Centerfield: My very last word on the Aspirin factory and Richard Clarke--Really!

March 26, 2004

My very last word on the Aspirin factory and Richard Clarke--Really!

I've gotten a lot of response on the aspirin factory thing and Richard Clarke's veracity. Some people think Clarke is "credible," as in believable. Some cite his long record of honesty and integrity as a public servant, his "reputation."

And both Clarke and Clinton Defense Secretary William Cohen swore under oath before the 9/11 Commission that Al-Shifa was a chemical weapons factory, owned by Osama Bin Laden, producing WMD's for Saddam. So what should we believe? Following are the facts about Al-Shifa.

Skip it if you just want to believe what fits your preconceptions and politics.

It was stated in another blog that William Cohen testified as follows about Al-Shifa. The blogger said that Cohen's testimony confirmed Clarke's so they found Clarke more credible because of it. My take is the opposite, because I actually did some research on the whole affair. Someone asked me for comment. here's the blog extract on Cohen:

I'm listening to William Cohen's testimony before the 9/11 Commission right now on C-Span. He was asked what "actionable intelligence" really means, and I think he hit the answer out of the park and, at the same time, made a tight case against the oft-mocked attack on al-Shifa after the Embassy bombings in Africa. Cohen said this is a good example of what I considered "actionable intelligence":

1. Intelligence showed that the plant was constructed under conditions of extraordinary secrecy and security. It was protected during construction by surface-to-air missiles
2. The Military Industrial Corporation was building the plant. That was an entity that got substantial funding from bin Laden.
3. It was known that bin Laden was trying to get chemical weapons. funded
4. The plant's owner traveled to Baghdad to meet with the founder of Iraq's VX program.
5. The soil near the plant contained emta (sp.)--a precursor of VX that did not occur in nature and had no purpose other than to produce VX.

Here's MY take:

The problem: the post-bombing facts don't back up the conclusion (that it was, or had ever been, a chemical weapons factory). Clinton received the intel cited, a circumstantial case and a pretty thin one. He was assured it was actually rock solid. He acted--and it's been a case of bureaucratic cover-the-butt ever since, as Cohen and Clark's testimony shows. Point by point:

Don't know. We have not been given the specific hard intel referred to (and why not?) we're just supposed to take their word for it.

Bin Laden was a stock holder in MIC. So were many of the Bin laden clan, the bulk of whom were on the outs with OBL. At no time did OBL or the clan have a controlling interest, or any executive control of the company. MIC built the plant. MIC built military installations. MIC also built schools, malls, industrial plants, oil pipelines, etc. We don't bomb them. I once owned a small amount of stock in Worldcom. Does this make me responsible for their actions? A non-starter, this one.

So what? This proves precisly nothing about that particular plant. ZILCH. Under the same reasoning, Osama Bin Laden is justification for bombing your local Feed and Grain. Hey, they got chemicals there!

A Sudanese drug manufacturer travelled to the
country next door to visit with the man responsible for drug and chemical import/export? Allah forbid there could be any possible rational explanation for that other than a covert plot to manufacture WMD's for Saddam! See #1.

The only hard evidence referred to at all,
really. What we're talking about here is one soil sample reportedly gathered by one CIA "asset" at night, tested once, that no one has been able to get a repeat test on. What we don't have is [a] the asset's ID, any evidence of his/her reliability, motivations, prior performance, etc.; [b] any "chain of evidence" for the sample that shows where it came from and how it was handled and tested, or [c] the sample itself, available for re-testing. See #1.

And immediately after the bombing when the owner was told why his plant was bombed he opened the site to the media, appealed to the U.N., and had numerous experts from Europe and America flown in, all of whom spent weeks examining the rubble. And all those media and all those experts found no EMPTA. No EMPA (the actual nerve gas). No evidence at all of chem weapon production, and with the site so broken up it would have been impossible to sterilize it in the few hours before it was covered with media. But they did find abundant and convincing evidence that the sinister site was....a pharmaceutical plant producing over half of Sudan's medicines, from aspirin to anitbiotics. BTW, he had owned the plant for all of five months.

The U.S. government had seized the U.S. assets of the owner. A couple of months later, they quietly released them after the owner filed suit against the U.S. government--in federal court in Washington, where all terrorists go for their public hearings, right? A quick
Google under sudan pharmaceutical bombing suit produced hundreds of results.

Here's a sample: "Most of those who have investigated the case have concluded that the US acted on faulty intelligence and that key procedures were overriden by officials in the White House."

The report found no evidence that Salah Idris had ever met or had any dealings with Osama bin Laden, or any other extremist Islamic individuals or groups. It also refuted allegations, voiced by some US officials, that Iraqi officials were involved in the production of chemical
weapons at the factory.

George Salem of Akin Gump said that they found that the plant was a legitimate commercial operation "wholly engaged in the production of pharmaceuticals for sale on domestic and international markets".

Evidence emerged suggesting that the El-Shifa plant made pharmaceuticals – supplying more than half of Sudan's demand – not weapons, and that owner, Salah Idris, was a businessman, not a terrorist. In fact, the administration quickly backtracked on claims that Mr. Idris, who bought the plant just five months before it was bombed, was linked to Bin Laden.

Outsiders freely visited the plant and said it was not guarded and that it lacked the extra space, equipment, materials and
air-sealed doors necessary for chemical weapons work (which requires
sophistication rarely seen in a state like Sudan). The Eastern and Southern
African Trade and Development Bank, which provided Mr. Idris with a loan,
audited the operation and found nothing amiss.

The soil sample that supposedly contained the chemical EMPTA, which is used in the production of VX, a nerve gas, as well as some innocent applications, appeared flawed and could not be replicated by American chemists brought in by Mr. Idris. Yet the United States opposed inspecting the rubble, as proposed by Mr. Idris and Sudanese government authorities, even though doing so likely would have confirmed any presence of EMPTA.

Oops! Sound familiar? So you see why I don't believe Cohen or Clarke on this, especially given that it was their fuck-up? As I've mentioned, they have particular reasons right now to not want a tale of how Bill Clinton, acting in good faith on what he was told was absolutely reliable and actionable intelligence, bombed the crap out of an aspirin factory on the mistaken assumption it was really a chem weapons plant owned by Bin Laden, making WMD's for Saddam.

The owner sued the U.S. in the US Court of Claims for compensation, but the suit was ulimately thrown out by the court last year on the grounds that the court was incompetent to decide what was a legitimate military target after it had been duly designated as such by the Commander-in-Chief, under the "seperation of powers" doctrine. The court did not address the evidence at all, it was a "jurisdictional" ruling. El-Shifa Pharmaceutical Industries, Co. v. United States, 2003 WL 1342179 (Ct. Fed. Cls., March 14, 2003)

...the court granted the motion to dismiss on the ground that the Takings Clause "does not extend to the destruction of property designated by the President as enemy war-making property, and that the court may not look behind the President's discharge of his Constitutional duties as Commander in Chief, including his declaration of what constitutes an enemy
target and his determination to use military force to destroy that
target".

But we must believe Clarke, he's an honorable man with a reputation for honesty and square dealing built up through years of public service....so if he's lying about this NOW, and was lying then, how is that reputation deserved, and useful for backing his veracity NOW?

The Dems won't disown the action because doing so makes Bush look reasonable for acting on faulty intel on the WMD issue, and a vague Saddam/OBL link. The intel community won't denounce it because it shows how thoroughly and completely they screwed the pooch, not just with Iraq but the whole Middle East, for years. And the Republicans won't denounce it because as long as it's accepted officially as a chem-weapon facility they can use it as WMD issue ammo and a Bin Laden/Saddam link tied up by the Clinton admin, years before the Iraq invasion. But none of them wants to seriously examine it in
public again.

You can see why I don't really believe
anyone's "authority" about such things...especially partisan ranters
with political agendas.

Posted by Tully at March 26, 2004 01:32 PM

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Centerfield

A Weblog of Centrist Voices in American Politics

March 26, 2004

My very last word on the Aspirin factory and Richard Clarke--Really!