Free Republic

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...

<p>Baghdad -- More evidence has surfaced that the looting of the National Museum was carried out in part by professional art thieves who used chaos as cover to make off with artifacts sought by private collectors, museum officials said.</p> <p>The officials said financiers from countries like Saudi Arabia, Iran and Jordan have been paying people since the end of the 1991 Gulf War to smuggle specific items from the sites of archaeological digs around the country.</p>

The World Health Organization says it believes the looting of medicines, equipment and hospital records from a Health Ministry warehouse and WHO offices in Baghdad was well organized. WHO spokesman Iain Simpson says looters stole all the medicines and supplies stored in the Ministry of Health's main warehouse in Baghdad. He says the stocks were worth millions of dollars, and were badly needed across the country. Mr. Simpson says looters also destroyed the WHO office in Baghdad. "They turned up with a truck and with equipment, which enabled them to get into a safe," he said. "This clearly was not...