[continued from previous message] 
  
 which go back to the earliest discoveries of writing itself, was stolen.[9] 
 Since then, as a result of an amnesty for looters, about 4,000 of the 
 artifacts have been recovered in Iraq, and over a thousand have been 
 confiscated in the United States.[10] Curtis noted that random checks of 
 Western soldiers leaving Iraq had led to the discovery of several in illegal 
 possession of ancient objects. Customs agents in the U.S. then found more. 
 Officials in Jordan have impounded about 2,000 pieces smuggled in from Iraq; 
 in France, 500 pieces; in Italy, 300; in Syria, 300; and in Switzerland, 
 250. Lesser numbers have been seized in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and 
 Turkey. None of these objects has as yet been sent back to Baghdad. 
  
 The 616 pieces that form the famous collection of "Nimrud gold," excavated 
 by the Iraqis in the late 1980s from the tombs of the Assyrian queens at 
 Nimrud, a few miles southeast of Mosul, were saved, but only because the 
 museum had secretly moved them to the subterranean vaults of the Central 
 Bank of Iraq at the time of the first Gulf War. By the time the Americans 
 got around to protecting the bank in 2003, its building was a burnt-out 
 shell filled with twisted metal beams from the collapse of the roof and all 
 nine floors under it. Nonetheless, the underground compartments and their 
 contents survived undamaged. On July 3, 2003, a small portion of the Nimrud 
 holdings was put on display for a few hours, allowing a handful of Iraqi 
 officials to see them for the first time since 1990.[11] 
  
 The torching of books and manuscripts in the Library of Korans and the 
 National Library was in itself a historical disaster of the first order. 
 Most of the Ottoman imperial documents and the old royal archives concerning 
 the creation of Iraq were reduced to ashes. According to Humberto Marquez, 
 the Venezuelan writer and author of Historia Universal de La Destruccisn de 
 Los Libros (2004), about a million books and ten million documents were 
 destroyed by the fires of April 14, 2003.[12] Robert Fisk, the veteran 
 Middle East correspondent of the Independent of London, was in Baghdad the 
 day of the fires. He rushed to the offices of the U.S. Marines' Civil 
 Affairs Bureau and gave the officer on duty precise map locations for the 
 two archives and their names in Arabic and English, and pointed out that the 
 smoke could be seen from three miles away. The officer shouted to a 
 colleague, "This guy says some biblical library is on fire," but the 
 Americans did nothing to try to put out the flames.[13] 
  
 The Burger King of Ur 
  
 Given the black market value of ancient art objects, U.S. military leaders 
 had been warned that the looting of all thirteen national museums throughout 
 the country would be a particularly grave danger in the days after they 
 captured Baghdad and took control of Iraq. In the chaos that followed the 
 Gulf War of 1991, vandals had stolen about 4,000 objects from nine different 
 regional museums. In monetary terms, the illegal trade in antiquities is the 
 third most lucrative form of international trade globally, exceeded only by 
 drug smuggling and arms sales.[14] Given the richness of Iraq's past, there 
 are also over 10,000 significant archaeological sites scattered across the 
 country, only some 1,500 of which have been studied. Following the Gulf War, 
 a number of them were illegally excavated and their artifacts sold to 
 unscrupulous international collectors in Western countries and Japan. All 
 this was known to American commanders. 
  
 In January 2003, on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, an American delegation 
 of scholars, museum directors, art collectors, and antiquities dealers met 
 with officials at the Pentagon to discuss the forthcoming invasion. They 
 specifically warned that Baghdad's National Museum was the single most 
 important site in the country. McGuire Gibson of the University of Chicago's 
 Oriental Institute said, "I thought I was given assurances that sites and 
 museums would be protected."[15] Gibson went back to the Pentagon twice to 
 discuss the dangers, and he and his colleagues sent several e-mail reminders 
 to military officers in the weeks before the war began. However, a more 
 ominous indicator of things to come was reported in the April 14, 2003, 
 London Guardian: Rich American collectors with connections to the White 
 House were busy "persuading the Pentagon to relax legislation that protects 
 Iraq's heritage by prevention of sales abroad." On January 24, 2003, some 
 sixty New York-based collectors and dealers organized themselves into a new 
 group called the American Council for Cultural Policy and met with Bush 
 administration and Pentagon officials to argue that a post-Saddam Iraq 
 should have relaxed antiquities laws.[16] Opening up private trade in Iraqi 
 artifacts, they suggested, would offer such items better security than they 
 could receive in Iraq. 
  
 The main international legal safeguard for historically and humanistically 
 important institutions and sites is the Hague Convention for the Protection 
 of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, signed on May 14, 1954. 
 The U.S. is not a party to that convention, primarily because, during the 
 Cold War, it feared that the treaty might restrict its freedom to engage in 
 nuclear war; but during the 1991 Gulf War the elder Bush's administration 
 accepted the convention's rules and abided by a "no-fire target list" of 
 places where valuable cultural items were known to exist.[17] UNESCO and 
 other guardians of cultural artifacts expected the younger Bush's 
 administration to follow the same procedures in the 2003 war. 
  
 Moreover, on March 26, 2003, the Pentagon's Office of Reconstruction and 
 Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA), headed by Lt. Gen. (ret.) Jay Garner -- the 
 civil authority the U.S. had set up for the moment hostilities ceased -- 
 sent to all senior U.S. commanders a list of sixteen institutions that 
 "merit securing as soon as possible to prevent further damage, destruction, 
 and/or pilferage of records and assets." The five-page memo dispatched two 
 weeks before the fall of Baghdad also said, "Coalition forces must secure 
 these facilities in order to prevent looting and the resulting irreparable 
 loss of cultural treasures" and that "looters should be arrested/detained." 
 First on Gen. Garner's list of places to protect was the Iraqi Central Bank, 
 which is now a ruin; second was the Museum of Antiquities. Sixteenth was the 
 Oil Ministry, the only place that U.S. forces occupying Baghdad actually 
 defended. Martin Sullivan, chair of the President's Advisory Committee on 
 Cultural Property for the previous eight years, and Gary Vikan, director of 
 the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore and a member of the committee, both 
 resigned to protest the failure of CENTCOM to obey orders. Sullivan said it 
 was "inexcusable" that the museum should not have had the same priority as 
 the Oil Ministry.[18] 
  
 As we now know, the American forces made no effort to prevent the looting of 
 the great cultural institutions of Iraq, its soldiers simply watching 
 vandals enter and torch the buildings. Said Arjomand, an editor of the 
 journal Studies on Persianate Societies and a professor of sociology at the 
 State University of New York at Stony Brook, wrote, "Our troops, who have 
 been proudly guarding the Oil Ministry, where no window is broken, 
 deliberately condoned these horrendous events."[19] American commanders 
  
 [continued in next message] 
  
 --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05 
  * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)