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Politics : Just the Facts, Ma'am: A Compendium of Liberal Fiction -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sully- who wrote (19429)	10/26/2004 4:03:55 PM
From: cirrus	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 90947

Very good post. However, this paragraph is interesting: The physical evidence was a soil sample containing EMPTA, a precursor for VX nerve gas. Almost immediately, the decision to strike at al Shifa aroused controversy. U.S. officials had expressed skepticism that the plant produced pharmaceuticals at all, but reporters on the ground in Sudan found aspirin bottles and a variety of other indications that the plant had, in fact, manufactured drugs. For journalists and many at the CIA, the case was hardly clear cut. For one thing, the soil sample was collected from outside the plant's front gate, not within the grounds, and an internal CIA memo issued a month before the attacks had recommended gathering additional soil samples from the site before reaching any conclusions. "It caused a lot of heartburn at the agency," recalls a former top intelligence official. Did CIA Director Tenet tell Bill Clinton that this was a "slam dunk"? If so, it clearly wasn't. Here's some other viewpoints, none of which are definitive: ------------------------------------------------------ One weak link in the EMPTA argument is the question of who procured the sample. Citing a "veteran intelligence agent," the journalist Jason Vest pointed out in March 1999 that since 1996 the CIA had treated Sudan as a "denied area"— off-limits to actual CIA officers. This led the CIA to depend on either recruiting a foreign national or one on loan from a friendly neighboring intelligence service. Egypt has no love for Sudan, and Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Uganda all receive "non-lethal" U.S. military aid used to help the Sudanese People's Liberation Movement fight the Islamist regime in Khartoum. While declining to confirm specifics about how the sample was collected, the agent stated that the choice of operative for the mission likely did not lend itself to ensuring entirely objective results. Another potential problem for the EMPTA argument, widely noted at the time, is that pesticide traces in the soil are apparently easy to mistake for EMPTA. (This is quite different from, and less easy to dismiss than, the argument dismissed by Benjamin and Simon above—that EMPTA "could hypothetically have been a derivative of pesticide production.") A third difficulty, cited by the slain reporter Daniel Pearl of the Wall Street Journal (who wrote several characteristically thorough investigations of the Al-Shifa bombing) was attributed to Dr. Jan Medema, a toxic-substances expert in Holland: Dr. Medema says it is highly unlikely that a plant's ventilation system or underground waste-disposal system would allow O-Empta to get into surface soil outside the plant. More likely, he said, is that the Sudanese wanted to get rid of some already made O-Empta and poured it directly into the soil, and "somebody saw that and took a sample." This latter scenario is hard to picture. If the plant managers worried that they'd be searched or bombed, wouldn't it have been better simply to remove the EMPTA to a separate, more secure building? Why throw away a substance they would have gone through such difficulty to produce and stash* in the first place? slate.msn.com