Will the Media Remember Al-Shifa?

This month marks the anniversary of the August 7, 1998 terrorist attacks on American embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, which claimed the lives of 224 people, including 12 Americans. The anniversary has received substantial media attention, including stories on NBC‘s Sunday Today (8/8/99), ABC‘s World News Saturday (8/7/99), CBS‘s Evening News (8/7/99), and the Washington Post (8/8/99), the New York Times (8/7/99), and Los Angeles Times (8/7/99).

But virtually absent from this coverage has been any mention of the U.S. response which followed those attacks: the cruise missile raids launched two weeks later by President Clinton against camps in Afghanistan and against the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, Sudan.

Although U.S. officials originally claimed the Sudanese factory was involved in the production of chemical weapons and had links to accused terrorist Osama bin Laden, those assertions—along with many of the subsequent, shifting allegations offered in the days following the attack—have turned out to be inaccurate.

To date, the U.S. has presented no convincing evidence directly linking the factory to either bin Laden or chemical weapons. But it should be noted that even if the U.S. could offer credible evidence that the Al-Shifa plant made chemical weapons, or that it was linked to bin Laden, the missile strike would almost certainly still be a violation of the United Nations charter and a serious contravention of international law. The Charter permits countries to use force only in “self-defense” against an “armed attack”—an attack which, according to the accepted legal standard, must be so imminent as to leave “no choice of means, and no moment of deliberation.”

August 20 will mark the anniversary of the Al-Shifa attack. With the notable exceptions of the Washington Post and U.S. News & World Report, which recently ran informative articles about the Al-Shifa case (Washington Post, 7/25/99; U.S. News &World Report, 8/16-23/99), the mainstream media have paid little attention to the Al Shifa case.

FAIR encourages journalists to use the anniversary of the cruise missile attacks as an opportunity to review the evidence upon which the Sudan attack was based, and the legality of the attacks on both Sudan and Afghanistan. Media outlets should look back in their reporting not only on crimes committed against the U.S., but also on possible crimes committed by the U.S.

For more information on the media’s response to the Al-Shifa attack, please read “Media in Cruise Control.”