October 20 2004
Last week Monday I went to the museum here in Khartoum. I arrived at 13:15. The guard told me it was closed and I should come back after 15:00. So I went to the zoo and looked at the duck and the goose. After 15:00 I went back to the museum, and was told it was closed.I asked to speak with the highest up guy present. Soon the Chief Ticket Seller presented himself. His badge said “C.T.S.” in English. After the five minutes of usual greetings and salutations I got around to asking the C.T.S. why the museum was closed. He was fairly literate in English and seemed intelligent. He looked at the hours of operation like he had never seen them before. (He has worked there for 14 years.) I asked him what the hours of operation were on Mondays. He said "From 08:00 to 13:00 we are closed, and from 13:00 to 15:00 we are closed, and from 15:00 to 18:00 we are closed." I said "The sign also says you are open on Mondays. So you can't be closed the whole day." He said "We are open on Mondays; I just read you the times." I then asked him to only tell me the times that the museum was open on Mondays. He slowly read the times again and said "bokra". Bokra is Arabic for "tomorrow". So the times the museum is open on Monday, is Tuesday. We talked for a further 5 minutes. The guy is not dumb or stupid, but there is a huge conceptual difference here. I just don't understand these people sometimes. It’s no wonder there are global conflicts.
So today I went to the museum again (it is Thursday). A very good museum. It is built like a huge time line from 3500 BC to 500 AD. Nothing more modern than 500 AD. Not exactly what I wanted, I was more interested in which of the buildings in Khartoum were from the British rule 1860-1890. Now the time is 10:30, and I have nothing to do.
I then got the idea to find the wreckage of the Al-Shifa Pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum that the Americans blew up in 1998. The internet had supplied much info on the attack, and the reasons why, but the exact location wasn't available. The attack was 13 days after the Embassy bombings in Kenya, and 2 days after Clinton's Monica Lewinsky Senate hearing where he testified "I did not have sexual relations with that woman.” It was also 3 weeks after the movie "Wag the Dog" came out. (Wag The Dog was about a President starting a war just to divert attention from a sex scandal in the White House. Very appropriate.)
So on August 21 1998 the US launched 13 Tomahawk Cruise Missiles from the Red Sea to destroy a "Weapons of Mass Destruction" nerve gas factory, ..... or a medicine factory, depending on your source of information. The attack was based on the following information...
1. The US said they didn't know of any medicines actually produced by the factory.
2. A secret CIA spy took soil samples and found EMTA. An agent used in Nerve Gas.
3. Osama Bin Ladin had shares in the Factory.
4. The plant was heavily guarded and shrouded in secrecy.
It turns out that...
1. The US had hired the El Shifa factory to send Malaria pills, and horse vet medicine to Iraq as part of the Food for Oil program. So they knew all about what the factory produced, and had even inspected and approved the factory.
2. The entire 100 meter by 100 meter factory was paved, so the "secret agent" had to take the sample from across the street in an empty plot that was used to grow corn. EMTA is used in fertilizer and insecticides.
3. Bin Laden had sold his shares long ago, and a new owner had taken over.
4. There were no armed guards ever, and factory tours were given for free, 3 days a week. Also the plant was built by a British company and the construction consultant was an American company. The CIA had only to ask for all the plans and blueprints, and the secret agent could have just gone on a free tour.
Anyway that’s all politics. I just wanted to see the damage from precision bombing. After way too many hours of walking, and searching Khartoum North, I found it. I asked the guard of the destroyed factory if I could come in. He rubbed his fingers together, and I gave him about 50 cent worth of local currency and he said come in. I asked if I could walk everywhere and take pictures. He said sure, and lay back down. For 2 hours I walked through rubble and bomb damage taking pictures and figuring out exactly what happened. There seemed to have been 5 separate explosions. All from above.
All the twisted and mangled steel structures were there, as well as the crumbled brick admin section. It really looked to me as if nothing had been removed since it happened almost 8 years earlier. I saw nothing that didn't look like it would be used to package medicines.
There is a refinery about 100 meters north of the factory, and the Coca Cola factory is about 200 meters away. Across the road are large power lines that are about 30 meters high. There really was minimal damage outside the 1 hectare factory site. Very good precision. I wonder what model of Tomahawk missile was used. There are 4 different types. Also were they just aiming for the factory, or were they accurate enough to have one go for the admin block, and one for the packing room, etc. I asked the guard (in Koranic Arabic) if there was any evidence of a cruise missile. (Try that in 5th century Arabic.)
He said yeah, follow him. He showed me a tail cone, and 5 mangled jet engines. He then showed me where they found the engines. I was pretty close with my guesses. He said there were 5 explosions only. The US said they launched 13 missiles. I wonder what happened to the other 8.
The jet engines look like single stage, centrifugal compressor, with 2 stage power section. After a bit of aggressive inspection of the engines, one of the axial turbine blades accidentally fell out of the engine into my pocket. How cool is that? I have an actual turbine blade out of an actual cruise missile used for real!
As I was leaving I noticed the guard's 6 year old boy carving into a cardboard box. On the side of the box was the writing “El Shifa Pharmaceutical Industries Co." in Arabic and English. Cool, another souvenir. I asked the kid if he would sell me the box. With a look that said very plainly "stupid white man" he agreed on enough for a coke.
Only after I started cutting up the box (because I only wanted the sign) did I notice he had been carving an AK47. That’s got to be a good souvenir by itself. I wonder what the implications are of a young child raised in a violent setting carving an AK47. Kind of scary.
Altogether, I liberated a turbine blade, a side of a box, a medicine bottle, and a short section of jet engine fuel pipe.
I chatted with the guard of the next door candy factory. He hadn't been employed at the time of the attack. I asked him if he felt America had attacked Sudan. He said "Yes America had attacked, but they also got attacked back on 9/11". I asked him if he thought that the 3000 deaths of innocent people on 9/11 was a proper response. He said that the people that died on 9/11 were not innocent, because they had bought the missiles that attacked Sudan with their taxes. Hmmm...
I needed to think lots about that.
Then I had the dubious pleasure of a further 8 kilometer walk.
They were spitting off the bridge. It seemed to be a contest. Well I'm a pretty good spitter so I thought I'd get a chance to show off a bit. After a bit of lurking to get the rules, I figured out that they would spit at the same time, and the fastest spit signified the winner by hitting the water first. So I joined in. On a dropped hand we would all spit. (You can't yell GO with a mouth full of spit.) Their spit was always faster than mine. How embarrassing to be out spit by some kids. I got desperate and hawked up a huge lunger. Squeezing out all water. Now there was only a thick heavy missile. I spit straight down with all the "ptewwy" I could, and beat them both. Now that I had some credibility, I decided to try to explain gravity and air friction (In 5th century Arabic). They just laughed. Maybe I'm trying to teach grandma to suck eggs. As I walked away they were still hacking and spitting.
Total walking on my pedometer was 25.8 kilometers. I started at 09:30 this morning and got home at 17:00. High temp today was 40 degrees Cent. So it’s not only "Mad dogs and Englishman" that go out in the noon day sun, but bored Pilots also.
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