Deja vu five years before Iraq

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This month marks the fifth anniversary of the Clinton administration's Operation Infinite Reach. There are many parallels between Operation Infinite Reach and the Bush administration's Operation Iraqi Freedom. Unfortunately, it appears that no one in the government learned anything from the failure and follies of Operation Infinite Reach.

On Aug. 7, 1998 two trucks loaded with explosives detonated nearly simultaneously, wrecking U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Killed were 224 persons, including 12 Americans, and more than 4,000 were wounded.

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

President Clinton announced on Aug. 20, 1998, that the attack on the Sudanese "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 press conferences on the day of the attack, National Security Adviser Sandy Berger continually referred to the "so-called pharmaceutical plant." 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 U.N. contract to ship a 100,000 cartons of a veterinary antibiotic medicine to Iraq. In the days after the attack, journalists reported that the factory grounds were littered with "melted packets of pain relievers and bottles of antibiotics."

The factory was destroyed in part because when CIA whiz kids searched the Internet for information on it, the El Shifa Web site 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 announced: "We do know that [bin Laden] has had some financial interests in contributing to the -- this particular facility." Salah Idris, a Saudi Arabian banker and industrialist, bought the plant five months before the United States destroyed it, but the U.S. government was unaware that the factory had changed hands and that the new owner had no ties with bin Laden.

The Clinton administration's smoking gun was little more than a cupful of dirt that a "CIA operative" had scooped up in December 1997 across the street from the factory -- 60 feet from the factory entrance and on someone else's property. The CIA did not bother to test the soil sample until July 1998. The key ingredient -- which the Clinton administration insisted was used only for nerve gas -- was actually also used in pesticides.