Talk:Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory

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Keith Windschuttle gives three sources for international aid agencies in Sudan who reported no malaria medicine shortage.

see also [2] for another assessment of the humanitarian situation in Sudan not mentioning a malaria medicine shortage and detailing the $US110 million Sudan received from the U.S. Agency for International Development (mostly from the Bureau of Humanitarian Response) in 1998.

In addition, Sudan had an economy the size of $US71 billion GNP in 2003, showing the country surely had enough money in 1999 (along with the described foreign aid resources) to replace its drug supply.

This myth was probably encouraged by former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark's reckless speculation:

The [Al-Shifa] plant produced 50% of the pharmaceuticals available in the Sudan... It produced 90% of the antibiotics used for malaria which is the leading cause of death there... A single U.S. missile attack destroyed the single most important health facility in the Sudan and will cause thousands of deaths.”

(Letter to the U.N., November 1998)

Contents

[edit] Medicine shortage

Since the editors of this page are not following the Keith Windschuttle link, here it is reprinted in its entirety.

Chomsky has persisted with this pattern of behavior right to this day. In his response to September 11, he claimed that no matter how appalling the terrorists’ actions, the United States had done worse. He supported his case with arguments and evidence just as empirically selective and morally duplicitous as those he used to defend Pol Pot. On September 12, 2001, Chomsky wrote:
The terrorist attacks were major atrocities. In scale they may not reach the level of many others, for example, Clinton’s bombing of the Sudan with no credible pretext, destroying half its pharmaceutical supplies and killing unknown numbers of people.
This Sudanese incident was an American missile attack on the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum, where the CIA suspected Iraqi scientists were manufacturing the nerve agent VX for use in chemical weapons contracted by the Saddam Hussein regime. The missile was fired at night so that no workers would be there and the loss of innocent life would be minimised. The factory was located in an industrial area and the only apparent casualty at the time was the caretaker.
While Chomsky drew criticism for making such an odious comparison, he was soon able to flesh out his case. He told a reporter from salon.com that, rather than an “unknown” number of deaths in Khartoum, he now had credible statistics to show there were many more Sudanese victims than those killed in New York and Washington: “That one bombing, according to estimates made by the German Embassy in Sudan and Human Rights Watch, probably led to tens of thousands of deaths.” However, this claim was quickly rendered suspect. One of his two sources, Human Rights Watch, wrote to salon.com the following week denying it had produced any such figure. Its communications director said: “In fact, Human Rights Watch has conducted no research into civilian deaths as the result of US bombing in Sudan and would not make such an assessment without a careful and thorough research mission on the ground.”
Chomsky’s second source had done no research into the matter either. He was Werner Daum, German ambassador to Sudan from 1996 to 2000 who wrote in the Harvard International Review, Summer 2001. Despite his occupation, Daum’s article was anything but diplomatic.
It was a largely anti-American tirade criticizing the United States’ international human rights record, blaming America for the 1980s Iran-Iraq war, accusing it of ignoring Iraq’s gassing of the Kurds, and holding it responsible for the purported deaths of 600,000 Iraqi children as a result of post-1991 economic sanctions. Nonetheless, his comments on the death toll from the Khartoum bombing were not as definitive as Chomsky intimated. Daum wrote:
It is difficult to assess how many people in this poor African country died as a result of the destruction of the Al-Shifa factory, but several tens of thousands seems a reasonable guess. The factory produced some of the basic medicines on the World Health Organization list, covering 20 to 60 percent of Sudan’s market and 100 percent of the market for intravenous liquids. It took more than three months for these products to be replaced with imports.
Now, it is hard to take seriously Daum’s claim that this “guess” was in any way “reasonable.” He said there was a three-month gap between the destruction of the factory and the time it took to replace its products with imports. This seems an implausibly long interval to ship pharmaceuticals but, even if true, it is fanciful to suggest that “several tens of thousands” of people would have died in such a brief period.
Had they done so, they must have succumbed to a highly visible medical crisis, a pandemic to put the SARS outbreak in the shade. Yet no one on the spot, apart from the German ambassador, seems to have heard of it.
Anyone who makes an Internet search of the reports of the Sudanese operations of the several Western aid agencies, including Oxfam, Médecins sans Frontières, and Norwegian People’s Aid, who have been operating in this region for decades, will not find any evidence of an unusual increase in the death toll at the time. Instead, their major health concern, then and now, has been how the Muslim Marxist government in Khartoum was waging civil war by bombing the civilian hospitals of its Christian enemies in the south of the country.
The idea that tens of thousands of Sudanese would have died within three months from a shortage of pharmaceuticals is implausible enough in itself. That this could have happened without any of the aid organizations noticing or complaining is simply unbelievable.
Hence Chomsky’s rationalization for the September 11 attacks is every bit as deceitful as his apology for Pol Pot and his misreading of the Cambodian genocide.

The comments of one reader - Chomsky's defense of Pol Pot continued for about 1 year beyond what we'd now consider reasonable. The US continued to recognise Pol Pot as the leader of Cambodia (and help to hold the UN seat for him) for 12 years after his overthrow. (Chomsky has spoken out on a huge number of issues - his error in this case is trivial in the nature of things, and I think his critics have only one other example of him being somewhat wrong). It ill-behoves a reference work such as Wikipedia to re-publish this kind of quite unwarranted personal abuse, particularily when it bears no relevance to the estimates of the deaths in Sudan.

I reproduced the two sentences about Pol Pot only for the sake of completeness of the Al-Shifa part. If you would like to challenge the credibility of the article on that basis, you will have to address all of Windschuttle's relevant arguments. And then you seem to want to use this challenge as a springboard to trivialize the opinions of those who object to Chomsky's viewpoint. When you first use the word "we" you don't speak for many of us, and when you say, "his error in this case is trivial" and "I think his critics have only one other example of him being somewhat wrong", you certainly don't. See the Wikipedia Noam Chomsky article and discussion for examples.

Secondly, organisations such as Oxfam, Médecins sans Frontières and so forth have to be very, very careful about criticisms of national governments. Check out what MSF said about being driven from Afghanistan after 24 years (it was there all the way through the Russian occupation and the rule of the Taleban). You'll have to read quite carefully to realise the devastating allegations they're making against the latest occupation.

Why would reporting a U.S.-caused medicine shortage be conceived as critical of the Sudanese government? And the argument which you use to try to support this idea isn't reasonable. If the MSF were making devastating allegations, they were being quite the opposite of very, very careful.

Thirdly, Sudan has most recently seen a vast catastrophe, brought about by easily witnessed violence, and the news has still struggled to get out. The claim that some 30,000 deaths of disease were caused by the unprovoked attack on a sovereign nation is not seriously undermined by what we're seeing in the above account.

It certainly would help your case if news were really "struggling to get out" over the course of the seven years since the bombing happened. But is it really true? Relief agencies are integrally related to the hospitals of a country where victims of disease, of course, will go to seek help. And, again, who do you speak for when you say the argument is not seriously undermined? Do we know what it would take to convince you? The Médecins sans frontières SF 1999 International Activity report entry on Sudan only mentions a famine (that took the lives of "only" 3,000) as a priority in that part of the world.
I might add the number of deaths allegedly caused by a medicine shortage seems to grow as fast as the evidence for it seems to shrink. 64.154.26.251 02:58, 17 October 2005 (UTC)

The article you linked to does not mention that the famine took "only" 3,000 in all of Sudan, but 3,000 in Ajiep alone (in a five month period, incidentally). With that in mind 30,000 seems abysmally low a number. Hmmm.

[edit] "the presence of EMPTA at the facility has never been credibly disputed"

This seems to be written from the POV of the Clinton admin. In fact the presence of EMPTA has never been credibly *confirmed*. Given what we now know about the plant, there is no reason to suspect that the test was anything but an error. Mirror Vax 09:47, 17 August 2005 (UTC)

I wouold you direct you here for a better explanation of the chemical evidence, as well as a debate about it. TDC 14:37, August 17, 2005 (UTC)
What evidence? You are taking on blind faith that this "soil sample" business must be absolutely correct, despite the CIA being absolutely wrong about everything else. It is not credible. Where is the confirmation? Did the CIA poke around in the rubble, and what did they find? Odd that we don't hear anything about that. All we hear about is the "soil sample". Mirror Vax 15:11, 17 August 2005 (UTC)
Unless the soil sample was doctored, which to the best of my knowledge no one is implying, there is no way it was misidentified. There was follow up testing performed at the plant nearly a year later, but it is not likely that either EMPTA or ethyl methylphosphonic acid (what it breaks down to) would be present as they would most likely have dissipated by then. So there are several possibilities here, the asset took the sample from another site or the sample was fabricated. TDC 16:07, August 17, 2005 (UTC)
One would think there was "no way" the CIA would make the most basic of errors, such as believing the plant was under military security. But they did. There are innumerable ways to be wrong. Given the total lack of corroboration, there should not be any presumption of correctness. Mirror Vax 16:37, 17 August 2005 (UTC)
No, there are not "innumerable ways to be wrong". As stated before the source gave them the wrong facility that he took the sample from, or it was fabricated. The amount of negligence that would be required to misidentify fonofos as EMPTA would be implausible even for an undergraduate in QA. TDC 17:24, August 17, 2005 (UTC)
I don't find it implasible that the CIA made a mistake. If you want to believe they made one type of mistake instead of another, fine. It doesn't make any difference. Mirror Vax 17:58, 17 August 2005 (UTC)
It makes a world of difference. One is an issue of a technical/scientific nature: what was in the soil sample taken by a HUMINT asset in Sudan. The other is an interpretive issue: what does this mean? TDC 18:09, August 17, 2005 (UTC)
The CIA is a fundamentally biased source; and can NEVER be considered a credible source of information to justify the actions of the US government. Their very mandate is to go out and commit (criminal) acts of espionage in foreign countries. Lying to other countries to futher US interests is the very *POINT* of the CIA's existence; and they wouldn't last long as spies if they weren't very, very good at hiding the truth from the rest of the world.

[edit] NPOV tag

Why specifically is the neutrality tag on this article? Apart from perhaps the Malaria deaths bit (which has a rebuttal in the next sentence) I don't on first glance see anything wrong with it (although it could do with some citations and maybe cut out the weasel words, e.g. on Clinton/Lewinsky connection). It does however seem reasonably balanced. If no-one can justify what specific changes need to be made in the next few days I will remove the tag. Badgerpatrol 01:33, 6 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Organization

This article badly needs organization. The various claims about the justification for the attack - Daniel Benjamin's CYA quote from the Weekly Standard and the quotes from the State Department bureau that investigated the justification for the attack and found it weak - should not be separated like this.--csloat 10:22, 27 July 2006 (UTC)

I tried to segment the article in several categories in an attempt to start organizing it. But I barely edited anything else, so I invite anyone to further categorize or organize the information. I'll try to do more later. Thief12 03:42, 6 August 2007 (UTC)

Article is linking to a wrong 'Leo Casey' —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 85.177.36.2 (talk) 11:50, August 20, 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Minor spin niggles

I found a couple of minor spin-type niggles in the article, which, not being a properly registered user, am not bold enough to correct on my own. These two are: in the Bombing subsection, "processing the most deadly nerve agent"; while "most" can be used in the same way as "rather" or "quite", in modern usage it'd lead the reader to understand that the nerve agent in question is The Most Deadly Nerve Agent Known The Man (misspelling intended) by some objective measure. Suggest removing the word "most" from the sentence, as replacing it with "quite" or "rather" would merely trade one flavour word for another. If on the other hand this sentence comes from a press release or some such, it should be enclosed in quotes and the appropriate citation be put in place. (This is why I'm reticent to go and modify the article myself.)

The other bit is "[...] to where bin Laden had moved following [...]", in the same subsection. I'd think this calls for a citation needed marker, or a "supposedly" or an "allegedly" immediately after the "had". In any case no source is cited for the detail, and as such the phrase comes off like something written by a PR department of the US intelligence apparatus, or possibly a knee-jerk apologist; hardly appropriate for an encyclopedia. 194.187.213.95 18:01, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Tags?

There are two tags at the top that link to a discussion on this page that does not exist. Can someone spell out what the concerns are about "neutrality" and "tone"? If not, I'd like to remove the tags. csloat (talk) 20:15, 21 January 2008 (UTC)