Category: Networks

The New York Times reports that the claims of massive looting of cultural artifacts in Iraq were, in fact, grossly inflated. Instead of 170,000 items missing, it looks more like, um, 25 that are for sure missing:

Col. Matthew F. Bogdanos, a Marine reservist who is investigating the looting and is stationed at the museum, said museum officials had given him a list of 29 artifacts that were definitely missing. But since then, 4 items — ivory objects from the eighth century B.C. — had been traced.

Twenty-five missing pieces out of an inventory of tens of thousands really isn’t a story.

ABC News reports that Shiite Muslims in Iraq are beginning to cooperate with Garner in the run-up to Monday’s conference:

Monday’s conference, second in a series likely to extend well into May, was expected to attract 300 to 400 delegates from political organizations that had opposed Saddam Hussein and from other Iraqi interest groups, said a Garner deputy, Barbara Bodine.

The first meeting was held April 15 in Ur, in southern Iraq, just a week after U.S. troops took control of the Iraqi capital and ousted the Saddam government. Fewer than 100 Iraqis participated, many of them exiles, as some Shiites and others stayed away in protest of potential U.S. influence over selection of a new Iraqi president.

Bodine told reporters that, on Monday, “I think we are going to see more of an indigenous representation, simply because we’ve had more time to organize.”

It’s common sense, isn’t it?

London’s Daily Telegraph has turned up another interesting memo:

Iraqi intelligence documents discovered in Baghdad by The Telegraph have provided the first evidence of a direct link between Osama bin Laden’s al-Qa’eda terrorist network and Saddam Hussein’s regime.

Papers found yesterday in the bombed headquarters of the Mukhabarat, Iraq’s intelligence service, reveal that an al-Qa’eda envoy was invited clandestinely to Baghdad in March 1998.

The documents show that the purpose of the meeting was to establish a relationship between Baghdad and al-Qa’eda based on their mutual hatred of America and Saudi Arabia. The meeting apparently went so well that it was extended by a week and ended with arrangements being discussed for bin Laden to visit Baghdad.

In the life of a nation, there are thousands of interactions with other nations and organizations every month. It’s unlikely to the extreme that Saddam’s government, in all its years, never had anything at all to do with Al Qaeda, so those who insist that the two never had anything to do with each other are bound to be proved wrong. Adding to this, Chalabi has told Fox News that Saddam had advance knowledge of 9/11. Why wouldn’t he?

Lest we forget, Jay Garner’s office asked CENTCOM to guard that museum in Baghdad:

KUWAIT CITY — In a memo sent two weeks before the fall of Baghdad, the Pentagon office charged with rebuilding Iraq urged top commanders of U.S. ground forces to protect the Iraqi National Museum and other cultural sites from looters.

“Coalition forces must secure these facilities in order to prevent looting and the resulting irreparable loss of cultural treasures,” says the March 26 memo, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Times.

The Pentagon’s Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA), led by retired Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, sent the five-page memo to senior commanders at the Coalition Forces Land Component Command (CFLCC).

Two weeks later, American forces pulled down the giant statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad to cheering crowds, and in the days that followed, looters pillaged Baghdad.

The museum was No. 2 on a list of 16 sites that ORHA deemed crucial to protect. Financial institutions topped the list, including the Iraqi Central Bank, which is now a burned-out shell filled with twisted metal beams from the collapse of the roof and all nine floors under it.

“We asked for just a few soldiers at each building, or if they feared snipers, then just one or two tanks,” said an angry ORHA official, one of several who spoke to The Times on the condition of anonymity.

So the question is why CENTCOM didn’t cooperate with ORHA, not why America doesn’t love clay pots, because we clearly do. I don’t expect this memo is going to quiet any of the critics of the Administration, but their official spokesman is off on an anti-Chalabi tirade now and can’t be bothered with any of this factual stuff.

This post of Brink Lindsey’s is so good it bears repeating:

America the Liberator

A year and a half ago, monsters murdered 3,000 Americans. America’s response, thus far: to liberate 50 million people in Afghanistan and Iraq from two of the most hideous tyrannies on earth.

Instead of revenge, beneficence. What a truly wonderful country we live in.

Amen.

The Washington Post reports that we’re making some progress in getting back the booty looted from the museum in Baghdad by Iraqis last week:

Officials are also using tips from citizens to hunt down stolen items, and trying to prevail on thieves to turn them in voluntarily. Muslim clerics, at the officials’ urging, have announced over mosque loudspeakers that anyone with looted items should return them to museum curators, no questions asked. U.S. reconstruction officials said they plan to air similar messages on Iraqi radio stations starting tonight.
“It’s already working,” said John Limbert, the U.S. ambassador to Mauritania, who is serving as adviser to Iraq’s Culture Ministry for the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, the U.S. postwar agency for Iraq. “I’ve heard from our friends that a number of objects were collected in mosques in the neighborhood after appeals from the imams of the mosques.”

Some was explicitly taken for safekeeping by museum staff, as they’re trained to do.

From the pages of the New York Times:

In Baghdad, power was restored to about one-fifth of the city for the first time in three weeks.

That’s good.

I’ll give a shiny quarter to anyone who can make sense out of this gem of post-modern ethics from Steven “Emergence” Johnson:

Just because something’s morally right doesn’t always make it the right thing to do.

Huh? What? Are you on drugs? Retarded? Demented? A tenured professor? A Ba’ath Party regular? That’s exactly what it means, nothing more and nothing less. Slap, slap, slap.

Check the Frisco Guardian’s March 27 issue for some unprecedentedly visionary predictions on the liberation of Iraq.

Tim Blair has the goods on George Galloway, the British MP who received a half million bucks a year to lobby Saddam’s case in the Parliament. On top of the recent evidence of payoffs to Russia and Germany, and what we already knew about France, this makes the protesters and others who advocated for Saddam without being paid look like suckers.