Before fourteen cruise missiles turned it into a heap of twisted steel and medical detritus, the Al Shifa factory in Khartoum was the largest manufacturer of medicines in all of Sudan, producing over half of the country’s pharmaceutical products and specializing in anti-malaria drugs. But on August 20, 1998, the plant was “pulverized,” reduced to nothing but “broken concrete and iron bars,” leaving “thousands of brown bottles of veterinary and other medicines” littered across the sand. Fourteen years later, its wreckage remained, a shrine to an incident that locals still refer to as a terrorist attack.

The Al Shifa plant had been taken out on the direct orders of Bill Clinton. The strike was in retaliation for Osama bin Laden’s recent bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. In addition to destroying the Al Shifa, the administration targeted a group of Al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan.

When it was pointed out to the Clinton administration that they had just eliminated one of Sudan’s major medical suppliers, spokespeople “claimed the plant was actually a disguised chemical weapons factory.” They insisted that “soil samples taken outside the plant had shown the presence of a substance known as Empta, whose only function was to make the nerve gas VX.” The plant, they said, “was heavily guarded . . . and it showed a suspicious lack of ordinary commercial activities.”