Loot

And a bit more on the subject.

Andrea links to this site, which seems to be a clearing house of stories on the museum looting.

There’s both tragedy and overwrought comedy here. We should beef up border guards to make sure that artifacts aren’t going out of the country (well, yeah — I assme the border guarding is as tight as we can make it, since we want to make sure that weapons and regime members don’t get out, either). Some artifacts may already be showing up for sale in Paris (has the French government seized the stuff?).

Or this:

Just consider how far the United States has sunk since the end of World War II. America launched the Safehaven Program to recover European art looted by the Nazis. Today, the United States aids and abets the looting of art and treasures thousands of years older than the European art it helped salvage some 60 years ago. In days past, U.S. military and intelligence, including the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA, helped recover and restitute historical treasures looted by the likes of Hermann Goering and Alfred Rosenberg. American generals like Dwight Eisenhower, Omar Bradley, and George Patton, Jr., personally oversaw the recovery and return of artwork seized by the Nazis.”

Right. And it was all back in the hands of the rightful owners within days of V-E Day, right? Indeed, that was the first priority of all those people — returning art to its rightful owners. Military operations, security, all that stuff, took second place. Uh-huh.

But there are a couple of odd things, too. Consider this picture, from the CS Monitor: EMPTY DISPLAY: A man in the Iraqi National Museum in Baghdad peers into a smashed case that once held a 4,500-year-old marble plaque. The guy is actually peering into what looks like an intact case. Another case in the foreground does have a hole smashed in the middle of it, but just one, just enough to reach a single item inside. The rest of the case is intact, and empty. The floor is clean. There are intact, but empty, cases all around, neatly arranged.

Huh?

Or this picture: An armed guard looks at empty shelves after a mob of looters ransacked and looted Iraq ( news -web sites )’s largest archeological museum in Baghdad. Again, the display cases are neatly against the wall, the glass is intact, there is one display card visible in one case, the floor is clean.

What?

Granted, there are plenty of other pictures of destruction, but I find these two odd, because they show a lack of destruction. What they do show is the orderly removal of a whole lot of artifacts by someone who had the keys to the cases, removed them (and their cards), then closed the cases back up again, neatly, in no sort of hurry.

Not a looting mob, by any means.

So either folks are just being sloppy with their photo captioning (always a possibility), or there’s a lot more to this story than meets the eye. Or, of course, both.