Not Your Sweetie

DU post:Additional info on the museum looting - deliberate destruction
Heard the following on German radio ("NDR Info" - sorry, no link to the report):

An interview with a museum official:
When the looters arrived in the street, the museum staff sent somebody to the US forces to ask for urgent assistance. 5 US soldiers arrived and the looters stopped. But after a short while, all 5 soldiers left the place again and didn't return. The looting continued.
People didn't simply steal everything, they also destroyed what they couldn't take away or what didn't look valuable to them. Large reliefs were pulverized, and worst of all, the complete documentation was destroyed as well: photos, maps, files, transcripts of clay tablets, the complete archives were burnt and all computer harddisks stolen or destroyed. There is absolutely nothing left of the heritage. All we have now are pictures in books. What hasn't been published yet has gone forever.
The safe where they had kept the most valuable material hadn't been cut open, but had been opened with a key. Someone from the museum staff or someone else with the knowledge obviously had removed the content before the "official" looting started.
This means that if things from the safe begin to turn up on the market, it might be possible to track them back to the real perpetrators...

Btw., the staff also said that the most important pieces from other museums in Iraq had been taken to the National Museum in Baghdad in order to protect them in the vault. Their vault had survived all the former wars and lootings. But not this time. So the best pieces from all of Iraq have gone as well.

And finally, after the looting of the museum, the National Library of Iraq was burned and all its content destroyed yesterday. The US forces didn't protect the library either, though they had promised to do so after the catastrophe at the museum!

But they are still holding out heroically at the oil ministry.