Now even staff from the Library of Congress are engaged in the de facto debunking of uncorrected myths about the supposedly spontaneous "looting" of cultural sites in Baghdad during the Iraq campaign.
The Library of Congress (LoC) has stepped in to help rebuild and restructure Baghdad’s National Library after it was devastated by arson and looting in April.On an 11-day State Department-sponsored trip that began in late October, three LoC experts became the first non-Iraqi group since the spring fires to view the entire collection firsthand. The door to the library’s stacks, which had been welded shut after the crime spree, was opened for the team to assess the damage.
“They waited until we landed in Iraq to unseal those doors,” said Mary-Jane Deeb, the LoC specialist on the Arab world who led the trip. “That shows you the trust they have in our efforts as librarians.”
The team’s most significant finding was that the looting was “highly targeted” and “highly focused,” Deeb said. “You had rooms turned to ashes and other rooms full of documents that were untouched.”
The LoC group determined that the rooms in which materials were turned to ashes were burned with incendiary substances. “Only security of the Baath regime would have had that type of material,” Deeb said.
Furthermore, the only collection destroyed in the stacks was Saddam Hussein’s “Republican Archives” — documentation from 1977 to the present that included the entire microfilm collection and all documentation related to acquisitions. Earlier archives covering the period 1920 to 1977 had been placed in rice bags and were not damaged.
“It’s tremendously important to show that it was not your average looter,” Deeb said.
The LoC staff also discovered for themselves what kind of soldiers we have serving in Iraq. Doesn't sound like an imperialist stormtrooper to me.
The LoC group quickly determined that the Baghdad library building had been damaged too extensively to be useful.“Even if repaired, the present building would be inappropriate to represent the Iraqi cultural heritage regionally and internationally,” the team’s report said. “Its location is unattractive, its facilities limited and it is rather undistinguished architecturally.”
The team recommended that the library be relocated to a senior officers club on two acres overlooking the Tigris River that is currently occupied by more than 300 U.S. troops.
In its report, the team said that the three-story building, situated in a historical district, is “perfectly suitable for a great national library.”
Deeb said that a U.S. officer who was also a civil engineer led the team around the facility. The officer had drafted “kind of a blueprint” of how the building could be transformed to a library.
“It was absolutely wonderful,” she said.
via The Hill