'Bad Yanks', When It Began In Iraq

[Annie]

Excellent post that debunks the first case of the 'callousness' of US troops. Ever since, it's been 'one scandal after another', the latest being the Italian reporter. It's pretty long and as the title states, there are endnotes:

http://gutenblogcastle.blogspot.com/2005/02/iraq-antiquities-revisited-with.html

Iraq Antiquities Revisited (with Endnotes)
Jeffrey Schuster

On Saturday, April 12, 2003, three days after the statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square in Baghdad had been pulled down to cheering Iraqis, the story of the looting of the Iraq National Museum began to appear both in print and on broadcast news outlets around the world. Over Saturday and Sunday and continuing into the next week it would be the dominant news story coming out of Iraq.

That Saturday, in her lead paragraph for the Associated Press, Hamza Hendawi wrote that the Iraq National Museum had been emptied and all that remained was broken pottery and shattered display cases. The BBC News online world edition reported that looters had removed thousands of pieces from the museum. And John F. Burns, writing for the New York Times, claimed that the museum had been looted over a period of 48 hours and that they had taken away “at least 50,000” artifacts. Later that evening Burns would rewrite his lead. Instead of 50,000 artifacts being carried away by looters, he inserted, “with at least 170,000 artifacts carried away by looters...” (1)