"Iraq Museum Looted Items FOUND"?

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Bill Marsh

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Without comment I post this article from the Chicago Tribune, May 5, 2003


Click here: Chicago Tribune: Most museum artifacts found http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0305050207may05,1,7026050.story

Most museum artifacts found


U.S. says only 38--not 170,000--missingement


By Christine Spolar
Tribune foreign correspondent

May 5, 2003

BAGHDAD -- The vast majority 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.

A total of 38 pieces, not tens of thousands, are now believed to be missing. Among them is a display of Babylonian cuneiform tablets that accounts for nine missing items.

The most valuable missing piece is the Vase of Warka, a white limestone bowl dating from 3000 B.C.

The inventory, compiled by a military and civilian team headed by Marine Col. Matthew Bogdanos, rejects reports that Iraq's renowned treasures of civilization--up to 170,000 artifacts--had been lost during the U.S.-led war against Iraq. It also raises questions about why any of the artifacts were reported missing.

The looting seems to have occurred April 10-12, two days after museum officials fled the grounds amid a battle in which Fedayeen Saddam gunners entered the complex and began firing on advancing U.S. tanks.

In one instance, investigators found that intruders had taken some less-valuable artifacts from a storage room in the basement of the museum. That theft, in a little-known storage area, has raised suspicions that the thieves had knowledge of the museum and its storage practices.

Investigators armed with chisels and a sledgehammer broke through hastily constructed barricades Saturday to search several large storage rooms in the museum.

In one storage area on the second floor, they discovered evidence of a gunner's nest. From debris left behind, investigators concluded that a gunner was armed with an assault rifle and rocket-propelled grenades.

About a foot from the gunner's lookout was a hole punched through the wall by a 25 mm shell. Investigators surmised that the gunman fled after that single volley from allied forces.

Damage to the museum's administrative offices was extensive, with desks, wiring, fixtures and chairs hauled out by looters. Artifacts, apparently obscured in some instances by the rubble left by looters, emerged largely unscathed.

"There is no comparison in the level of destruction seen in the museum and that seen the administrative offices," Bogdanos said. "It's absolute wanton destruction in the offices. We didn't see anywhere near that destruction in the museum. [People] stole what they could use. ... They left the antiquities."

Investigators, compiling information about what occurred during the chaotic takeover of Baghdad by U.S.-led troops, are concluding that little damage occurred to antiquities displayed at the museum. Investigators counted 17 display cases destroyed out of 300 to 400 cases. Many of the items apparently were removed before the looting.

In addition, investigators have counted 22 items that were damaged, including 11 clay pots on display in corridors. Most of those damaged artifacts are restored pieces and can be restored again, museum officials told investigators.

The most significant of the damaged pieces was the Golden Harp of Ur. But investigators determined that the golden head on the damaged antiquity, feared missing, was only a copy. Museum officials confirmed this week to investigators that the original head had been placed in a storage vault at the Iraqi Central Bank before the war.

The inventory was compiled after investigators examined five large storage areas in the museum Saturday to check for looting. Each room was lined with shelves holding plastic containers filled with envelopes of small, less-valuable artifacts, such as beads or amulets.

There was no apparent sign of forced entry to the storage sites, and the doors were locked when investigators arrived. Museum staffers told investigators they had no keys to the room, so investigators remain uncertain how entry was made.

Investigators found that the basement storage area, which held thousands of small items not deemed suitable for display, had been disturbed in one of the rooms. They broke through a cinder-block barrier to the room to find hundreds of cardboard boxes intact and about 90 plastic boxes, containing about 5,000 less-valuable items, missing.

A boxful of such items was retrieved about a week ago near Al Kut, investigators said, and it is likely that the intruders are attempting to move other such artifacts outside Baghdad."

Hmmmm
 
Fox news reported this evening that Museum staff is being questioned with some of the top guys uncooperative. It seems the 'looting' occured before the US even got to Bagdad, with the two dozen most valuable items out of thousands of cases gone. Those people seen weeping on TV when this first hit are the most likely suspects.

btw..I got this golden lion head; any takers?

munk
 
Who knows?

Pass the salt:

Stolen Iraqi paintings nabbed in U.S.
TV news engineer found with looted works at Dulles airport; othermedia members, serviceman also caught, officials say.

NBC NEWS AND NEWS SERVICES

WASHINGTON, April 23 — Several members of the media and a U.S. serviceman have been caught attempting to ship Iraqi paintings, weapons and other war souvenirs to America, U.S. authorities said Wednesday. At least 15 paintings, gold-plated firearms, ornamental knives, bonds and other items have been seized at airports in Atlanta, Boston, London and Washington in the last week, according to the Bureau of Customs and Border Protection.


...Benjamin James Johnson, who worked as an engineer for Fox News Channel, is the only person charged or identified by the government...

A criminal complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va., charges Johnson tried to bring 12 paintings into the United States last Thursday. They were contained in a large cardboard box that was examined by Customs agents at Dulles International Airport outside Washington. An affidavit filed with the criminal complaint says that Johnson, who accompanied U.S. troops in Baghdad, gathered up the paintings at a palace that belonged to Odai Hussein, one of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s sons. The paintings depict Saddam and Odai.

While the historical value of the paintings is deemed to be negligible, they are believed to have considerable resale value given their ties to Saddam Hussein, the government said.

An examination of Johnson’s luggage also turned up 40 Iraqi Monetary Bonds and a visitor’s badge from the U.S. embassy in Kuwait....

... Customs bureau officials said an unidentified U.S. serviceman attempted to ship a rifle, pistol, and AK-47 assault rifle — all gold-plated — taken from an Iraqi government facility to a military base in the United States. The serviceman was shipping from an address in Kuwait to Fort Stewart, Ga. The items were seized last Friday at London’s Heathrow Airport.

An unidentified Boston Herald reporter attempted to bring a painting, wall ornament and other items into the country through Boston’s Logan International Airport on Saturday, federal authorities said.

Additional Iraqi items, including a painting, a gold-plated emblem, a gun holster and a knife, that were being shipped by several other members of the media were seized at Dulles on Monday...

Lessee...at the time of this story, one serviceman caught, and one, two, plus "several other members of the media" caught.

http://www.msnbc.com/news/904187.asp?0cv=CB20&cp1=1

I'll have some salt with that salt please.
 
Fox news was pretty upset about it. They referred to this now former employee in derisive terms. I thought he was a producer, though, not an engineer. It is hard to imagine risking a good career on what amounts to transitory spoil. But then, thieves risk much for little.

I saw pictures of gold plated firearms owned by one of Saddam's sons.

The photos of all those great bolt action mausers being destroyed by the Marines were very sad.

munk
 
Fox news was pretty upset about it.
Click to expand...

The cynic in me has to ask if they were upset that he apparently stole stuff while he was on assignment for them, or upset that he got caught which produced adverse publicity.

I saw a PBS documentary on WWII that concluded with an esteemed journalist proudly displaying the postage stamp that a journalist had "liberated" from a concentration camp. The journalist was commended for preserving an actual piece of history or the like.

I don't see a lot of difference, myself.
 
Amazing. I can understand bringing back a small carryable or two, but Ill-gotten gains are fleeting. This ain't a robbery folks, it is a country re-build. In the defense of the majority of noble servicemen, this is not par for the course. I'm sure Sarge did not 'loot' the big knife he got for Rusty in Afg.

Whomever got the brilliant idea to ship an automatic weapon via post is just silly, or dumb. Perhaps they forgot that the post-sept11 mail service has stepped up security, looking for weapons, anthrax, anything suspicious. I'm darn sure anything shipped from Iraq will be treated to a thorough look-see...duh!

As for the media, well, they aint so bright sometimes. No excuse.

Keith
 
Fox news- Sheppard Smith. He sounded out-right disgusted and contemptious. He is known for adlib. It was not my impression he was reciting a PR line for Fox to repair damage.

I like Fox. I like Brit Humes Special Report.

Soldiers do pick up flags and such, battlefied pick ups. Raiding the supply of gold plated firearms is a little over the top.

There were some American WWll generals who stole the dishware from a retaken Chateow. (sic) They were not prosecuted.

I know several Nam vets with SKS or AK rifles taken from in country.

munk
 
Fox news- Sheppard Smith. He sounded out-right disgusted and contemptious. He is known for adlib. It was not my impression he was reciting a PR line for Fox to repair damage.
Click to expand...

I'll take your word for it, I don't pay up for the Fox news station. I just watch cartoons on the free Fox local affiliate.

Sometimes there are a few bad apples in the barrel.

Sometimes there are a few good apples and it is hard to believe they haven't gone bad in the proximity of all the bad ones.

The only way to tell is to look through a significant portion of the barrel or ignore it long enough that all must have surely gone rotten by the smell.

Stuff like this makes one wonder just what's really in the barrel--Maybe it's the barrel itself that innoculates the apples with rot.:

http://www.bladeforums.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=251834

--Any "news" is better than no news? At what price?

I'm sure that there are lots of honest people trying to do a good job under difficult circumstances. But when much their work gets funneled through a bunch of narcisitic celebrities who think that they themselves are the news, how long will they last? [ What proportion of the "news" nowadays is about those involved in reporting the news or what they think of the news, instead of the news they are supposed to report?]

I've got no problem with anybody making a fair deal with somebody to get a souvenir for a negotiated price, as long as the seller actually owns the object and the deal isn't coerced. Sometimes hard to know or prove that's the case, and I understand.

Taking personal effects from the dead that could eventually wind up in the hands of family or demonstrate identity is despicable. Taking objects owned by the state or it's successor that could be used or sold to benefit remaining war-ravaged populace is in the same league as going to Tijuanna and stealing money from some little street kid selling chewing-gum on the street in my book. Any "war reparations" should be negotiated between governments, not appropriated by individuals.


As far as the bolt action Mausers go, if it's really true that the best thing is to eliminate them from any Iraqi ownership, I say pay Iraq for them, or accept them as partial payment for rebuilding costs, bring them to the US and sell them through the Civilian Marksmanship program. Destroying stuff like that isn't much different than destroying pieces in the museum.

And any one who served there and is is willing to qualify and instruct in the program should get one for free.
 
many of the mausers appeared to be in near unissued condition. You should see the piles of AK47's burning over at AR15.com

This policy of removing arms from Afganistan and Iraq seems flawed to me.

I'd sure keep mine if I lived there. I live here, for instance, and am keeping mine.

munk
 
yeah, I don't what the deal with the small arms is--

A while back one of the major networks followed a team in Afghanistan that was looking for weapons. They were allowing locals to keep personal arms but methodically detroying AA guns, rockets, explosive ordnance and the like. The guy in charge said something like, "yeah that's for self defense, you can have that", pointing to an AK. "but not that[/]", pointing to a large caliber, belt fed machine-gun hidden in an out-bulding.

A few days ago, in Iraq, they showed some guys who had apparently protected an intact house owned by a Saudi from looting being totally disarmed under protests that they had been hired to protect the premises, had done so, and now couldn't couldn't do their job and would be fired. No follow-up.

Doesn't really seem to add up to a quick turn-over of civilian protection to Iraqis, but what do I know?
 
They should be able to find biologial, chemical, and nuclear weapons so easily.

The WMD search ain't over yet. But the clock is ticking away on the Bush-Chen-Rums "Invade Iraq without Proof" gamble. Interesting thing, the article below seems to come from the guys on the ground - not the press rooms of HQ or Washington.

As the judge says to the prosecutor in the Hollywood movies " . . . just find the d**n gun . . ." :D

********

Frustrated, U.S. Arms Team to Leave Iraq
Task Force Unable To Find Any Weapons

By Barton Gellman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, May 11, 2003; Page A01


BAGHDAD -- The group directing all known U.S. search efforts for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is winding down operations without finding proof that President Saddam Hussein kept clandestine stocks of outlawed arms, according to participants.

The 75th Exploitation Task Force, as the group is formally known, has been described from the start as the principal component of the U.S. plan to discover and display forbidden Iraqi weapons. The group's departure, expected next month, marks a milestone in frustration for a major declared objective of the war.

Leaders of Task Force 75's diverse staff -- biologists, chemists, arms treaty enforcers, nuclear operators, computer and document experts, and special forces troops -- arrived with high hopes of early success. They said they expected to find what Secretary of State Colin L. Powell described at the U.N. Security Council on Feb. 5 -- hundreds of tons of biological and chemical agents, missiles and rockets to deliver the agents, and evidence of an ongoing program to build a nuclear bomb.

Scores of fruitless missions broke that confidence, many task force members said in interviews.

Army Col. Richard McPhee, who will close down the task force next month, said he took seriously U.S. intelligence warnings on the eve of war that Hussein had given "release authority" to subordinates in command of chemical weapons. "We didn't have all these people in [protective] suits" for nothing, he said. But if Iraq thought of using such weapons, "there had to have been something to use. And we haven't found it. . . . Books will be written on that in the intelligence community for a long time."

Army Col. Robert Smith, who leads the site assessment teams from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, said task force leaders no longer "think we're going to find chemical rounds sitting next to a gun." He added, "That's what we came here for, but we're past that."

Motivated and accomplished in their fields, task force members found themselves lacking vital tools. They consistently found targets identified by Washington to be inaccurate, looted and burned, or both. Leaders and members of five of the task force's eight teams, and some senior officers guiding them, said the weapons hunters were going through the motions now to "check the blocks" on a prewar list.

U.S. Central Command began the war with a list of 19 top weapons sites. Only two remain to be searched. Another list enumerated 68 top "non-WMD sites," without known links to special weapons but judged to have the potential to offer clues. Of those, the tally at midweek showed 45 surveyed without success.

Task Force 75's experience, and its impending dissolution after seven weeks in action, square poorly with assertions in Washington that the search has barely begun.

In his declaration of victory aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, President Bush said, "We've begun the search for hidden chemical and biological weapons, and already know of hundreds of sites that will be investigated." Stephen A. Cambone, undersecretary of defense for intelligence, told reporters at the Pentagon on Wednesday that U.S. forces had surveyed only 70 of the roughly 600 potential weapons facilities on the "integrated master site list" prepared by U.S. intelligence agencies before the war.

But here on the front lines of the search, the focus is on a smaller number of high-priority sites, and the results are uniformly disappointing, participants said.

"Why are we doing any planned targets?" Army Chief Warrant Officer Richard L. Gonzales, leader of Mobile Exploitation Team Alpha, said in disgust to a colleague during last Sunday's nightly report of weapons sites and survey results. "Answer me that. We know they're empty."

Survey teams have combed laboratories and munitions plants, bunkers and distilleries, bakeries and vaccine factories, file cabinets and holes in the ground where tipsters advised them to dig. Most of the assignments came with classified "target folders" describing U.S. intelligence leads. Others, known as the "ad hocs," came to the task force's attention by way of plausible human sources on the ground.

The hunt will continue under a new Iraq Survey Group, which the Bush administration has said is a larger team. But the organizers are drawing down their weapons staffs for lack of work, and adding expertise for other missions.

Interviews and documents describing the transition from Task Force 75 to the new group show that site survey teams, the advance scouts of the arms search, will reduce from six to two their complement of experts in missile technology and biological, chemical and nuclear weapons. A little-known nuclear special operations group from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, called the Direct Support Team, has already sent home a third of its original complement, and plans to cut the remaining team by half.

"We thought we would be much more gainfully employed, or intensively employed, than we were," said Navy Cmdr. David Beckett, who directs special nuclear programs for the team.

State-of-the-art biological and chemical labs, shrunk to fit standard cargo containers, came equipped with enough supplies to run thousands of tests using DNA fingerprinting and mass spectrometry. They have been called upon no more than a few dozen times, none with a confirmed hit. The labs' director, who asked not to be identified, said some of his scientists were also going home.

Even the sharpest skeptics do not rule out that the hunt may eventually find evidence of banned weapons. The most significant unknown is what U.S. interrogators are learning from senior Iraqi scientists, military industrial managers and Iraqi government leaders now in custody. If the nonconventional arms exist, some of them ought to know. Publicly, the Bush administration has declined to discuss what the captured Iraqis are saying. In private, U.S. officials provide conflicting reports, with some hinting at important disclosures. Cambone also said U.S. forces have seized "troves of documents" and are "surveying them, triaging them" for clues.

At former presidential palaces in the Baghdad area, where Task Force 75 will soon hand control to the Iraq Survey Group, leaders and team members refer to the covert operators as "secret squirrels." If they are making important progress, it has not led to "actionable" targets, according to McPhee and other task force members.

McPhee, an artillery brigade commander from Oklahoma who was assigned to the task force five months ago, reflected on the weapons hunt as the sun set outside his improvised sleeping quarters, a cot and mosquito net set down in the wreckage of a marble palace annex. He smoked a cigar, but without the peace of mind he said the evening ritual usually brings.

"My unit has not found chemical weapons," he said. "That's a fact. And I'm 47 years old, having a birthday in one of Saddam Hussein's palaces on a lake in the middle of Baghdad. It's surreal. The whole thing is surreal.

"Am I convinced that what we did in this fight was viable? I tell you from the bottom of my heart: We stopped Saddam Hussein in his WMD programs," he said, using the abbreviation for weapons of mass destruction. "Do I know where they are? I wish I did . . . but we will find them. Or not. I don't know. I'm being honest here."

Later in the conversation, he flung the unfinished cigar into the lake with somewhat more force than required.

Team members explain their disappointing results, in part, as a consequence of a slow advance. Cautious ground commanders sometimes held weapons hunters away from the front, they said, and the task force had no helicopters of its own.

"My personal feeling is we waited too long and stayed too far back," said Christopher Kowal, an expert in computer forensics who worked for Mobile Exploitation Team Charlie until last week.

'The Bear Wasn't There'


But two other factors -- erroneous intelligence and poor site security -- dealt the severest blows to the hunt, according to leaders and team members at every level.

Some information known in Washington, such as inventories of nuclear sites under supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency, did not reach the teams assigned to visit them. But what the U.S. government did not know mattered more than what it did know. Intelligence agencies had a far less accurate picture of Iraq's weapons program than participants believed at the outset of their search, they recalled.

"We came to bear country, we came loaded for bear and we found out the bear wasn't here," said a Defense Intelligence Agency officer here who asked not to be identified by name. "The indications and warnings were there. The assessments were solid."

"Okay, that paradigm didn't exist," he added. "The question before was, where are Saddam Hussein's chemical and biological weapons? What is the question now? That is what we are trying to sort out."

One thing analysts must reconsider, he said, is: "What was the nature of the threat?"

By far the greatest impediment to the weapons hunt, participants said, was widespread looting of Iraq's government and industrial facilities. At nearly every top-tier "sensitive site" the searchers reached, intruders had sacked and burned the evidence that weapons hunters had counted on sifting. As recently as last Tuesday, nearly a month after Hussein's fall from power, soldiers under the Army's V Corps command had secured only 44 of the 85 top potential weapons sites in the Baghdad area and 153 of the 372 considered most important to rebuilding Iraq's government and economy.

McPhee saw early in the war that the looters were stripping his targets before he could check them. He cut the planning cycle for new missions -- the time between first notice and launch -- from 96 to 24 hours. "What we found," he said, was that "as the maneuver units hit a target they had to move on, even 24 hours was too slow. By the time we got there, a lot of things were gone."

Short and powerfully built, McPhee has spent his adult life as a combat officer. He calls his soldiers "bubbas" and worries about their mail. "It ain't good" that suspect sites are unprotected, he said, but he refused to criticize fighting units who left evidence unguarded.

"You've got two corps commanders being told, 'Get to Baghdad,' and, oh, by the way, 'When you run across sensitive sites, you have to secure them,' " he said. "Do you secure all those sites, or do you get to Baghdad? You've got limited force structure and you've got 20 missions."

A low point came when looters destroyed what was meant to be McPhee's headquarters in the Iraqi capital. The 101st Airborne Division had used the complex, a munitions factory called the Al Qadisiyah State Establishment, before rolling north to Mosul. When a reporter came calling, looking for Task Force 75, looters were busily stripping it clean. They later set it ablaze.

An Altered Mission


The search teams arrived in Iraq "looking for the smoking gun," Smith said, and now the mission is more diffuse -- general intelligence-gathering on subjects ranging from crimes against humanity and prisoners of war to Hussein's links with terrorists.

At the peak of the effort, all four mobile exploitation teams were devoted nearly full time to weapons of mass destruction. By late last month, two of the four had turned to other questions. This week, MET Alpha, Gonzales's team, also left the hunt, at least temporarily. It parted with its chemical and biological experts, added linguists and document exploiters and recast itself as an intelligence team. It will search for weapons if leads turn up, but lately it has focused on Iraqi covert operations abroad and the theft of Jewish antiquities.

The stymied hunt baffles search team leaders. To a person, those interviewed during a weeklong visit to the task force said they believed in the mission and the Bush administration accusations that prompted it.

Yet "smoking gun" is now a term of dark irony here. Maj. Kenneth Deal, executive officer of one site survey team, called out the words in mock triumph when he found a page of Arabic text at a former Baath Party recreation center last week. It was torn from a translated edition of A.J.P. Taylor's history, "The Struggle for Mastery in Europe." At a "battle update brief" last week, amid confusion over the whereabouts of a British laboratory in transit from Talil Air Base, McPhee deadpanned to his staff: "I haven't a clue where the WMD is, but we can find this lab."

<cut for lack of space>

In a climate-control room, chemical weapons filters and carbon dioxide scrubbers protected the air and an overpressure blast valve stood ready to vent the lethal shock waves of an explosion. And a decontamination shower stood under an alarm panel designed to flash the message "Gas-Gaz."

"Is it evidence of weapons of mass destruction?" asked Deal. "No. It's probably evidence of paranoia."

"I don't think we'll find anything," said Army Capt. Tom Baird, one of two deputy operations officers under McPhee. "What I see is a lot of stuff destroyed." The Defense Intelligence Agency officer, describing a "sort of a lull period" in the search, said that whatever may have been at the target sites is now "dispersed to the wind."

<cut for lack of space>


© 2003 The Washington Post Company
 
btw. does anyone know what happened to the MIG 29s of the Iraqui Air Force that were flown to Iran in 1991? Maybe they had some WMD stuff on board. Never heard about the planes again - maybe they fly with Iranian Insignia now.

The Problem in Iraq seems to be that if you bring democracy they will probably elect the shiite Islamists - which means the end of democracy again. Very difficult.
Andreas
 
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