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 By BRUCE NELAN Ruth Fremson--AP  AUG. 17, 1998: Clinton minutes before delivering his "apology" [an error occurred while processing this directive]
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FULL DARKNESS HAD FALLEN over the Jumiat-ul-Mujahedin guerrilla camp in a desolate, arid valley in Afghanistan. Along its barbed-wire perimeter, a sentry peered out over the rocky ground and desert shrubs. Unemployed and with a fifth-grade education, Moha mmed Sultan Batti, 20, had left his home in Pakistan armed only with a determination to fight for Islam. He had been at the camp barely a week, and he was suddenly hit with all the fight he could handle. "I heard loud whistles," he recounted later from hi s hospital bed in Pakistan, "and the sky lit up. Then came this terrible pounding. I was knocked down, and I could hear the others crying and screaming." The camp, along with several others sprawled out through the valley, had been struck by about 60 American Tomahawk cruise missiles fired from warships in the Arabian Sea. They purred across Pakistan at a low altitude until their guidance systems, prompted by satellites, registered that the missiles had arrived at their targets. Then they crashed down with 1,000-lb. (455-kg) high-explosive warheads designed to demolish buildings. Others, even more deadly, each disgorged 166 hand-grenade-size bomblets with special munitions that explode separately to kill people and destroy vehicles and airplanes. As the blasts felled Batti, the missiles were tearing into three other training sites in the valley, along with the headquarters building and a support camp crammed with weapons and explosives. And at the same time in Sudan, about 20 more cruise missiles fired from U.S. ships in the Red Sea were leveling what Washington described as a chemical-weapons factory in Khartoum. Simultaneous explosions. The whole sequence of events began three weeks ago with simultaneous explosions: terrorists' truck bombs shattered American embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. As President Bill Clinton put it last week, "Tod ay we have struck back."
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