Posted on 11/23/2004 3:53:53 AM PST by kiwi_hawk
NEW YORK (AP) An expert on Iraq's postwar reconstruction was sentenced Monday to six months house arrest and two years probation for trying to smuggle into the United States 4,000-year-old artifacts stolen from Iraq's national museum in the chaos after the U.S.-led invasion. Joseph Braude, 30, had pleaded guilty before U.S. District Judge Allyne Ross in August to charges of smuggling and making false statements. Braude could have faced up to 16 years in prison. Braude is a Middle East expert fluent in Arabic, Hebrew and Farsi, who had for years assisted the FBI and CIA with counterterrorism efforts. When he returned from Iraq last summer, Braude was stopped by customs agents at John F. Kennedy International Airport after he failed to declare he was carrying three ancient marble and alabaster seals. He also briefly denied that he had been to Iraq. The seals had been stolen from the Iraqi National Museum during widespread post-invasion looting. Customs agents say Braude admitted during questioning that he bought the seals, dating back four millennia to Iraq's Akkadian period, from a black marketeer. Braude, the descendant of a prominent family of Iraqi Jews, studied Near Eastern languages at Yale University and Arabic and Islamic history at Princeton University before publishing ''The New Iraq: Rebuilding the Country for Its People, the Middle East and the World'' last year. After the U.S. invasion, Braude's expertise became high in demand, and he regularly appeared on NBC's ''Today'' show, CNN, the Fox News Channel and others.
(Excerpt) Read more at boston.com ...
Will the seals go back to Iraq?
"Will the seals go back to Iraq?"
I would assume they would.
Might sound like a stupid question, but for years (maybe still at present) the practice has been that customs inspectors who find a verboten item may keep it, rather than it being returned to its place of origin.
Check out the book review on this "carpetbagger" at Salon:
http://www.salon.com/books/review/2003/03/26/braude/index_np.html
"customs inspectors who find a verboten item may keep it, rather than it being returned to its place of origin."
Well he was caught at a first world airport and his case was too high profile for them to pocket the goods I suspect.
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