US War Crimes: The Looting of the Iraqi National Museum
by Varlet 12:32am Mon Apr 14 '03 article#24588
repost from Chicago Indymedia


The sacking of the National Museum of Antiquities in Baghdad, Iraq, while US Troops, forewarned of the possibility of this by the archaeologists of the US and the world, essentially looked
on, is a crime against humanity unparalleled since the destruction of the Library of Alexandria, said to have been the repository of all human knowledge from time immemorial.

While it is unclear exactly *who* destroyed the Library of Alexandria, there is NO DOUBT as to who is responsible for the destruction of the exquisite National Museum of Antiquities. The responsibility lies solely with the US government; in particular, at the doorsteps of the Pentagon and US State Department. These murderous swine have the blood of tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands of Iraqi men, women, children and soldiers since the US invasion began on 19 March 2003. They have the blood of millions more murdered in the 1991 Gulf War and the brutal UN-sponsored sanctions that followed. We hope to live to see the day when Bush Sr. and Jr. and their war cabinets, as well as those of the mass murderer Clinton and his advisers, who wantonly attacked the Iraqi people time and time again, are brought to justice by a tribunal of the friends and relatives of their Iraqi victims!

We must never forget that the Clinton administration was responsible for the continuation and tightening of the Bush I - initiated UN sanctions, which are estimated to have led to the deaths of 1.5 million Iraqis, mostly children. For 8 long years, the Iraqi people suffered at the hands of two successive heartless and brutal Clinton administrations. These crimes must not go unpunished, nor shall they ever be forgotten!

But the destruction of the National Museum of Antiquities of Iraq, the sole repository of the most priceless collection of works of art, science, and literature from the very dawn of human civilization, is a crime which will cause irreparable damage to every future generation of the world's children! The collective history of humankind has been savaged, destroyed forever, at the hands of a mob unleashed by the wanton destruction of the city of Baghdad by a band of thieves and murderers in Washington who care for nothing but the obscene profits they will acquire by destroying the infrastructure of Iraq and seizing the Iraqi oil fields!

This horrendous crime against humanity must be shown for what it truly is: the raping of Iraqi culture, of human history, by a gang of American and British bankers, oil barons, and industrialists who place their own personal aggrandizement over all other considerations! This unparallelled venality of the US bourgeoisie shows to us Trotskyists, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that unless these capitalist butchers and thieves are overthrown by the working class, and their brutal capitalist system is replaced with an egalitarian socialist society that creates a world in which all women and men can live as sisters and brothers, the entire cultural history of the human race, and the human race itself, will stand threatened with total annihilation!

The anticommunists have long mocked us when we declared forthrightly that the human race in the 20th and 21st centuries had but this choice before them: either Socialism or Barbarism! The destruction of the National Museum of Afghanistan by the Taliban "freedom fighters" who were unleashed by the US in the "jihad" against the Soviet Union, and the pillaging of the National Museum of Antiquities of Iraq, under the very noses of the US military invaders sent to "liberate" Iraq, shows that the Trotskyists were RIGHT once again!

If you think I exaggerate, read these testimonies reprinted below, from scientists who know much more about this tremendous disaster that I do!

"McGuire Gibson, a University of Chicago professor and president of the American Association for Research in Baghdad, was infuriated.

"He said he had been in frequent and frantic touch with U.S. military officials since Wednesday, imploring them to send troops 'in there and protect that building.'

"The Americans could have prevented the looting, agreed Patty Gerstenblith, a professor at DePaul School of Law in Chicago who helped circulate a petition before the war, urging that care be taken to protect Iraqi antiquities.

'It was completely inexcusable and avoidable,' she said."
(April 13, 2003
'Iraqi Artifacts Plundered by Looters'
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS)

"Gordon Newby, a historian and professor of Middle Eastern studies at Emory University in Atlanta, said the museum's most famous holding might have been tablets with Hammurabi's Code -- one of mankind's earliest codes of law. It could not be determined whether the tablets were at the museum when the war broke out.

"Other treasures believed to have been housed there -- such as the Ram in the Thicket from Ur, a statue representing a deity from 2600 BC -- are no doubt gone, perhaps forever, he said.

"'This is just one of the most tragic things that could happen for our being able to understand the past,' Newby said.

"John Russell, a professor of art history and archeology at the Massachusetts College of Art, feared for the safety of the staff of Iraq's national antiquities department, also housed at the museum; for irreplacable records of every archeological expedition in Iraq since the 1930s; and for perhaps hundreds of thousands of artifacts from 10,000 years of civilization."
(CULTURAL THEFT - Museum artifacts plundered by looters - A Baghdad trove is picked clean
By Hamza Hendawi, Associated Press, 4/13/2003)

"McGuire Gibson, professor of Mesopotamian archeology at the University of Chicago and head of the American Association for Research in Baghdad, said he had given the U.S. Army lists of 5,000 sites in Iraq, including a prioritized list of 150 locations that they should try to spare.

" 'In all the lists, I stressed that the most important site of all, the No. 1, is this museum,' Gibson said. 'Because of this, I assumed that it would be secured as soon as they [soldiers] were in the neighborhood.'

"Another American expert, Gil Stein, director of the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago, noted that the museum housed the masterpieces of Mesopotamian culture.

" 'Mesopotamia is the world's first civilization. It's the first place to develop cities, the first place where writing was invented,' Stein said. 'And the artifacts from the excavations from there are the patrimony for our entire civilization and absolutely irreplaceable.'

"The Iraqi Department of Antiquities, which oversaw the museum, was never corrupted by Hussein's Baath Party 'and had done everything they could to keep these artifacts safe,' Stein said. 'It's not their failure. The failure is ours.'

"Assessing the damage from the recent plundering, Stein echoed the frustration of Iraqi museum officials, saying a couple of U.S. soldiers standing outside the museum could have secured it.

"'They have gone to great lengths to protect the oil wells,' he said. 'But the treasures of Iraq's past are immeasurably more valuable.'
("Artifacts survive war--not chaos...Looters seize museum treasures" - By Bill Glauber, Chicago Tribune,
April 13, 2003)

The Looting of the Museum of Antiqities of Iraq Was a War Crime, and the US Government of the Idiot President George Bush and his Democratic Party allies is responsible for it!

Varlet


by Varlet 12:32am Mon Apr 14 '03 article#24588
repost from Chicago Indymedia


The sacking of the National Museum of Antiquities in Baghdad, Iraq, while US Troops, forewarned of the possibility of this by the archaeologists of the US and the world, essentially looked
on, is a crime against humanity unparalleled since the destruction of the Library of Alexandria, said to have been the repository of all human knowledge from time immemorial.

While it is unclear exactly *who* destroyed the Library of Alexandria, there is NO DOUBT as to who is responsible for the destruction of the exquisite National Museum of Antiquities. The responsibility lies solely with the US government; in particular, at the doorsteps of the Pentagon and US State Department. These murderous swine have the blood of tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands of Iraqi men, women, children and soldiers since the US invasion began on 19 March 2003. They have the blood of millions more murdered in the 1991 Gulf War and the brutal UN-sponsored sanctions that followed. We hope to live to see the day when Bush Sr. and Jr. and their war cabinets, as well as those of the mass murderer Clinton and his advisers, who wantonly attacked the Iraqi people time and time again, are brought to justice by a tribunal of the friends and relatives of their Iraqi victims!

We must never forget that the Clinton administration was responsible for the continuation and tightening of the Bush I - initiated UN sanctions, which are estimated to have led to the deaths of 1.5 million Iraqis, mostly children. For 8 long years, the Iraqi people suffered at the hands of two successive heartless and brutal Clinton administrations. These crimes must not go unpunished, nor shall they ever be forgotten!

But the destruction of the National Museum of Antiquities of Iraq, the sole repository of the most priceless collection of works of art, science, and literature from the very dawn of human civilization, is a crime which will cause irreparable damage to every future generation of the world's children! The collective history of humankind has been savaged, destroyed forever, at the hands of a mob unleashed by the wanton destruction of the city of Baghdad by a band of thieves and murderers in Washington who care for nothing but the obscene profits they will acquire by destroying the infrastructure of Iraq and seizing the Iraqi oil fields!

This horrendous crime against humanity must be shown for what it truly is: the raping of Iraqi culture, of human history, by a gang of American and British bankers, oil barons, and industrialists who place their own personal aggrandizement over all other considerations! This unparallelled venality of the US bourgeoisie shows to us Trotskyists, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that unless these capitalist butchers and thieves are overthrown by the working class, and their brutal capitalist system is replaced with an egalitarian socialist society that creates a world in which all women and men can live as sisters and brothers, the entire cultural history of the human race, and the human race itself, will stand threatened with total annihilation!

The anticommunists have long mocked us when we declared forthrightly that the human race in the 20th and 21st centuries had but this choice before them: either Socialism or Barbarism! The destruction of the National Museum of Afghanistan by the Taliban "freedom fighters" who were unleashed by the US in the "jihad" against the Soviet Union, and the pillaging of the National Museum of Antiquities of Iraq, under the very noses of the US military invaders sent to "liberate" Iraq, shows that the Trotskyists were RIGHT once again!

If you think I exaggerate, read these testimonies reprinted below, from scientists who know much more about this tremendous disaster that I do!

"McGuire Gibson, a University of Chicago professor and president of the American Association for Research in Baghdad, was infuriated.

"He said he had been in frequent and frantic touch with U.S. military officials since Wednesday, imploring them to send troops 'in there and protect that building.'

"The Americans could have prevented the looting, agreed Patty Gerstenblith, a professor at DePaul School of Law in Chicago who helped circulate a petition before the war, urging that care be taken to protect Iraqi antiquities.

'It was completely inexcusable and avoidable,' she said."
(April 13, 2003
'Iraqi Artifacts Plundered by Looters'
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS)

"Gordon Newby, a historian and professor of Middle Eastern studies at Emory University in Atlanta, said the museum's most famous holding might have been tablets with Hammurabi's Code -- one of mankind's earliest codes of law. It could not be determined whether the tablets were at the museum when the war broke out.

"Other treasures believed to have been housed there -- such as the Ram in the Thicket from Ur, a statue representing a deity from 2600 BC -- are no doubt gone, perhaps forever, he said.

"'This is just one of the most tragic things that could happen for our being able to understand the past,' Newby said.

"John Russell, a professor of art history and archeology at the Massachusetts College of Art, feared for the safety of the staff of Iraq's national antiquities department, also housed at the museum; for irreplacable records of every archeological expedition in Iraq since the 1930s; and for perhaps hundreds of thousands of artifacts from 10,000 years of civilization."
(CULTURAL THEFT - Museum artifacts plundered by looters - A Baghdad trove is picked clean
By Hamza Hendawi, Associated Press, 4/13/2003)

"McGuire Gibson, professor of Mesopotamian archeology at the University of Chicago and head of the American Association for Research in Baghdad, said he had given the U.S. Army lists of 5,000 sites in Iraq, including a prioritized list of 150 locations that they should try to spare.

" 'In all the lists, I stressed that the most important site of all, the No. 1, is this museum,' Gibson said. 'Because of this, I assumed that it would be secured as soon as they [soldiers] were in the neighborhood.'

"Another American expert, Gil Stein, director of the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago, noted that the museum housed the masterpieces of Mesopotamian culture.

" 'Mesopotamia is the world's first civilization. It's the first place to develop cities, the first place where writing was invented,' Stein said. 'And the artifacts from the excavations from there are the patrimony for our entire civilization and absolutely irreplaceable.'

"The Iraqi Department of Antiquities, which oversaw the museum, was never corrupted by Hussein's Baath Party 'and had done everything they could to keep these artifacts safe,' Stein said. 'It's not their failure. The failure is ours.'

"Assessing the damage from the recent plundering, Stein echoed the frustration of Iraqi museum officials, saying a couple of U.S. soldiers standing outside the museum could have secured it.

"'They have gone to great lengths to protect the oil wells,' he said. 'But the treasures of Iraq's past are immeasurably more valuable.'
("Artifacts survive war--not chaos...Looters seize museum treasures" - By Bill Glauber, Chicago Tribune,
April 13, 2003)

The Looting of the Museum of Antiqities of Iraq Was a War Crime, and the US Government of the Idiot President George Bush and his Democratic Party allies is responsible for it!

Varlet