Reply #4: The El Shifa Pharmaceutical plant.

[DrWeird]

Intelligence informed President Clinton (and the UN, btw, who approved of the attack) that agents had sampled soil from outside the plant and discovered synthetic phosphorous compounds that were intermediates to the production of chemical weapons, but were not any of the intermediates or reagents used in what El Shifa claimed was its product line.

Turned out it was fertilizer or pesticides used on the rose bushes from where the sample was taken. It remains a textbook example of bad analytical chemistry sampling methods and was not the sign of any incompetence on Clinton's part. As opposed to 9-11, which the Bush Administration had plenty of warnings for.