The Sudanese Factory Bombing

[LeoCasey at aol.com]

My reading of the evidence concerning the Sudanese factory bombing is that 
there probably was a failure in American intelligence, and that the factory 
was not producing poison gas. I have no problem criticizing the poor 
selection of a target, but I think that the principles which guided that 
selection [1] that it strike directly at the capacity of terrorist 
organizations and states sponsoring terrorism to carry out those tasks, and 
[2] that it minimize, as much as humanly possible, the loss of human life, 
were absolutely the ones we need to be using now. If you read the New 
Republic piece on the bombing, you will see that they were criticizing 
those principles as unnecessarily restrictive, and not simply the apparent 
failures in intelligence. If the New Republic is arguing that, you can only 
imagine what position the hard right is taking.

I would not for a moment criticize anyone making a case that the Sudanese 
factory bombing was an ineffective, poorly chosen response to the criminal 
bombing of the embassies, that it was based on poor and wrong intelligence, 
and that, as a consequence, it caused unnecessary suffering.

But it is an outrageously offensive insult to the memories of those 
hundreds of African and American dead from those embassy bombings, as well 
as the thousands upon thousands entombed in lower Manhattan as we discuss 
this, all dead because of actions specifically designed to kill the maximum 
number of innocent people, that an action which killed one person in an 
ill-conceived attempt to save many more lives was a greater crime. Chomsky 
and Estabrook know no shame that they would say such a thing at such a 
time.


>That's not fair, Leo. The accusation is that it was not making poison 
>gas--that somebody lied in the process of accumulating the evidence that 
>suggested it was. The accusation is that the U.S. casually knocked out 2/3 
>the pharmaceutical manufacturing capacity of Sudan, with bad consequences 
>thereafter for Sudan's public health.
>
>And as best as I have been able to figure out, the accusation is probably 
>true.

Leo Casey
United Federation of Teachers
260 Park Avenue South
New York, New York 10010-7272
212-98-6869

Power concedes nothing without a demand.
It never has, and it never will.
If there is no struggle, there is no progress.
Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who 
want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and 
lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters.
-- Frederick Douglass --

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