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To: aristeides
We learn from Yaroslav Trofimov in the Wall Street Journal a couple of days ago that Lt. Col. Schwartz's troops were taking fire from people inside the museum, fire to which they did not respond. How much of the looting occurred before that hostile fire ended, and how much occurred after?

Good point. I am hoping more will come out about this incident in the near future. Here is what I posted on that topic further up in the thread:

Apparently, one of the commanding officers in Baghdad said we were taking fire from the museum grounds and that's why it couldn't be secured. But Central Command and DOD are not saying that we even tried to. Rumsfeld was very dismissive of the issue. Did we try or didn't we? The statement also contradicts a report that we did in fact secure the building for a half hour with a tank and then left. The statement about "taking fire" doesn't really tell us much. If we avoided every place we were "taking fire" from, we wouldn't be in Iraq right now. Does he mean that the Iraqi's chased us off because we had insufficient force? Then had we allocated sufficient force to secure the museum, we could have stopped the looting that transpired and killed some bad guys too.

49 posted on 04/19/2003 9:03:04 AM PDT by Fifth Business
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To: Fifth Business
Seems to me it's very likely our troops were under orders not to attack militarily a place like the museum of antiquities.
50 posted on 04/19/2003 9:05:20 AM PDT by aristeides
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