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--snip-- Slowly but surely, military officers and U.S. Customs agents are beginning to account for the disparate pieces of a vast museum collection from a land rich in history and artifacts thousands of years old. And what they have discovered is that far fewer pieces were looted from the museum's collection than initial reports indicated. --snip-- "Some of the original reports indicated close to 170,000 items were either stolen or destroyed," said Marine Col. Matthew Bogdanos, who heads the investigation. "What we're finding is that the number is significantly smaller, by a factor of at least 100.

MISSING ANTIQUITIES Loss Estimates Are Cut on Iraqi Artifacts, but Questions Remain By ALAN RIDING BAGHDAD, Iraq, April 30 — Even though many irreplaceable antiquities were looted from the National Museum of Iraq during the chaotic fall of Baghdad last month, museum officials and American investigators now say the losses seem to be less severe than originally thought. 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...

PORTSMOUTH, Va. -- An underwater survey found what might be remnants of the Confederate ironclad warship Virginia, the former USS Merrimack that fought the Union's ironclad Monitor in the 1862 battle that redefined naval warfare. "It would be a stroke of incredible luck to discover it after all these years," said Dick Hoffeditz, curator of the Virginia War Museum in Newport News. The underwater survey, for the proposed construction of a marine terminal on the Elizabeth River, describes two shipwrecks in the area and says there is "a distinct possibility" that they might be parts of the Virginia and of...

U.S. Museum to Return Ramses I Mummy to Egypt Hillary Mayell for National Geographic News April 30, 2003 A 3,000-year-old mummy that many scholars believe is ancient Egypt's King Ramses I is the star attraction of an exhibit at the Michael C. Carlos Museum in Atlanta that will run from April 26 to September 14. How the mummy came to reside in North America for 140 years, and wound up in Atlanta, is a tale that includes the collapse of law and order in ancient Egypt, grave robbers, stolen antiquities, a two-headed calf and a five-legged pig, the wonders of...

Douglas Anthony Cooper of Montreal chides me for a throwaway line in last week's column about the antiwar crowd's sudden interest in property crime: "Steal the photocopier from Baghdad's Ministry of Genital Clamping and they're pining for the smack of firm government." "Some matters reside beyond the domain of comedy," writes Cooper. "The rape of the National Museum of Iraq and the torching of the National Library will be lamented by historians for centuries." He concludes, "A man of Steyn's sensibilities beneath the sneer I detect a partisan of Western civilization ought to find this an occasion of immense sorrow."...

Tuesday, April 22, 2003; 12:01 a.m. EST] We Americans must face two realities since Operation Iraqi Freedom has proved so successful. Reality #1: The world's leftists and America-haters (many of them fellow Americans) want to see us fail in Iraq. Reality #2: They have plenty of time to make sure we fail or at least give the mentally challenged worldwide the impression that we did. They will conduct a campaign against America until long after an Iraqi government takes over and Iraqi oil is lubricating the Iraqi and world economies. The campaign began with the fall of Baghdad. The hullabaloo...

The blue Kia minivan rolled through the guarded gates of the National Museum of Antiquities early this afternoon, loaded with a precious cargo of metals and minerals: a bronze relief from the 4th century B.C. swathed in yellow foam padding, antique farm implements, an elaborately engraved marble slab wrapped in plastic, a decapitated statue of an Assyrian king. Also inside the van was Namir Ibrahim Jamil, a 33-year-old Iraqi pianist who said that 11 days ago he watched in horror as looters ransacked the museum, hauling away as much of Iraq's tangible legacy as they could carry. He said he...

If Iraq's National Museum had not been looted, the conspiracy theorists - the antiwar, anti-Bush commentators and protestors - would have had to invent the story. Instead, they merely invented the story of how it happened. Here are some of the interpretations racing across the Internet from loony to loony. George W. Bush is a cultural dunce, who wouldn't know a 5,000 year-old Warka Vase from a Mexican flower pot from Wal-Mart. He didn't care about the artifacts. (It's not like they're Rembrandts or Leonardos or even Elvises on velvet, he said to himself.) Besides, his cronies who are rich...

<p>If thieves hadn't looted Iraq's National Museum, the conspiracy theorists — the anti-war, anti-Bush pundits and protesters — would have had to invent the story. Instead, they merely invented the story of how it happened.</p> <p>Here are some of the interpretations racing across the Internet, from looney to loonier. George W. Bush is a cultural dunce who wouldn't know a 5,000-year-old Warka vase from a Mexican flower pot at Wal-Mart. He didn't care about the artifacts. (It's not like they're Rembrandts or Leonardos or even Elvises on velvet, George W. said to himself.) Besides, his cronies, who are rich collectors, now get a chance to buy the real stuff on the open black market: They can bid on that cuneiform accounting table (1980 B.C.) when it turns up for auction at Christie's. The Web site of the World Socialists describes "the politics of plunder" as a preface to stealing the oil wells.</p>

Volume 56 Number 3, May/June 2003 Editor's note: The following Special Report was written just before the war's outbreak. THE SPECTER OF WAR Protecting Iraq's museum collections and archaeological sites in the event of an invasion. BY JOANNE FARCHAKH The grand reliefs from the Assyrian palaces of Nimrud and Khorsabad--the pride of the Baghdad Museum--are housed in an exhibition hall across the street from the Ministry of Communication and a mere 300 feet from a television and radio station. These buildings, as experience has shown, are the first targets for air strikes, and Iraqi cultural officials fear that the reliefs,...

Customs agents at a US airport believe they have seized at least one item taken from Baghdad museum, which was looted of thousands of valuable artefacts as Saddam Hussein's regime collapsed. The FBI refused to say at which airport the object had been confiscated or the nature of the artefact, but customs officials across the country have been put on high alert amid suspicions that many of the stolen objects will end up on the US market. Many objects from Iraq, looted both at the end of the first Gulf War in 1991 and during the last, have already started...

<p>WHO'S to blame for the destruction of Iraqi museums, libraries and archives, amounting to what The New York Times calls "one of the greatest cultural disasters in recent Middle Eastern history"? The Bush administration, say academic specialists on the Middle East. They proceed to compare American leaders to some of the worst mass-murderers in history.</p>

<p>April 22, 2003 -- WASHINGTON - Ancient art stolen from a Baghdad museum already appears to be rolling up on U.S. shores, the head of the FBI's art-theft unit said yesterday.</p> <p>Lynne Chaffinch said Customs agents have come across suspicious Iraqi artifacts at airports, and she's gotten calls from prominent collectors and auction-house dealers who say they've spotted pieces stolen during the mass looting that took place at Iraq's National Museum of Antiquities.</p>

"Bush Panel Members Quit Over Looting: Cultural Advisers Say U.S. Military Could Have Prevented Museum Losses" -- The Washington Post, April 17, 2003 You just knew that they'd find some reason to bewail U.S. conduct. The United States has just achieved one of the cleanest and most humane military triumphs in the history of warfare -- toppling a vicious dictator while simultaneously tending to the needs of the civilian population. U.S. forces have behaved with chivalry toward enemy forces (showering them with opportunities for surrender), as well as respect for the religious symbols of the Iraqi people and rapid attention...

Marines Guard $1B in Iraqi Gold By ELLEN KNICKMEYER .c The Associated Press BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - U.S. Marines with machine guns and tanks stood watch Friday over what they estimated was $1 billion in gold - safeguarding bank vaults that withstood direct rocket-propelled grenade hits by robbers determined to fight their way in. ``Fort Knox doesn't have security like this,'' Staff Sgt. Jack Coughlin of the 3rd Battalion, 4th Marines said in a bank lobby, as shots rang out outside - U.S. snipers dealing with robbers armed with AK-47s still roaming Baghdad's pillaged banking district. Days of audacious daylight...

AMMAN: Jordanian customs officials have seized 42 paintings believed to have been looted from Iraq's national museum, government officials said on Saturday. The paintings were taken earlier in the week at al-Karameh border post from unidentified journalists entering Jordan from Iraq and were sent to the main Customs Department in Amman, said the officials, well-informed on the confiscated items. The paintings were being verified for authenticity but that preliminary checks led to them to believe the material had been looted from Iraq, the officials said on condition of anonymity. They declined to provide other details. Officials at the Ministry of...

Since coalition forces have taken control of Iraq's major cities, the looting and disorder in the streets - particularly the sacking of the Iraqi National Museum - have prompted criticism that U.S. and British soldiers haven't done enough to contain the chaos. Perhaps they could have done more to safeguard the national treasures. But they did, after all, have a war to win. Now, with the war almost a wrap, the troops' role is legitimately shifting toward restoring order. Case in point: the foiled heist at a Baghdad bank Thursday, where soldiers scared off armed robbers and then safeguarded $4...

Experts: Looters Had Keys to Iraq Museum By JOCELYN GECKER .c The Associated Press PARIS (AP) - Experts say that what seemed like random looting in Baghdad - the pillaging of treasures dating back 5,000 years in human history - was in fact a carefully planned theft, and the stolen artifacts may already be in the system that traffics in stolen artifacts to collectors in Europe, the United States and Japan. FBI agents, meanwhile, have been sent to Iraq to help recover the stolen antiquities, while in Washington, three members of the White House Cultural Property Advisory Committee resigned to...

PARIS, April 17 (AFP) - Much of the looting of treasures at Iraq's national museum was carried out by organised gangs who traffic in works of ancient art, according to experts at a United Nations conference called on Thursday to examine the war-damage to the country's cultural heritage. "It looks as if at least part of the theft was a very deliberate, planned action," said McGuire Gibson, of Chicago University's Oriental Institute, who is president of the American Association for Research in Baghdad. "Probably (it was done) by the same sorts of gangs that have been paying for the destruction...

<p>BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Last week's looting of the Iraq National Museum, which saw numerous items disappear from a vast collection spanning eight millennia of Mesopotamian history, has provoked world-wide outcry -- and criticism of the U.S. military for its failure to protect Iraq's priceless cultural heritage.</p>