"We do know that he's had an association in the past with
the Sudanese government. We do know that he has had
some financial interests in contributing to this particular
facility; whether or not it's with the full knowledge of the
Sudanese government remains to be seen."
Now, U.S. officials say they do not know with certainty
whether the VX precursor was manufactured at the plant,
was stored there, or may have represented a small quantity of
research and development material.

Shifting Official Explanations
Moreover, senior U.S. intelligence officials have since
changed their views on another critical point.
They now acknowledge the plant was dual-use-that is,
that it was capable of making drugs as well as nerve agent.
But on the day of the attack they said there was no evidence
that commercial products were ever sold out of the facility.
Another murky point is to what extent the U.S. was
concerned about unleashing a potentially toxic cloud of nerve
agent when it bombed the plant. Officials say that they used a
computer model to predict what would happen. But there are
two difficulties with that argument.
Precursors aren't toxic, so any worry about toxic fatalities
would be minimal. And if the U.S. did suspect the presence
of highly toxic VX at the plant, they certainly had no idea how
much might be there-again making it impossible to predict
impact of the explosion on the surrounding neighborhood.
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