Flaws in U.S. Account Raise Questions on Strike in Sudan
By TIM WEINER and STEVEN LEE MYERS
ASHINGTON -- In the days since the United States bombed what it called a secret
chemical weapons plant in Sudan, some of the key statements made by administration
officials to justify the attack have proven to be inaccurate, misleading or open to question.
U.S. officials continue to say they bombed a facility that produced a key ingredient for a deadly
nerve agent. But their descriptions of the plant as a highly secretive, tightly secured military-industrial
site, their initial statement that the plant produced no commercial products, and their statements that
the exiled Saudi millionaire, Osama bin Laden, directly financed the plant, do not appear to be
factual.
Administration officials' efforts to strengthen their case have been complicated by the extreme
secrecy they imposed in launching the attack, which they now say prevents them from showing their
evidence to the world. That secrecy and the inconsistencies in their public statements have given the
Sudanese government, which the United States calls a sponsor of international terrorism, a chance
to challenge the justification for the attack and call for an international inquiry. The administration's
refusal to endorse an inquiry also has become an issue in the international debate over the attack.
President Clinton personally chose the bombing site, a pharmaceutical plant in an industrial area of
northern Khartoum, as the target for U.S. cruise missiles, declining to strike any other among a
larger set of targets presented to him by military planners.
But it is unclear whether the CIA ever told Clinton that it was also a medicine factory with a United
Nations contract.
"There may have been better places to go," a Pentagon official said Friday. "That doesn't mean it
was the wrong place to go."
Clinton said Monday that he stayed awake "up till 2:30 in the morning trying to make absolutely sure
that at that chemical plant there was no night shift." He added: "I didn't want some person who was
a nobody to me, but who may have a family to feed and a life to live, and probably had no earthly
idea what else was going on there, to die needlessly."
The plant made both medicine and veterinary drugs, according to U.S. and European engineers and
consultants who helped build, design and supply the plant. The plant they describe was not a tightly
guarded chemical-weapons facility patrolled by Sudanese soldiers, as a senior intelligence official
described it last week.
Briefing reporters hours after the attack on the plant, the senior intelligence official said: "We have
no evidence -- or have seen no products, commercial products that are sold out of this facility."
That representation was also made by the CIA to the nation's most senior military officers, Pentagon
officials said.
The point the senior intelligence official was trying to make in his briefing was that "this was not a
normal pharmaceutical facility," his spokesman said Friday. His focus was on the presence at the
plant of Empta, a precursor chemical used to make VX, a deadly nerve gas, the spokesman said.
Senior U.S. officials said that the CIA secretly took a soil sample from a few yards outside the plant
that, upon analysis, contained Empta.
The plant "just didn't lend itself to making chemical weapons," said Tom Carnaffin, a British
mechanical engineer who served as technical manager at the plant during its construction from 1992
to 1996. Workers there mixed pre-formulated chemicals into medicines, he said, and lacked the
space to stockpile or manufacture other chemicals.
But another government official said "you could spin several scenarios" as to why Empta was found
at the plant, including suppositions that the chemical was stored or transported there. Other officials
now say it is unclear that Empta was actually produced at the plant, but insisted that the soil sample
proved the factory's complicity in making VX.
Several chemical-weapons experts outside the government say the single soil sample, if it was not
carefully preserved and quickly tested, could have misidentified the key ingredient. They said Empta
is chemically similar to several commercially available pesticides and herbicides, including the
well-known commercially available weedkiller called Round-Up. Senior government officials say
they are sure the CIA's chemical analysis was correct, and the most compelling evidence they saw
for attacking the plant.
The CIA did not make clear to senior military officials that the plant produced a large share of the
medicine used in Sudan, a Pentagon official said.
The Pentagon official said: "Some of the intelligence people didn't know they would find any of that
there," referring to shattered remnants of medical products found in the wreckage of the plant after
the attack.
A spokesman would not say Friday whether the intelligence agency told Clinton that the plant made
medicine, or whether the agency deemed that fact important. Several government officials said any
aspect of the plant beyond the presence of Empta in it was irrelevant.
Secretary of Defense William Cohen, in briefing reporters shortly after the attack, said that bin
Laden, the exiled Saudi multi-millionaire whom the U.S. blames for the bombings of U.S. embassies
in Africa, helped finance the plant.
"We do know that he had contributed to this particular facility," Cohen said. The U.S. government
has presented no evidence to support that, and some U.S. officials now say bin Laden's financial
support for Hassan al Turabi, Sudan's leading political figure, as well as for the Sudanese military
and intelligence services did not directly flow to the plant itself.
Officials at the White House, the Pentagon and the CIA insist that they hit the right target, and cite
the soil sample as proof.
"I do not sense here any question about the legitimacy of this target," one administration official said.
"We have confidence in the soil sample. It categorically demonstrates the presence of a compound
good for just one thing -- making VX by the Iraqi method. The plant was set up with the
encouragement of Turabi who urged bin Laden to finance it. End of story."
An intelligence official said: "In retrospect and with the benefit of hindsight it was the right target."
The decision to attack the plant was made in extreme secrecy by a very small circle of senior
officials, including few beyond Clinton, Cohen, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, national
security adviser Sandy Berger and Army Gen. Henry Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Gen. Anthony Zinni, commander of U.S. forces in the region, drew up the plans.
In less lofty circles of the government, there is some controversy about the attack on the plant in
Khartoum. "This is all anybody in these corridors is talking about," one official said. "Why this
facility? Why did nobody bother to talk to the technical people who know about the evidence they
had? Why was there only one soil sample? And one lab test?"
Other government officials have suggested privately that the United States would have done better
to strike other military-industrial sites in Khartoum that, they say, are more closely linked to
chemical-weapons production. But this is armchair generalship to senior military officials.
In the days after the strike, the Pentagon conducted a thorough review of all the evidence and
reasoning that went into choosing the factory. A senior military officer said that "had we to do it over
again," the plant would remain a target.
"My feeling is the evidence is there," the officer said.
The small amount of intelligence information released by the Clinton administration to justify the
attack contrasts with the detailed intelligence made public by other administrations to justify military
strikes.
In April 1986, President Reagan went so far as to make public the contents of decoded Libyan
diplomatic cables in explaining why he had ordered a U.S. bombing raid that month on Tripoli, the
Libyan capital. In a White House speech, Reagan said the United States had "irrefutable" evidence
linking Libya to the bombing of a West Berlin discotheque that killed a U.S. serviceman.
While he did not divulge the exact source of the information, he said that the Libyan government had
sent messages to its embassy in East Berlin about a week before the bombing at the discotheque to
conduct a "terrorist attack against Americans."
The day before the attack, he said, the Libyan embassy "alerted Tripoli that the attack would be
carried out the following morning -- the next day, they reported back to Tripoli on the great success
of their mission."
His move outraged intelligence officers, who said the disclosure had damaged their ability to gather
information on terrorist groups, but it was seen by the Reagan administration as vital in winning the
support of U.S. allies and the public. |
