Free Republic

dated Mar 29, 2015 BOSTON – The FBI has positively identified the two robbers who in 1990 committed the largest art heist in history, stealing over $500 million worth of masterpieces from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum here. One of them is a local ex-con who was free only because his lawyer, now Secretary of State John Kerry, was able to get his first-degree murder conviction overturned in 1982. “We got justice,” Kerry told a reporter in 2009 of his work for the notorious hoodlum, “and I’ll go to my grave proud that we did.” Multiple law-enforcement sources here have...

top British Museum official said yesterday that his Iraqi counterparts told him they had largely emptied display cases at the National Museum in Baghdad months before the start of the Iraq war, storing many of the museum's most precious artifacts in secure "repositories." The official, John E. Curtis, curator of the Near East Collection at the British Museum, who recently visited Iraq, said Baghdad museum officials had taken the action on the orders of Iraqi government authorities. When looting started, most of the treasures apparently remaining in display halls were those too large or bulky to have been moved for...

<p>BAGHDAD - The vast majority of the Iraqi trove of antiquities feared stolen or broken have been found inside the National Museum in Baghdad, according to American investigators who compiled an inventory over the weekend of the ransacked galleries.</p> <p>A total of 38 antiquities, not tens of thousands, are now believed to be missing. Among them is a single display of Babylonian cuneiform tablets that accounts for nine missing items.</p> <p>The single most valuable missing piece is the Vase of Warka, a white limestone bowl dating from 3000 B.C.</p>

There are some cultural crimes that transcend mere human concerns like life, liberty and the pursuit of oil. Today, we mourn a loss that beggars the imagination. A hundred generations from now, our heirs will curse us for what happened in Baghdad on April 11-12, 2003. The origins of the war in Iraq may have really been the cruelty of the Saddam Hussein regime; they may have been simple revenge or pure capitalist greed. It doesn't matter. The fact is, Saddam did not start this war — we did, and that fact imposed certain responsibilities on us. We took the...