CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Presidential Entitlement to Kill: The 1998 Bombing of Sudan

Bill Clinton on the phone in the Oval Office. Photo: White House.

Last week was the 28th anniversary of the U.S. government bombing of a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan. Scott Horton, director of the Libertarian Institute, observed last week that that wanton assault by the Clinton administration “helped make a folk hero out of bin Laden, drove up recruitment for Al Qaeda and made it more difficult for the Taliban to give him up.” Operation Infinite Reach was a farce of the first order – and may have helped pave the way to the September 11 attacks.

That carnage resulted in a federal court ruling that practically gave presidents a license to kill any time that they claimed to have good intentions.

On August 7, 1998, two trucks loaded with explosives detonated nearly simultaneously, wrecking U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, killing 224 people, including 12 Americans, and wounding more than 4,000.

The U.S. government quickly concluded that the embassy attacks had been an al-Qaeda operation. Twelve days later the Clinton administration launched Operation Infinite Reach. In a failed attempt to kill Osama bin Laden, scores of Tomahawk cruise missiles struck al-Qaeda terrorist training camps in Afghanistan. Thirteen cruise missiles launched from U.S. ships in the Red Sea destroyed the El Shifa factory in Khartoum, Sudan.

President Clinton announced that “our goal was to destroy, in Sudan, the factory with which bin Laden’s network is associated.” Clinton declared that the attack on the “chemical weapons-related facility” was an “exercise of our inherent right of self-defense … to prevent and deter additional attacks by a clearly identified terrorist threat” and that the “terrorist-related facilities in Afghanistan and Sudan” were hit “because of the imminent threat they presented to our national security.”

In Washington press conferences on the day of the attack, National Security Adviser Sandy Berger continually referred to the “so-called pharmaceutical plant.” When a “senior intelligence official” speaking at a Pentagon briefing was asked, “What is this pharmaceutical facility supposed to make?” he replied, “We have no evidence – or have seen no products, commercial products that are sold out of this facility. The facility also has a secured perimeter and it’s patrolled by the Sudanese military.”

But the plant was actually wide open to visitors and had been visited by U.S. government officials, World Health Organization officials, and foreign diplomats in the months before the U.S. attack. There was no Sudanese military presence near the plant.

Earlier in 1998, El Shifa had been awarded (with U.S. government approval) a UN contract to ship a hundred thousand cartons of a veterinary antibiotic medicine to Iraq under a special exemption to the UN embargo on that country. In the days after the attack, journalists reported that the factory grounds were littered with “melted packets of pain relievers and bottles of antibiotics.” Before the smoke had ceased rising from the rubble, it was undeniable that El Shifa was the largest pharmaceutical producer in the Sudan.

The factory was destroyed in part because, when CIA whiz kids searched the Internet for information on it, the El Shifa website did not contain a list of drugs the factory manufactured. This supposedly proved the factory was a chemical-weapons site that must be destroyed.

Defense Secretary William Cohen........

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