US Tax Dollars Paid for Looting of Iraq

As suspected, and assumed by those of us who have seen these imperial invasions many times before, it is clear the US taxpayers unwillingly and unknowingly paid for the looting and bookburning, making the rich, richer.

Today's SF Chronicle, 4/13/03, has an article from the Los Angeles Times with photo of $650 million in new US currency, dated 1999 and 2001, found in sealed cottages by the US occupation military.
See:
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2003/04/19/MN12539.DTL

By now, anyone who has paid attention knows that Saddam Hussein is a long-time CIA agent, which is clearly why he was allowed to disappear, much like that other CIA agent and scapegoat who had absolutely nothing to do with the Reichstag Fire of 9/11/01, Osama bin Laden. The current Axis of Evil is certainly George Bush, Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, and all the rest of the fascist dictators of the world, bought and paid for with our tax dollars to oppress the workingclass.

As we read below of the planned, deliberate and with malice aforethought looting of the art treasures, some of which may be recovered, we can be sure the bookburning was also planned by the Nazi USA and carried out by thugs paid for with our tax dollars. The burned books, of course, can never be recovered. Knowledge is power and dictators fear well-informed people. The contempt for books in particular and education and culture in general in this society is no accident; it is carefully perpetrated by the bankrupt capitalist class to make them richer and everyone else poorer.

As to one use for this money, the World Socialist Website of 4/13/03 has an excellent article entitled "US Government Implicated in PLANNED Theft of Iraqi Artistic Treasures" by Ann Talbot. See:
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/apr2003/loot-a19.shtml

Pertinent paragraphs:
"As the full extent of the looting of Iraq’s National Museum in Baghdad emerges, it becomes clear that there was nothing accidental about it. Rather it was the result of a long planned project to plunder the artistic and historical treasures that are held in the museums of Iraq."

"Dr. Dony George, head of the Baghdad Museum, said, “I believe they were people who knew what they wanted. They had passed by the gypsum copy of the Black Obelisk. This means that they must have been specialists. They did not touch those copies.”"

"Speaking on Britain’s Channel 4 News, he told Dr. John Curtis of the British Museum that among the artifacts that have been stolen are the sacred vase of Warka, a 5,000-year-old golden vessel found at Ur, an Akkadian statue base, and an Assyrian statue. It was, said Dr. Curtis, “Like stealing the Mona Lisa.”"

"The museum was the victim of a carefully planned assault. The thieves who took the most valuable material came prepared with equipment to lift the heaviest objects, which the staff could not move from the galleries, and had keys to the vaults where the most valuable items were stored. Not since the Nazis systematically stripped the museums of Europe has such a crime been committed."

"With the collapse of global stock markets, works of art and antiquities have come to be regarded even more highly as a secure investment, fuelling an already huge underground market."

"The illegal trade in antiquities is thought to be as lucrative as drugs trafficking, to which it is often linked. "

(At this point, they describe Robert Fisk's efforts to save a burning library by asking the US military to protect it and the US refusal to do same, of which he wrote in The Independent, and has since been reported widely.)

"After the fate of Baghdad museum, it can only be concluded that the generalised looting and arson at the library served to cover up a more systematic crime, in which select manuscripts were stolen for wealthy collectors. In the process they connived in the burning of books—another Nazi practice."

"In the aftermath of these two devastating attacks on culture, attention has focused on the activities of the American Council for Cultural Policy. Even the British press that works under some of the toughest libel laws in the world has been willing to suggest that the ACCP may have influenced US government policy on Iraqi cultural artifacts."

"The ACCP was formed in 2001 by a group of wealthy art collectors to lobby against the Cultural Property Implementation Act, which attempts to regulate the art market and stop the flow of stolen goods into the US. It has defended New York art dealer Frederick Schultz, who was convicted under the National Stolen Property Act, and opposes the use of the 1977 US v. McClain decision as a legal precedent in cases concerning the handling of stolen art objects."

"In the McClain case a US judge accepted that all pre-Columbian art or jewellery brought into the US without the express consent of the Mexican government was stolen property. Mexican law regards all archaeological artifacts as state property and bans their export. Mexico is one of a number of countries that has such legislation."

Speaking of the ACCP, Oscar Wilde's statement is incorporated:
"These are quite literally people who understand the price of everything and the value of nothing."

"What is already clear is that a great crime has been committed against not only the Iraqi people, but against the whole of humanity, since it is the history of humanity that has been attacked. For this reason the sack of Baghdad marks a significant point on the trajectory of the Bush administration as it attempts to plunge the world into a new barbarism that would outstrip anything that history can show from the past."