[kinghorse]

ix-nay l-say on the e-bay.

[Ben Bolt]

Bump for a later read .

[kevao]

Robert Fisk, call your office! Jeez, the hapless Fisk was wrong before the war (the Iraqi people didn't want to be liberated), during the war (Vietnam-style quagmire just five days into the campaign), and now after the war. Someone please tell me why he has ANY semblance of credibility left.

[alnick]

Oh, it's too bad that Clintonite resigned from the administration today citing how heartbroken he is about the looting of the museum as his reason. :-P

[SuziQ]

Hmmm. You reckon we'll see any of this info in the Old Grey Lady and the Washington ComPost? Maybe CNN will feature the story, whadda ya think? I, for one, won't be holding MY breath waiting for it.

[Porterville]

But I thought the US really messed-up, why can't a liberal ever win??

[JasonC]

Let's see - "We never thought it could be looted". That is why they had security guards, and supposedly scholars abroad had asked for US protection? Or has that bit of the story now gone away? Because, after all, if they knew it was going to be looted unless protected, they should have taken steps to protect things themselves before the old order broke down. But they didn't. Therefore, they can't have asked for US protection?

"secrecy long enveloped the museum -- where part of the collection had been siphoned off by Saddam Hussein's family and sold abroad". Oh, so Saddam looted the place already. And needs a pretext for items gone missing. Preferably one to blame on somebody else. Suddenly the Baathists have rather a lot to gain from a visible sacking, instead of being high minded guardians of the country's heritage.

"prompted a wave of anti-American anger. A belief often voiced in the streets of Baghdad holds that U.S. soldiers themselves stole the most-precious objects" Notice the passive voice? Nothing said about *who* is voicing such a belief. Perhaps, just perhaps, Baathists? Looking to blame anything on Americans? To excuse and cover their own thefts?

"Among the antiquities unaccounted for so far, Mr. George said, are the sacral vase of Warqa, from Sumerian times, and the bronze statue of Basitqi, from the Accadian civilization." 170,000 priceless items and records just became 2 objets d'art. In another report, I heard of a third. This was supposed to be the loss of the Alexandrian library all over again. Instead, one vase and one statue? Others to be filled in later.

"he couldn't move into the museum compound and protect it from looters last week because his soldiers were taking fire from the building". Oh. Just a little oversight there. A detail. So Iraqi *soldiers*, not museum workers, were last in the building? Armed? Shooting at our guys? *Then* it was looted? By Peter Pan no doubt. Certainly not by the armed Baathist hooligans trying to draw US fire on the place, deliberately to create a propagandistic atrocity.

They tried to goad us into blowing it up. We didn't play. They looted it themselves. Then blame it on us. If that won't stick, they blame us for not protecting it. While they were inside it, armed, doing the opposite of protecting it themselves.

This whole alleged incident now stinks to high heaven...

[Blood of Tyrants]

It is most likely that it wasn't just your run of the mill street looter who took the most valuable objects but theives who planned the looting weeks in advance. Not to mention that Saddam and his cronies stole anything they could sell to the French.

[MattAMiller]

I'm glad to hear this. The most important stuff was elsewhere, the damage wasn't as bad as earlier reported, and it wasn't a screw up but a decision to protect our troops.

[hotpotato]

But, thanks to Iraqi preparations before the war, it seems the worst has been avoided.

Are they saying this now because the FBI is headed that way to investigate????

[hotpotato]

I posted this in another thread:

I'm getting pretty tired of O'Reilly coming down on the military for this hiest. There are a lot of reports that point to an inside job or job that was planned well in advance. While all these Iraqi citizens are standing outside the looted museum expressing outrage before the cameras about the American's lack of protecting the museum, I'd like just ONE journalist to ask them if since they believe this was a predictable and preventable theft and if this "heritage" is as important as they are jumping up and down about, why didn't they form their own militia and guard it themselves rather than wait for troops to fight their way through Baghdad to get there in time to risk their lives to save *Iraqi* "heritage"!?

O'Reilly said last night the lack of protecting the museum was because, he thinks, our military was apathetic. arrrgggg!!!!

[hotpotato]

"Most of the things were removed. We knew a war was coming, so it was our duty to protect everything," Mr. George said. "We thought there would be some sort of bombing at the museum. We never thought it could be looted."

This pretty much backs up the DOD which claims it did not promise to prevent looting but said it would not bomb the museum which is *all* they would be able to promise. Good riddance to the two cultural advisors who quit today over this. I don't think anyone got a promise from the DOD to prevent the looting.

[F-117A]

Bump!

[k2blader]

Bump!

[Kay Soze]

After an hour of research here's what I found on the museum:


“The experts, which included Iraqi art officials, said some of the most valuable pieces had been placed in the vault of the national bank after the 1991 Gulf War, but they had no information on whether the items were still there.” http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-2575224,00.html


"Most of the things were removed. We knew a war was coming, so it was our duty to protect everything," Mr. George said. "We thought there would be some sort of bombing at the museum. We never thought it could be looted." http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB105053292455773900,00.html

“Officials at the UNESCO meeting at its headquarters in Paris said the information was still too sketchy to determine exactly what was missing and how many items were unaccounted for.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-2575224,00.html

Some believe that individuals, including government employees, are taking the best pieces out overland through Jordan
Hamdoon said that many pieces had disappeared from provincial Iraqi museums after the war.
http://www.usfca.edu/~trembath/www-class/iraq-antiquities.html

Some of the objects on display here are reproductions, with their originals removed by conquering nations to be displayed in foreign museums. The Louvre in Paris, London's British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania Museum in the US all contain antiquities from ancient Mesopotamia. Some pieces have been returned, but the effective closure of the country seems to preclude any further returns for the foreseeable future. http://www.arab.net/iraq/iq_baghdadsights.htm
Sensing the treasures could be in peril, museum curators secretly removed antiquities from their display cases before the war and placed them in storage vaults - but to no avail. The doors of the vaults were opened or smashed, and everything inside was taken, museum workers said.

That led one museum employee to suspect that people familiar with the museum may have participated in the theft.

``The fact that the vaults were opened suggests employees of the museum may have been involved,'' said the staffer, who declined to be identified. ``To ordinary people, these are just stones. Only the educated know the value of these pieces.''
http://www.thesundaymail.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5936,6281650%255E25777,00.html

The museum's most famous holding may have been tablets with Hammurabi's Code - one of mankind's earliest codes of law.
It could not be determined whether the tablets were at the museum when the war broke out.
http://www.thesundaymail.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5936,6281650%255E25777,00.html

In one possibly encouraging sign, several people in the Al Awi neighborhood that surrounds the museum said they did not see looters leave with any antiquities, even amid gun battles and looting that lasted two days.
But he said the only items from the collection he saw stolen were several old rifles. Mostly, he said, he saw looters take chairs, typewriters, ceiling lamp fixtures and other items from the museum's offices, as happened at nearly every other government office in the capital.

Abed El Rahman, a museum security guard who lives on the premises, also said that rifles were the only items he saw stolen from the collections. "But many people were carrying boxes," he said. "I don't know what was in the boxes."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/17/international/worldspecial/17MUSE.html

[LocalYokel]

Arrgh!

As the old saying goes: A lie has made it around the world before the truth has gotten out of bed.

Hello CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC? Did you get the word or have we "missed the news cycle"? Again.

[FairOpinion]

And there was this article too:

"In fact, in the main collection, it now appears that few items are missing, and very little seems to have been the victim of mob violence. "


from:

Detroit Free Press:
http://www.freep.com/news/nw/iraq/loot17_20030417.htm

[ckilmer]

Why a Museum?
Wall Street Journal ^ | April 18, 2003 | ERIC GIBSON


Posted on 04/18/2003 5:48 AM PDT by knuthom


We shouldn't have been surprised that, after the looting of Baghdad's antiquities museum last weekend, negligent Americans, not the looters themselves, got most of the blame. For much of the media, every bad thing since the invasion has been America's fault. So adding another charge to the indictment was an easy call.


That view is going to need a little revision, though, in light of Journal reporter Yaroslav Trofimov's story yesterday that the Americans couldn't protect the museum because they were taking fire from the building. He also reported that the damage was less than originally thought. Staffers from the Iraqi Antiquities Department, he wrote, had "preserved the museum's most important treasures, including the kings' graves of Ur and the Assyrian bulls," by hiding them in vaults that the looters didn't touch.


Still, just who was responsible? Or to put it another way: Why would the Iraqis plunder their cultural heritage?


We've seen riots and looting in this country. But at no time during such disturbances were art museums or libraries attacked. Yet when civil order broke down in Baghdad, the museum and national library became targets. Why? Word yesterday out of a UNESCO meeting in Paris was that it was a professional job. Looters had keys for the vaults and discriminated between originals, which they took, and copies, which they left behind.

"I have a suspicion it was organized outside the country," the University of Chicago's McGuire Gibson told the Associated Press. The implication is that it was a contract job by organized crime or some shadowy figure in the illicit traffic of antiquities. Nobody in the art world seems to have thought of Saddam Hussein.

But "I would personally suggest it was done by Saddam's circle, and my prime suspect would by Uday," says Con Coughlin, author of "Saddam: King of Terror," in an interview. "Saddam and his family are basically cultural vandals. When he left Kuwait he trashed the place. So it makes sense that when he leaves Iraq he took the most valuable items." Saddam's family is essentially "a Mafia family, and Barzan [Saddam's half-brother], the guy arrested Thursday, was basically the bagman."

Saddam had been busy looting the museum long before the war began. A decade ago, Iraq Opposition Radio alleged that "several antiquity collections have found their way outside Iraq and been sold for the benefit of Saddam's family and his cronies." And in October the German newspaper Welt am Sonntag reported that Saddam had started moving--to a remote town in northwestern Iraq--several truckloads of "gold bars and artworks from museums in Baghdad and the northern city of Mosul."


But clearly he hadn't moved it all, and at least some of the looting, to judge by press accounts, was done by ordinary Iraqis on a spree. Again: Why? It's not as if there is an easy resale market in such things. In fact, the word "museum" is misleading: It means something different in Saddam's Iraq than it does here. Totalitarian regimes are not uninterested in culture. But unlike the citizens of liberal democracies, for whom culture has a value in itself, dictators look on culture as politics by other means. Politics was the target of the looting, too.

Modernist art in Russia all but died in the 1920s, when Lenin denounced it as bourgeois and decadent, decreeing that the purpose of art was to glorify the revolution and the worker. The Nazis' looting of private art collections from Jewish families was not only mercenary but aimed at destroying a people by robbing it of its culture.


Saddam's regime was no different. "You have to understand that Saddam's propaganda ministry made great play on Iraq's cultural heritage, and he was forever linking himself with the great figures of Mesopotamian history such as Nebuchadnezzar," Mr. Coughlin says; Babylon was "turned into a Disney theme park." Saddam bulldozed large parts of the ruins, replacing them with bricked walls. "Tens of thousands of bricks used in the construction bore a special inscription," writes Mr. Coughlin in his book, "reminding future generations that the 'Babylon of Nebuchadnezzar was rebuilt in the era of the leader President Saddam Hussein.' "


In short, Iraqis laid waste to the museum in Baghdad because it had become the symbol of a hated regime. And little wonder. Saddam stole his country's treasures, hauling off truckloads for his enrichment. But he also misappropriated Iraq's history by making it a tool of his personality cult.


In time some of those objects may find their way back to Baghdad. But with Saddam now gone, their past is once again their own.