The Real Dirt on Sudan

by Arianna Huffington

THE decision to send Tomahawk cruise missiles against the El Shifa factory in Sudan turns out to have been based on evidence so flimsy that even James Bond would have refrained from acting on it. This was first revealed in a front-page story in the New York Times on Sept. 21, and has now been explored in chilling detail in this week's New Yorker by Seymour Hersh.

Remember when the President rushed back from Martha's Vineyard to speak to the nation from the Oval Office? "Our target was terror," he said. Well, it turns that in Sudan our target was a pharmaceutical factory. "The factory," the President asserted, "was involved in the production of materials for chemical weapons. The United States does not take this action lightly."

In fact, it appears that the United States took this action not just lightly but also recklessly and under extraordinary circumstances -- to wit, excluding from the decision-making process four of the five members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as well as FBI director Louis Freeh, who at the time had 400 men in the field investigating the embassy bombings. The attack on Sudan was supposed to be in retaliation for the very bombings the FBI was investigating.

The President's national-security advisor, Sandy Berger, told the nation that he knew "with great certainty" that the Khartoum factory was producing a nerve-gas precursor. Berger's great certainty was based on a handful of dirt from the factory's yard. So the President immediately assumed Dr. No was in the building -- and blew it to smithereens. The Administration has now admitted that it wasn't unaware the factory was manufacturing medicine.

But the television media that make or break a scandal these days have yet to take notice. "This story had all the wrong odors from the beginning," Bill Moyers told me. "It reminded me of decisions to retaliate taken in the Johnson White House during Vietnam on slim evidence of uncorroborated personal reports."

"I can tell you," Seymour Hersh said Tuesday on Charlie Rose -- one of the tiny handful of shows that dealt with the recent disclosures-"that the members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had an explanation for why they were cut out. They were cut out because they would have said 'no'."

Despite Hersh's revelations based on more than a hundred interviews with intelligence and military sources, scandal-weary members on the Hill entrusted with oversight responsibilities have also remained silent.

Let's assume that most Democrats are not going to criticize their already-vulnerable president about anything. But where are the Republicans? Rep. Floyd Spence (R-S.C.), chairman of the House National Security Committee, had a few questions for the Administration, but no time to ask them with the House going to recess and the election looming. "We've been very concerned," he told me, "about the Administration's declaration of war on terrorism, with no follow-up after the botched-up cruise-missile attacks and no coherent policy for dealing with the terrorist threats."

In a letter to Spence on Wednesday, Rep. Walter Jones (R-N.C.), a member of the National Security Committee, wrote, "it is imperative that the National Security Committee undertake a comprehensive investigation on the August missile attack . . . as its first order of business in the 106th Congress." Jones, who had supported the attacks, expresses in the letter his newfound skepticism: "After learning more about the attack, I am disturbed that the Clinton Administration undertook seemingly hasty and ill-planned military action without full consultation of the nation's foremost uniformed leaders."

Senators on the Armed Services and Intelligence Committees who had all supported the strikes are also beginning to stir. Sen. Bob Smith (R-N.H.),too, plans to call for hearings after the election. "The allegations are disturbing," he told me, "and the President's exclusion of the FBI raises serious doubts about his decision."

'I was here on this island up till 2:30 in the morning," the President said in a speech in Martha's Vineyard a few days after the attack on Sudan," trying to make absolutely sure that at that chemical plant there was no night shift. I believed I had to take the action I did, but I didn't want some person who was a nobody to me -- but who may have a family to feed and a life to live, and probably had no earthly idea what else was going on there -- to die needlessly."

"Somewhere in Libya right now, a janitor is working the night shift at the Libyan intelligence headquarters," a concerned Michael Douglas tells Annette Bening in The American President. "And he's going about doing his job because he has no idea that in about an hour he's going to die in a massive explosion."

Douglas was seducing a pretty lobbyist. The President is lulling a nation to sleep, while destroying lives, property, and American credibility abroad.

Related items on this website:

 AR Online Aug 1998 "Chemical factory? yeah, right!"

  New York Post, Dec 2001: Sexgate spurred Clinton missile attack