Possible Benign Use Is Seen for Chemical at Factory in Sudan
Issue in Depth
The New York Times: U.S. Offensive Against Terrorism
By STEVEN LEE MYERS and TIM WEINER
ASHINGTON -- The chemical that the United States cited to justify its bombing of a
Sudanese factory last week could be used for commercial products, the agency overseeing
the treaty barring chemical weapons said on Wednesday.
The United States has insisted that the chemical found outside the plant could only mean that the
plant was intended to make the nerve agent VX. Sudan contends the plant made medicines and
veterinary products.
The international treaty group, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, conceded
that it was not aware of any commercial product on the market that contained the chemical, nor of
another chemical compound made with it.
But its spokesman, Donato Kinigier-Passigli, said in a telephone interview on Wednesday that a
search of scientific papers showed the chemical, known as EMPTA, could be used "in limited
quantities for legitimate commercial purposes." The uses, he said, included fungicides and
anti-microbial agents, and not just the production of VX.
One Pentagon official said that the treaty organization had simply uncovered academic examples of
possible use with no real evidence that any commercial products are made from EMPTA.
"Just because you identify a chemical agent for commercial uses, that does not mean anyone makes
it," the official said.
In the chemical industry, experts said they were not aware of any commercial uses for EMPTA, nor
could they foresee any practical uses based on what is known about the chemical. Aldrich Chemical
Co. in Milwaukee makes the chemical and sells it at $45 a gram to laboratories for research. But a
spokesman said the company was not aware of its use in any commercial products.
The Clinton administration leveled the Shifa Pharmaceutical Industries Co. plant in Khartoum with a
volley of cruise missiles last Thursday, saying it had evidence linking the factory to the manufacturing
of VX and to a shadowy network of terrorists.
Facing questions about the decision to bomb the factory, senior administration officials said on
Monday that a soil sample collected nearby provided irrefutable evidence of the presence of VX at
the plant.
Kinigier-Passigli emphasized that the organization had come to no conclusions about the
administration's charges or the Sudan's counter-charges. The independent organization administers
the chemical weapons treaty, signed by more than 160 nations and ratified by the U.S. Senate last
year.
Still, the organization's disclosure raised questions about the administration's categorical assertions
that there could be no other possible explanation for the presence of EMPTA, or ethyl
methylphosphonothionate. Wednesday's disclosure added to a number of inconsistencies in the
administration's accusations, including statements by a senior intelligence official hours after the
bombing that the plant in Khartoum was heavily guarded and produced no commercial products.
Administration officials declined on Wednesday to discuss the evidence or the caveats raised by the
Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. However, Defense and intelligence officials,
speaking on condition of anonymity, said they still believed there could be no other explanation for
the presence of EMPTA in a soil sample secretly collected outside the facility several months ago.
On Wednesday, several American experts in chemical warfare and analysis offered another possible
explanation. They said the chemical's structure resembled that of an agricultural insecticide, known
as FONOFOS, which is commercially available in Africa.
While the two are not identical, they have molecular similarities and could be confused in a
laboratory test performed under less-than-ideal conditions, said Hank Ellison, a counterterrorism
expert who ran the Army's chemical and biological warfare programs at Fort Campbell, Ky., in the
1980s.
Ellison, now the president of Cerberus & Associates, Inc., a security consulting firm in Michigan,
said that while the chemical characteristics of FONOFOS and EMPTA were not identical, they
were "very similar" and those similarities "could be misinterpreted in a lab analysis."
"I imagine this soil sample wasn't taken under the best of circumstances, by somebody placing it in a
cooler and immediately sending it to a lab," he said. "And quality control for the storage and
manufacture of pesticides and insecticides is not the highest in the world, so that could increase the
possibility of seeing similarities in the chemical structure."
The defense and intelligence officials dismissed the possibility that the United States could have
misinterpreted the soil sample.
In the Hague, an official with the chemical weapons organization, who spoke on condition of
anonymity, said scientific research also suggested that EMPTA could be the byproduct of the
breakdown of other pesticides.
The international treaty, which the United States Senate ratified last year despite the reservations of
many conservative Republicans, who said the organization would never be effective, does not
identify EMPTA by name.
But the treaty covers it under the "Schedule 2" list of chemicals that are subject to scrutiny by the
organization's inspectors. By definition, chemicals included on Schedule 2 can have legitimate
commercial purposes. That is unlike chemicals on Schedule 1, which are deemed to have no other
use than to kill people and are strictly prohibited.
The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons is the international agency whose more
than 400 enginers and diplomats oversee the inspections of governments and chemical companies
around the world to assure they are not making prohibited agents. The group searched known
scientific literature in respone to press inquiries on EMPTA.
The Sudan has not signed the treaty, so factories like Shifa Pharmaceuticals are not subject to its
inspectors, unlike companies in the United States and other nations that have approved the accord.
While the organization did not identify any products using EMPTA, officials said they could not rule
out the possibility as strongly as the administration has.
The official at the organization, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the scientific research
showed companies including the Mobil Corp. and International Chemical Industries of America had
conducted research into commercial applications that used EMPTA.
The Sudan has called for an international investigation of the missile strike, which killed one person
and wounded seven others, according to the government in Khartoum.
Thomas Carnaffin, a British engineer who worked as a technical manager during the factory's
construction from 1992 to 1996, said he never saw any evidence of EMPTA or other materials
involved in the production of VX.
"I suppose I went into every corner of the plant," he said in a telephone interview from his home in
England. "It was never a plant of high security. You could walk around anywhere you liked, and no
one tried to stop you." |
