Ruminatrix
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Wednesday, May 07, 2003
Hide and Seek
A former high-lelvel intelleguince official told me that American Special Forces units had been set into Iraq in mid-March, before the start of the air and ground war, to investigate sites suspected of being missile or chemical- and biological-weapon storage depots. "They came up with nothing," the official said. "Never found a single Scud."Here are more leaks from disgruntled spooks to Seymour Hersh on the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, which created the Saddam-Qaeda nexus.
Meanwhile, it appears that at least some of the art in Iraq's National Museum was indeed stashed for safe-keeping before the looters broke in. Stuff was looted, maybe a lot, but not everything.
...When U.S. forces -- and journalists -- first visited the museum after days of looting, they saw hundreds of empty display cases. Iraqi antiquities officials called the theft the ``crime of the century,'' and questioned why American troops hadn't moved quicker to safeguard the collection.Lastly, if an American mobile exploitation team's "hunters" do indeed locate a seventh-century Babylonian Talmud said to be in a Baghdad basement, where does the scroll belong? Is it an Iraqi antiquity, and therefore part of of that nation's cultural heritage? Or do we draw the line against the plunder of Iraqi antiquities in some other way? If so, why?
Upon closer inspection, however, American investigators and museum officials found that only 17 cases had been broken into. Thirty-eight items have now been confirmed missing and 22 damaged in the main gallery -- far less than originally feared, Bogdanos said.
But no one knows the status of tens of thousands of antiquities kept at storage sites across the city, or an untold number of smaller, portable items that museum officials removed for safekeeping months before the war.
Museum officials are trying to draw up inventories of these sites, but film negatives and files were destroyed when administrative offices were trashed. The museum used antiquated, unstandardized pen-and-ink records, and some inventories are years out of date.
Despite the frustrations, at least 671 items have been returned to the museum since officials began broadcasting appeals over the coalition's Information Radio.
Hundreds of them were laid out Tuesday on a table in the reading room of the museum library, where officials had separated genuine artifacts from fakes -- many of which were collected by the institution to keep them off the black market.