Benjamin C. Works, Executive Director

--Celebrating Chaos Theory Since 1990--

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SIT 9-2; Wednesday. September 2, 1998 - Revised

This issue has been tough for me to figure out, and I may not have it perfect yet, but I wish to consider all the relevant factors regarding the vigorous debate as to whether the United States acted legitimately in striking the Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum on August 20^th. This debate has implications in Kosovo and to some extent, in Bosnia as well. It is a debate between the court of law and the law of war.

I intend to address this from the view of ongoing debate in the Media over the degree of "perfection" of the evidence --over which there is some doubt -- then measure that against the diplomatic, political, intelligence, military implications in the US, in Europe and in the Arab-Islamic world.

In February, as part of the UN-Iraq weapons of mass destruction (WMD) inspection crisis, the US government leaked information of a transfer of WMD technology from Iraq to Sudan, via the magazine US News and World Report, and other media outlets.

In June, Osama bin Laden issued a general "fatwa" for unrestricted holy war against the United States and its civilian population wherever they might be slaughtered. Under that fatwa, on August 7, Osama's confederates exploded two large truck bombs nearly simultaneously in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, killing Americans, Kenyans and Tanzanians. Since then, other smaller bombs have gone off in various places.

On August 20^th the US struck back at Osama's training camps in Afghanistan, while others destroyed the Shifa Pharmaceutical Plant in Khartoum.

The facts as presented are that sometime by February of this year, the US secured a soil sample with strong presence of the precursor chemical EMPTA outside the plant. This chemical is not highly lethal in and of itself, but has no commercialized or attractive potential civilian applications; it is only used in Saddam's particular blend of VX nerve gas. Certain experts approached by the press have hypothesized potential non-lethal or civilian uses, but there are other products on the market and EMPTA is not cheap at $45 per gram.

The government of Sudan, notable for its allegedly ruthless suppression of Christians and Animist pagans in the south of this vast geographical agglomeration, accuses the US of a human rights violation, violation of its sovereignty, and a war crime, while protesting its innocence of endorsing or protecting Osama, or any other plot-plan to manufacture weapons of mass destruction. Astutely, that government has used the video images of the pharmaceutical plant as anti-US propaganda around the world, presenting it as another "baby milk factory" outrage against innocents. This spin control has been taken up by the Islamic fundamentalist movement, and their arch foes the New Left of the UN's New World Order globalist movement.

US officials have begun to admit the imperfection of our intelligence which justified targeting that facility, though the EMPTA sample is in hand and though no one dares really challenge the larger strike against Osama's base camps --he did declare war first, as I recall.

Imperfection and incompleteness of evidence are not the same as fabrication or willful misuse of intelligence. Testimony by William Cohen and CIA Director George Tenet in Congressional hearings yesterday, satisfied members that the government took reasonable measures. I am satisfied as to intent, as I also adhere to both the state's sovereign right and common law obligation to provide for the defense of its people from abroad, and from both domestic communal violence and criminal activity at home. I remain displeased with regard to executive level incompetence and inadequacy within the National Command Authority, for reasons outlined below.

To restate a hypothesis I sent informally last Thursday:

* Theory A --we did have the right information and tried to strike as effectively as possible --doing the necessary and right thing,

And;

* Theory B --we did not have sufficient evidence for a strike and rushed these attacks contrary to our long-term security interests.

Theory A is built on a military necessity, and incorporates the probabilities that in the fog of war, not all information is perfectible and errors can be made by humans.

Theory B suggests hasty decision making not for security reasons, but for political and diplomatic reasons. It implies both a "Wag the Dog" diversion and a nasty fight in the UN General Assembly where the administration, to cover its own tracks, lets our military take the fall. Such a theory, if true, would also further erode the credibility of CENTCOM in the Gulf region.

Under these theories, there is wiggle room and subjectively one can fit known evidence and leaks into both, justifying about any opinion one wishes to hold. Objectively, a war has been proclaimed against the United States and lives have been taken capriciously by the other side --an embassy bombing is another form of a mini-Pearl Harbor when host-country civilians and guest bureaucrats, not US soldiers or airmen, are killed by such treacherous means.

We can easily see that in the larger context of disabling Osama and his declared war, the United States acted vigorously, but did afford the Taliban Government of Afghanistan a chance to contain Osama first, as Mme Albright publicly offered on Aug. 19^th. Taliban bargained, the Tomahawks flew; the negotiations continue. Sudan will be more careful.

Concurrently, Iraq has been identified as proliferating its WMD technology into Sudan, links to Osama were indicated and Iraq, on the day of the strike, was increasing tensions with the UNSCOM inspection team.

America's opponents abroad --both Social-Leftist and Islamic Rightist take the Khartoum strike on its own merits, seeking to isolate it from the greater picture and to measure the justification for it in terms of legal standards of evidence. By attacking one piece in the greater picture, they seek to discredit all of it on an emotional basis --losing sight of the forest for the tree. But there were those two bombed-out embassies.

The CIA, NRO and NSA are never going to be perfect in correctly gathering, digesting and acting on all dangers in the world, nor even of perfect interpretation of intelligence gathered in the cases they do have handles on; no human organization is fault-free.

In the case of the Clinton Administration, we find time and again, that through executive level neglect, certain fundamentals are missing in many curious ways. In yesterday's Los Angeles Times sources appeared to admit that they had not fully profiled the Shifa plant in February or since, and were not aware of the extent of its legitimate pharmaceutical production --as if it only made batches of precursors and other naughty chemicals? The US maintains an embassy in Khartoum and people with cameras can drive around one presumes. The CIA, of course, always loses its human intelligence budgets in favor of wizzo electronic surveillance gadgets during Democratic administrations and has to rebuild to fill the gaps during Republican tenures in the Oval Office. --The onrush of advanced digital encryption programs will reverse some of this reliance on electronic surveillance.

If there is fault to lay in not rechecking the target, it should probably be confined to CIA Director Tenent and National Security Advisor Sandy Berger. It would seem logical that between February and August somebody would have maintained updated lists of potential targets, but in their haste to address the twin crises with Osama and Saddam, somebody in the higher reaches of the National Command Authority failed this logical step. --Don't blame this on the shooters or the "spooks," though. They did their best and collateral damage (we used to call these humans "casualties of the situation") was properly contained. Alas, when you strike at night, janitors --the humblest of civilian employees of enemy target complexes-- do get killed. Such are the fortunes of war. That creates a further spin control problem to the US and its Islamic allies.

Ron Brown's "Air Force-Two" turned out not to have the crash recorder "black boxes" and though the US has spent billions on Global Positioning Satellite System (GPSS) technology, the presidential and executive fleet had not yet been fitted with such equipment. I know C-141 jockeys who carried their own during Desert Shield-Desert Storm, but the unfortunate pilot of Secretary Brown's plane was not so provident. Air Force One, I was told by one of its pilots, was fitted with GPSS on an ASAP basis.

In the wake of the Nairobi explosion, we find that though Mme Albright superintends a State Department housekeeping budget in the billions, and though our ambassador in Kenya had expressed concerns about embassy security, the site's surveillance cameras had not been provided with a VCR and videotape to retain a record.

Then the failure to survey the site within recent weeks. This left the Sudan government and the plant's official owners a wide-open opportunity to surprise Clinton's team and amaze the Press. This gives them some diplomatic traction and capital going into the high-profile UN General Assembly meetings later this month.

It is clear that the United States does not have judicial-grade evidence that establishes the strike "beyond a reasonable doubt," though I believe that the administration can provide "a preponderance of evidence" or at least a fairly tight circumstantial and physical evidence package. These are the terms of debate established by the New Leftists in the public Media and therein lies a trap for the US and other sovereign states going forward, if the argument is allowed credibility. For this reason, and, among others, because Thomas L Pickering is taking the lead on this for the State Department, I am comfortable that the right message was delivered in the right way to the right recipients in the Khartoum strike --I would have appreciated a little more fresh evidence before executing this leg of the two-country counterstrike that symbolically outdid Osama's twin strike in all three measures of distance spanned, precision of timing and throw-weight of warheads.

War is not a court of law and actions in war obey a self-defense imperative, not the niceties of jurisprudential leisure. Yes, governments, intelligence agencies and armies make mistakes, and we expect egregious mistakes to be disciplined or corrected in time. But to accept a bureaucratic argument making a higher precedent out of a military action is dangerous to civilization in the long run, not helpful. Society has always had out of control anarchists of left and right; ideological and religious who set themselves above the law; we always will have mad dog zealots and outlaw regimes. To raise our standards to artificial heights is to disarm ourselves while empowering, encouraging and enabling these outlaw elements. International Law, the Law of War and the court of International opinion are sufficient devices to moderate the behavior of civilized states--even the US when its President is feeling truculent, rather than thinking more analytically.

Defense analysts and military alumni do have a role in keeping the heat on our leaders in terms of respecting and maintaining the highest standards Americans have always attempted to establish and protect in confrontations with our foes. Thus, we have to inspect this evidence, weigh its sufficiency and if necessary, take inadequate leaders and commanders to task for obeying political, rather than institutional standards of conduct.

I caution my fellow US military alumni to consider how far they push their criticism of the attacks on Khartoum and Osama in the context of the greater war against terrorism; as if we abandon the strategic to the tactical and political, we also play into the New Left's trap of giving credibility and standing in arguing their legalistic argument for them. Let us not cavil over details so much as remember Osama's TNT attacks and Saddam's WMD stockpiles.

In both Bosnia and Haiti, candidate Clinton embraced two "tar babies" in the figures of Alija Izetbegovic and Father Aristide. The US remains stuck with the devious fundamentalist President of rump-Bosnia and continues to gloss over his attempts to erect an Islamic satrapy to feed himself and his confederates. We have bombed or threatened to bomb based on political half-truths and even misrepresentations in the past.

Ample evidence exists in the world Press which virtually proves that three times the Izetbegovic regime staged bombings of their own people in "bread-line massacres" and three times got away with the US blaming the attacks on the Serb forces, despite clear evidence in UN observer hands to the contrary. (A number of articles are available at various websites for which I have hyperlinks, and I have enough on disk to assemble a file myself, given a few hours of cut-and-paste).

Since Osama has declared and waged war directly on the US in Saudi Arabia, Kenya and Tanzania, the current situation differs from our mis-alliance within the politically-inspired homicidal mischief in Bosnia.

Clinton, any non-American can easily argue, has cried "wolf!" too many times. Atop that, there is his openly exposed series of lies before the bar and before the American People with regard to Miss Lewinsky and other matters. From a rhetorical view, I invite my overseas readers to enjoy themselves, but to also consider that by resisting the New Left's legalistic arguments, we resist the New World Order they intend to impose on the rest of us. That the US continues to practice its policy hypocrisy with regard to Bosnia and Kosovo is material, especially in restricting Yugoslavia's right of "hot pursuit" of an insurrectionist band, while hotly pursuing Osama and the Shifa plant with Tomahawks.

But in another sense, by Yugoslavia's conforming to artificially heightened standards of law enforcement --rather than those of a more brutal counter-insurgency warfare-- Yugoslavia is refurbishing its badly maligned reputation and honor and I believe that in the overwhelming main, Yugoslav police and military personnel are trying to do their duty well, in a tough little fight, with a hand tied behind their back --more on Kosovo, atrocities, etc; next time.

As for me, the conclusion is that in Khartoum, under the larger problem of Osama's terror war and Saddam's misconduct, we acted under Theory A, but, as with all things the Clinton team does, there were a lot more loose ends than others might have left. One can argue haste, but I prefer to "make haste slowly," as Augustus Caesar liked to say.

For others, take your own choice, but if you suspect the whole complex of the Globalist-Left at the UN, kindly remember that sometimes governments have to strike fast, and with necessary force, to protect many peoples against other homicidal actors.

As to the intelligence and military personnel involved, I believe they executed their duties under legitimate orders and sought to serve honorably in a tough and dirty war that continues as an ongoing global campaign of terror in defiance of the laws of nations and the Law of War.

© Copyright 1998 Benjamin C. Works-SIRIUS