Rumsfeld's comments

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

------ Forwarded Message
From: chodge5 () utk edu
Date: Wed, 16 Apr 2003 14:51:25 -0400 (EDT)
To: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>
Subject: [Fwd: Rumsfeld's comments] (fwd)


Honestly, just when you thought you had become completely numb to outrage,
you read something like this:


Donald Rumsfeld on the museum in Baghdad:

"The images you are seeing on television you are seeing over, and over,
and over, and it's the same picture of some person walking out of some
building with a vase, and you see it 20 times, and you think, 'My
goodness, were there that many vases? Is it possible that there were
that many vases in the whole country?' "

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/dailybriefing/story/0,12965,935381,00.html



Sit down before you read this:

This article from NYTimes.com

Pillagers Strip Iraqi Museum of Its Treasure

April 12, 2003
By JOHN F. BURNS


BAGHDAD, Iraq, April 12 - The National Museum of Iraq
recorded a history of civilizations that began to flourish
in the fertile plains of Mesopotamia more than 7,000 years
ago. But once American troops entered Baghdad in sufficient
force to topple Saddam Hussein's government this week, it
took only 48 hours for the museum to be destroyed, with at
least 170,000 artifacts carried away by looters.

The full extent of the disaster that befell the museum only
came to light today, after three days of frenzied looting
that swept much of the capital.

As fires in a dozen government ministries and agencies
began to burn out, and as some of the looters tired of
pillaging in the 90-degree heat of the Iraqi spring, museum
officials reached the hotels where foreign journalists were
staying along the eastern bank of the Tigris River. They
brought word of what is likely to be reckoned as one of the
greatest cultural disasters in recent Middle Eastern
history.

A full accounting of what has been lost may take weeks or
months. The museum had been closed during much of the
1990's, and like many Iraqi institutions, its operations
were cloaked in secrecy under Mr. Hussein.

So what officials told journalists today may have to be
adjusted as a fuller picture comes to light. It remains
unclear whether some of the museum's priceless gold, silver
and copper antiquities, some of its ancient stone and
ceramics, and perhaps some of its fabled bronzes and
gold-overlaid ivory, had been locked away for safekeeping
elsewhere before the looting, or seized for private display
in one of Mr. Hussein's myriad palaces.

What was beyond contest today was that the 28 galleries of
the museum and vaults with huge steel doors guarding
storage chambers that descend floor after floor into
darkness had been completely ransacked.

Officials with crumpled spirits fought back tears and anger
at American troops, as they ran down an inventory of the
most storied items that they said had been carried away by
the thousands of looters who poured into the museum after
daybreak on Thursday and remained until dusk on Friday,
with only one intervention by American troops, lasting
about half an hour, at lunchtime on Thursday.

Nothing remained, museum officials said, at least nothing
of real value, from a museum that had been regarded by
archaeologists and other specialists as perhaps the richest
of all such institutions in the Middle East.

As examples of what was gone, the officials cited a solid
gold harp from the Sumerian era, which began about 3360
B.C. and started to crumble about 2000 B.C. Another item on
their list of looted antiquities was a sculptured head of a
woman from Uruk, one of the great Sumerian cities, from
about the same era, and a collection of gold necklaces,
bracelets and earrings, also from the Sumerian dynasties
and also at least 4,000 years old.

But an item-by-item inventory of the most valued pieces
carried away by the looters hardly seemed to capture the
magnitude of what had occurred. More powerful, in its way,
was the action of one museum official in hurrying away
through the piles of smashed ceramics and torn books and
burned-out torches of rags soaked in gasoline that littered
the museum's corridors to find the glossy catalog of an
exhibition of "Silk Road Civilizations" that was held in
Japan's ancient capital of Nara in 1988.

Turning to 50 pages of items lent by the Iraqi museum for
the exhibition, he said that none of the antiquities
pictured remained after the looting. They included ancient
stone carvings of bulls and kings and princesses; copper
shoes and cuneiform tablets; tapestry fragments and ivory
figurines of goddesses and women and Nubian porters;
friezes of soldiers and ancient seals and tablets on
geometry; and ceramic jars and urns and bowls, all at least
2,000 years old, some more than 5,000.

"All gone, all gone," he said. "All gone in two days."

An
Iraqi archaeologist who has participated in the excavation
of some of the country's 10,000 sites, Raid Abdul Ridhar
Muhammad, said he had gone into the street in the Karkh
district, a short distance from the eastern bank of the
Tigris, about 1 p.m. on Thursday to find American troops to
quell the looting. By that time, he and other museum
officials said, the several acres of museum grounds were
overrun by thousands of men, women and children, many of
them armed with rifles, pistols, axes, knives and clubs, as
well as pieces of metal torn from the suspensions of
wrecked cars. The crowd was storming out of the complex
carrying antiquities on hand carts, bicycles and
wheelbarrows and in boxes. Looters stuffed their pockets
with smaller items.

Mr. Muhammad said he found an American Abrams tank in
Museum Square, about 300 yards away, and that five marines
had followed him back into the museum and opened fire above
the looters' heads. This drove several thousand of the
marauders out of the museum complex in minutes, he said,
but when the tank crewmen left about 30 minutes later, the
looters returned.

"I asked them to bring their tank inside the museum
grounds," he said. "But they refused and left. About half
an hour later, the looters were back, and they threatened
to kill me, or to tell the Americans that I am a spy for
Saddam Hussein's intelligence, so that the Americans would
kill me. So I was frightened, and I went home."

Mohsen Hassan, a 56-year-old deputy curator, returned to
the museum this afternoon after visiting military
commanders a mile away at the Palestine Hotel, with a
request that American troops be placed in the museum to
protect the building and items left by the looters in the
vaults. Mr. Hassan said the American officers had given him
no assurances that they would guard the museum around the
clock, but other American commanders announced later in the
day that joint patrols with unarmed Iraqi police units
would begin as early as Sunday in an attempt to prevent
further looting.

Mr. Hassan, who said he had spent 34 years helping to
develop the museum's collection, described watching as men
took sledgehammers to locked glass display cases and in
some instances fired rifles and pistols to break the locks.


He said many of the looters appeared to be from the
impoverished districts of the city where anger at Mr.
Hussein ran at its strongest, but that others were
middle-class people who appeared to know exactly what they
were looking for.

"Did some of them know the value of what they took?" he
said. "Absolutely, they did. They knew what the most valued
pieces in our collection were."

Mr. Muhammad spoke with deep bitterness toward the
Americans, as have many Iraqis who have watched looting
that began with attacks on government agencies and the
palaces and villas of Mr. Hussein, his family and his inner
circle broaden into a tidal wave that targeted just about
every government institution, even ministries dealing with
issues like higher education, trade and agriculture, and
hospitals.

American troops have intervened only sporadically, as they
did on Friday to halt a crowd of men and boys who were
raiding an armory at the edge of the Republican Palace
presidential compound and taking brand-new Kalashnikov
rifles, rocket-propelled grenades and other weapons.

American commanders have said they lack the troops to curb
the looting while their focus remains on the battles across
Baghdad that are necessary to mop up pockets of resistance
from paramilitary troops loyal to Mr. Hussein.

Mr. Muhammad, the archaeologist, directed much of his anger
at President Bush. "A country's identity, its value and
civilization resides in its history," he said. "If a
country's civilization is looted, as ours has been here,
its history ends. Please tell this to President Bush.
Please remind him that he promised to liberate the Iraqi
people, but that this is not a liberation, this is a
humiliation. If we had stayed under the rule of Saddam
Hussein, it would have been much better."

The looting appeared to have its heaviest impact on a
security guard at the museum, Abdul Rahman, 57, who said he
had tried to stop the first band of looters breaking
through to steel gates at the rear of the compound on
Thursday morning. He said he gave up when the looters
started firing in the air with pistols and rifles. "They
were shouting, `There's no government, there's no state,
and we will do what we like. We will take anything we
want.' They said `Open up, open up, there's no more Saddam
so we can do what we like.' "

Mr. Rahman said he returned to his room and remained there
for two days, hiding and heartbroken.

Under Mr. Hussein, he said, he had learned to keep his
thoughts to himself. "I've learned how to mind my own
business," he said. "I'm a security guard. I don't bother
myself with other people's affairs."

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/12/international/worldspecial/12CND-BA
GH.html?ex=1051192880&ei=1&en=8855f5ee93fa96bc



-- 
--aj

A. J. Wright - <ajw () toadking org>
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Benjamin Franklin



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