Top Clinton officials defend 1998 attack on Sudanese factory
WASHINGTON, March 24 (AFP) — Two top officials under former president Bill Clinton defended their decision to launch cruise missiles against a Sudanese factory suspected of producing material for use in chemical or biological weapons.
Clinton’s secretary of state Madeleine Albright and former defense secretary William Cohen gave their account of the event at a public hearing of an independent inquiry ordered by Congress to examine US intelligence ahead of the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States.
“On actionable intelligence, I believed, and continue to believe, that the plant in Sudan was connected to this network that (al-Qaeda leader) Osama bin Laden had had in Sudan and that it was an appropriate strike,” Albright told the commission.
Cohen said the US Central Intelligence Agency had provided information that raised serious concerns about the al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory.
“That the plant itself had been constructed under the security measures, that the plant had been funded, in part, by the so-called military industrial corporation, that bin Laden had been living there, that he had in fact money that he had put into this military industrial corporation,” were all concerns, Cohen said.
Plus the owner of the plant had traveled to Baghdad to meet with the father of Iraq’s VX program, Cohen said. VX is a deadly nerve agent that can be used as a weapon.
The CIA had found traces of a compound known as EMTA near the plant, and according to “all the intelligence, there was no other known use for EMTA at that time other than as a precursor to VX,” Cohen added.
Top US officials “were given information that bin Laden, following the bombings of the embassies in East Africa, was seeking to get his hands on chemical and biological weapons to kill as many people as he could. We were real concerned about that. I was very concerned about that,” Cohen said.
Cohen added that he “was satisfied, even though that still is pointed as a mistake, that it was the right thing to do then. I would do it again, based on that kind of intelligence,” he said.
The Clinton administration was roundly criticized for launching cruise missiles against the factory without enough proof that it was producing weapons.