Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory
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The Al-Shifa ("to Heal" OR "healing") pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum, Sudan was constructed between 1992 and 1996 with components imported from the United States, Sweden, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, India, and Thailand. It was the largest pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum and it employed over 300 workers, producing medicine both for human and veterinary use. Not only did one of the poorest countries in the world manage to supply around half of the needs of its Sudanese population, it managed to achieve the unthinkable - export. Thus American Pharmaceutical giants found themselves competing against Al-Shifa without any success. In a report for the Nonproliferation Review, Michael Barletta shows, that it was an open facility, often shown to foreign visitors [1].
On August 20, 1998, the factory was destroyed in cruise missile strikes launched by the United States in retaliation for the August 7 truck bomb attacks on its embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya (see: 1998 U.S. embassy bombings). The administration of President Bill Clinton justified the attacks, dubbed Operation Infinite Reach, on the grounds that the al-Shifa plant was involved in producing chemical weapons and had ties with the violent Islamist al Qaeda group of Osama bin Laden, which was believed to be behind the embassy bombings. The August 20 U.S. action also hit al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan, to where bin Laden had moved following his May 1996 expulsion from Sudan.
The key piece of physical evidence linking the al-Shifa facility to production of chemical weapons was the discovery of EMPTA in a soil sample taken from the plant during a CIA clandestine operation. EMPTA, or O-ethyl methylphosphonothioic acid, is classified as a Schedule 2B compound according to the Chemical Weapons Convention and is a VX precursor. Although several theoretical uses for EMPTA were postulated as well as several patented process using EMPTA, such as the manufacture of plastic, no known industrial uses of EMPTA were ever documented nor any products that contained EMPTA. It is, however, not banned by the Chemical Weapons Convention as originally claimed by the US government. Moreover, it does not necessarily follow from the presence of EMPTA near (but outside) the boundary of Al Shifa that this was produced in the factory: EMPTA could have been "stored in or transported near al-Shifa, instead of being produced by it," [2] according to a report by Michael Barletta.
Under-Secretary of State Thomas Pickering claimed to have sufficient evidence against Sudan, including contacts between officials at Al-Shifa plant and Iraqi chemical weapons experts, with the Iraq chemical weapons program the only one identified with using EMPTA for VX production. The National Democratic Alliance [NDA], a Sudanese opposition in Cairo led by Mubarak Al-Mahdi, also insisted that the plant was producing ingredients for chemical weapons. [3] Former Clinton administration counter terrorism advisor Richard Clarke and former national security advisor Sandy Berger also noted the facilities alleged ties with the former Iraqi government. Clarke also cited Iraq’s $199,000 contract with al Shifa for veterinary medicine under the UN’s Oil for Food Program.
Officials later acknowledged, however, "that the evidence that prompted President Clinton to order the missile strike on the Shifa plant was not as solid as first portrayed. Indeed, officials later said that there was no proof that the plant had been manufacturing or storing nerve gas, as initially suspected by the Americans, or had been linked to Osama bin Laden, who was a resident of Khartoum in the 1980s."[4] The U.S. State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research wrote a report in 1999 questioning the attack on the factory, suggesting that the connection to bin Laden was not accurate; James Risen reported in the New York Times: "Now, the analysts renewed their doubts and told Assistant Secretary of State Phyllis Oakley that the C.I.A.'s evidence on which the attack was based was inadequate. Ms. Oakley asked them to double-check; perhaps there was some intelligence they had not yet seen. The answer came back quickly: There was no additional evidence. Ms. Oakley called a meeting of key aides and a consensus emerged: Contrary to what the Administration was saying, the case tying Al Shifa to Mr. bin Laden or to chemical weapons was weak."[5] The Chairman of El Shifa Pharmaceutical Industries, who is critical of the Sudanese government, more recently told reporters, "I had inventories of every chemical and records of every employee's history. There were no such [nerve gas] chemicals being made here."[6] Sudan has since invited the U.S. to conduct chemical tests at the site for evidence to support its claim that the plant might have been a chemical weapons factory; so far, the U.S. has refused the invitation to investigate. Nevertheless, the U.S. has refused to officially apologize for the attacks, suggesting that some privately still suspect that chemical weapons activity existed there.[7]
The Khartoum attack was noted for its outstanding precision, as successive missiles all but levelled the al-Shifa works with minimal damage to surrounding areas, although one person was killed and ten wounded in the attack.
Directly after the strike the Sudanese government demanded that the Security Council conduct an investigation of the site to determine if it had been used to produce chemical weapons or precursors. Such an investigation was from the start opposed by the US. Nor has USA ever let an independent laboratory analyze the sample allegedly containing EMPTA. Michael Barletta concludes that there is no evidence the al-Shifa factory was ever involved in production of chemical weapons, and it is known that many of the initial US allegations were wrong[8].
The factory was a principal source of Sudan's anti-malaria and veterinary drugs.[citation needed] Human Rights Watch reported that the bombing had the unintended effect of stopping relief efforts aimed at supplying food to areas of Sudan gripped by famine: "many relief efforts have been postponed indefinitely, including a crucial one run by the U.S.-based International Rescue Committee where more than fifty southerners are dying daily"[9]. In Summer 2001, Werner Daum (Germany's ambassador to Sudan 1996–2000) wrote an article [10] in which he estimated that the attack "probably led to tens of thousands of deaths" of Sudanese civilians. The regional director of the Near East Foundation, who has direct field experience in the Sudan, published in the Boston Globe another article with the same estimate. By that time, however, the U.S. had changed its sanctions policy to allow commercial sales of medical products to embargoed destinations, so the Sudanese were allowed to buy pharmaceutical supplies from U.S. companies. [11]
The strikes were criticized by many as being motivated at least in part by a desire to deflect attention from President Clinton's ongoing domestic troubles in the Lewinsky scandal, coming only three days after Clinton admitted to his affair with Lewinsky. Nonetheless, opponents to this 'Wag the Dog' theory raise the fact that concurrent strikes against al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan disprove this theory, given that an additional strike would do nothing to divert attention that the Afghanistan strike might have already achieved.
The Sudanese government wants the plant preserved in its destroyed condition as a reminder of the American attack and also offered an open door to the U.S. for chemical testing at the site, however, the U.S. refused the invitation. Sudan has asked the U.S. for an apology for the attack but the U.S. has refused on the grounds it has not ruled out the possibility the plant had some connection to chemical weapons development. [12]
The bombing of the al-Shifa factory resurfaced in the news in April, 2006 due to the firing of former CIA analyst Mary O'Neil McCarthy. McCarthy was against the bombing of the factory in 1998, a fact that was published in the New York Times soon after her arrest. However, despite the claims by the government of Sudan that the factory produced only pharmaceuticals, McCarthy came to the view the plant was used in chemical weapons development. Thomas Joscelyn quotes Daniel Benjamin, a former NSC staffer:
- The report of the 9/11 Commission notes that the National Security staff reviewed the intelligence in April 2000 and concluded that the CIA's assessment of its intelligence on bin Laden and al-Shifa had been valid; the memo to Clinton on this was cosigned by Richard Clarke and Mary McCarthy, the NSC senior director for intelligence programs, who opposed the bombing of al-Shifa in 1998. The report also notes that in their testimony before the commission, Al Gore, Sandy Berger, George Tenet, and Richard Clarke all stood by the decision to bomb al-Shifa. [13]
In his book 9-11 , Noam Chomsky argues that the bombing of Al-Shifa was a piece of terrorism by the United States Government that probably resulted in the deaths of "several tens of thousands" of Sudanese people from diseases such as malaria and TB because they were deprived of the medicines manufactured at the plant.
