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TESTIMONY: US STARTED LOOTING

Coyote | 16.04.2003 08:56

Accidentally, I was there

TESTIMONY IN SWEDENS LARGEST AND MOST IMPORTANT NEWSPAPER
DAGENS NYHETER (DAILY NEWS):

4/11 2003

USA INVITED THE LOOTINGS

Khaled Bayomi looks a little puzzled when the US commander on TV regrets they do not have ressources to stop the looting of Baghdad. Accidentally, I was there when the US troops invited people to start the looting.

Khaled Bayomi went from Malmoe, Sweden, to Baghdad as human shield the same day the fighting started. he can tell a lot about that, but the most interesting part is his testimony on the looting.

- I had been talking to some friends close to Haifa Avenue on the west bank of Tigris. It was April 8 and the fighting was so intense I couldn't get back to the other side of the river. After noon it became totally quiet and four US tanks got in position in the outskirts of the slums. From the tanks I heard eager shouting in Arabic, inviting people to come closer.

During the morning hours everybody that tried to cross the streets were shot at. But in the strange silence after the shooting stopped people at last became curious.

After 45 minutes the first residents ventured out. Then the US soldiers shot and killed the two Sudanese guards outside a local government building and the Arab translators in the tanks invited people to go for it. The rumor spread quickly and the building was emptied. A little later the tanks broke through the gates of the Ministry Of Justice in the next building and the looting continued there.

I was in a big crowd that was watching together with me. They did not participate in the looting but dared not intervene. Many had tears in their eyes from shame and embarrassment.

Next morning the looting had continued into the Modern Museum 1500 feet further north. There too were two crowds, one looting and one watching in disgust.

Are you saying the US troops initiated the looting?

Absolutely. The lack of rejoicing made the US troops need pictures of Iraqis who in different ways demonstrated some kind of protest against the Saddam Regime.

But the residents of Baghdad tore down a big Saddam statue?

Did they? That was a US tank that did it, right next door from the hotel where all the journalists are staying. Right until noon of April 9 I didn't see one single damaged Saddam picture.

Back home in Sweden bayomi is a professor at the Lund University where he for ten years has lectured in Middle Eastern politics.

Isn't it good that Saddam is out?

he isn't out. he has split his army in tiny units. That's why there never was a large battle. As at state you can say he dismantled it in 1992 already when he gave priority to a tribal structure that is crucial in Iraq. When the US started the war Saddam gave up the state completely - relying on the tribal structure. That's why we didn't see any fighting in the big cities.

Now the US is forced to do everything themselves, because there is no political power from within Iraq that could even dream of challenging the existing structure. Those two [leaders] who have been brought there from outside the country get killed right away.

Bayomi is referring to what happened to Nazar al-Khazraji, who fled from Denmark [where he was indicted for war crimes], and the shiite leader Abdul Majid al-Khoei.

They were hacked to pieces with swords and knives by a raging crowd in Najaf because they were considered US puppets. According to the Danish daily BT, the CIA secretly brought al-Khazraji from Denmark to Iraq.

 http://www.dn.se/DNet/jsp/polopoly.jsp?d=1435&a=129852

Coyote

Comments

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Striking at their own roots

16.04.2003 10:29

The globalists launch their heaviest bombardment against the cradle of civilisation at the precise moment of the surge of the spring equinox, in a blatant satanic usurping of the earth's energy economy. Mesopotamia is after all very dear to their hearts, and must be fully disabled and dominated for them to achieve what they consider their true destiny
Then, having overseen the looting of the ancient treasure, they try to organise their puppet government, at the very eye (in the capstone naturally) of their genetic and cultural heritage, close by the Ziggurat of Ur.
Hmmm - the Shi-ites don't wanna play ball, the Republican Guard is already divided into autonomous cells, the threat of guerilla war is imminent, Tehran will get the blame.
So Iran's next on the list - Syria's just a playful diversion for media speculation

Babylonian Booty
By Melinda Liu and Anne Underwood, Newsweek

It had been conquered and re-conquered a dozen or more times, by (among others) the Akkadians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Macedonians, Parthians, Arabs, Ottomans and British, and in February 1991, yet another foreign power raised its flag over the ancient city of Ur, near the mouth of the Euphrates: the Americans.
DARING THE ALLIES to bomb the birthplace of the patriarch Abraham, Iraqis had parked their jets near Ur's 4,000-year-old ziggurat, but the planes were shot up all the same. American soldiers toured the ancient tower, then got out their entrenching tools and began digging for souvenirs. A forlorn Iraqi gatekeeper ran among them, wailing protests in Arabic, until U.S. officers put a stop to the looting. Last week, when NEWSWEEK visited the site, it was virtually deserted, except for a lone guide, the son of the old gatekeeper, keeping a wary eye on the American and British warplanes streaking overhead. "Ninety-nine percent of Americans don't know the country they'll be bombing is Mesopotamia," says Dr. Huda Ammash, a high-ranking Baath Party official. "Our country has served humanity for so long, now it's up to the international community to help protect Iraq." To the oilfields, the ecology of the Gulf and the lives of countless civilians and soldiers, add another potential casualty of the impending war: the cultural patrimony of Western civilization. In January scholars gave Defense Department officials the names of archeological sites they hoped to spare. "[The military] had a list of 150," says McGuire Gibson, professor of Mesopotamian archeology at the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute. "We gave them over 4,000 more--but that only covers the 10 to 15 percent of the country we've studied." Gibson is cautiously encouraged by the record of the earlier war, in which allied bombing spared most important monuments, even those adjoining military targets that were destroyed. But he's also aware that in the featureless plains of southern Iraq, the only high ground consists of the ruins of ancient cities. If the Iraqis make a stand, these mounds, which can be as much as four miles around and 80 feet high, are the natural places to do it.
EBAY'S THREAT TO IRAQ
The larger danger, scholars believe, is from looting. This has been a feature of war in this part of the world since long before the seventh century B.C., when a frieze in one of the palaces at Nineveh depicted an event described thusly in Michael Roaf's "Cultural Atlas of Mesopotamia": "An Assyrian soldier brings in a severed head to be counted with the rest of the booty after a battle in Babylonia." In 1991, with Baghdad's iron control over the country shattered, "nine of 13 regional museums were completely looted," says Richard Zettler, associate curator at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Iraqi civilians began tearing into unexcavated sites with front-end loaders, carrying away anything of value. The plunder has been turning up ever since in dealers' catalogs and at auctions around the world. Last week on eBay, sellers were offering 4,000-year-old cuneiform-tablet fragments ("Be sure to bid on this fantastic piece of history!") and a Sumerian silver necklace from 2500 B.C. "There are Iraqi antiquities everywhere you look," says John Malcolm Russell, an authority on the region at Massachusetts College of Art. "And they didn't all come from someone's basement. There are very few legitimate objects on the antiquities market."
This time the Iraqis seem better prepared for postwar chaos. The Iraq Museum in Baghdad was heavily sandbagged last week and closed to the public while workers frantically packed its immense treasure into metal trunks. Rare documents and books, including gold-leaf copies of the Qur'an printed on silk paper, were being packed away at Baghdad's Abdul Qader Al-Kailini mosque. "Four thousand museum pieces were stolen in 1991," says Jaber al-Tikriti, the Iraq Museum's director of antiquities.
"This time we have a plan."
But, except out of professional solidarity, Western scholars care less about museum thefts than about the plundering of unexcavated sites. Objects in museums have already been photographed and studied, and if they were properly excavated, their archeological context is known. "Archeologists don't want the objects themselves," explains Russell, "but the stories they represent. When you yank a clay tablet or a cylinder seal out of the ground, you lose everything but the pretty object itself."
It's a minor irony that Saddam's brutal police state has been exceptionally conscientious about protecting Iraq's cultural heritage, partly for his own megalomaniacal reasons. A reconstruction of a Babylonian palace in the 1980s was accomplished with bricks inscribed with a tribute to Saddam Hussein, "protector of civilization, [who] rebuilt this palace which belonged to Nebuchadnezzar II." In that, of course, Saddam is no different than a hundred others who have ruled this ancient land and left their marks on it. Now, perhaps, more than ever, the world ought to be studying their fates.

 http://www.museum-security.org/03/034.html

dh


Cradle of Civilisation?

16.04.2003 11:36

Civilisation as mentioned in 'Newsweek' and other pigmedia is contrued to be 'white' I suppose?

Total respect to the historical artefacts and those who want to genuinely protect them.

And also I recognise the construed historical bullshit the white supremacist rulers of the USA are obessessed with choices like Ur for talks .. (did anyone follow up the speech given by Garner....Abraham/Ibrahim and all the biblical shit!)

But fuck off anyone who regurgitates shit fed to them as if civilisation is what was written by abunch of paedophiles from Oxbridge colleges in the last century (20th AD).

So all the other civilisations are noit really civilisations and are fair game to have been looted and displayed in British and other western museaums (most of them are not for dispaly ...instead rotting in basements....the Ethiopian gold for one!) .

Fucking racist pigs!

I suggest we loot the british museum on May day to put history right.
Anyone?

ram


i wos wondering...

16.04.2003 12:41

hotrod here, spring time IRE and all that..
I wos wondering if you would get on the old the "cradle of civiliation in spring" trip
I think it's very signifcant.
Look that the importance of Palestine and the so called Holy Land, millions have been slaughtered over the years .
some times they talk about Holy lands, more accurate.
I wonder how much quality loot in the form of historic artefacts the U:S nazis will be shipping back home .
Spot symbolism anyone .. ??

nimrod


chill...

16.04.2003 12:43

ram, with your constant ranting about 'white pig-dog fucking paedophile pig-dog white bastards' you come across as more hysterical and hate-filled than the omni-present racists you claim to 'uncover'. Why not take a chill-pill and exercise oyur freedom of speech in a more engaging manner?

anarchoteapot


give me a break

16.04.2003 13:30

...and concentrate on the substance. Also realise that to come out of the bullshit that has been forcefed to white people from a young age is not easily pointed out. It is like an eye seeing itself you see.
ANY ABUSES IF THEY AFFECT YOU THEN YOU ARE IN A PRIME POSITION TO WAKE UP. WAKE UP!

The way the world history of the planet has been construed by the 'white seats of learning' is well known.


The whole of archaeology is being rewritten right now.

Here is *one* cheesy link for anyone who wants to read up...


So to go on about 'Cradle of civilisation' about what is *thought* to be the origins of the white race is closer to racism.

What is your problem?

Do you deny that UK's and USA's actions of mass murder is racism driven?

Or is it that you do not want to be criticised because you are white? (Are you white?)

ram


pigMedia and history

16.04.2003 13:36

 http://www.grahamhancock.com/horizon/default.htm

is one proof of pigmedia at work. As IMC is primarily a media outfit I thought you might want to without intending to distract away from the current political situation.

Alos note that the pigmedia in question is the same one that liberated Basra on the second day and made up swill about popular uprising in Iraq that was never to be.

Palefaces wake up!

ram


...again

16.04.2003 13:39

"So to go on about 'Cradle of civilisation' about what is *thought* to be the origins of the white race is closer to racism."

Just can't follow your rantings, mate. Cradle of Civilisation is a phrase, like 'Fertile Crescent', 'Babylon', to describe this area of the world, where city-state living ('civilisation') first appeared (although other archaeology points to Catal Huyuk etc). You seem to constantly read into well-known standard definitions racist slurs. As an bit of an anarcho-primitivist I agree that the founding of city-states was not the start of niceness or wonderfulness, or intelligence, or any other paranoid reading of 'civilisation' you seem to be making, but that is not what was meant. Also, when did anyone suggest that Ur was the origin of the white race? Nowhere. Just your para delusions, mate. Widen your reading so you recognise accepted standard phrases with definitions. Yes I'm white, and wear glasses, and have funny hair, and am a parent, and a pagan, and a guitarist, and.....those blinkers are reducing your perception of reality.

anarchoteapot


anarcho-primitive ?!

16.04.2003 14:23

"Tuesday's meeting in the city of Ur, birthplace of the biblical patriarch Abraham in ancient Mesopotamia, ...."
--pigMedia of recent times

DO YOU GET IT!

Bible and the shit. I am not saying Mesopataemia is ancient. Am I?
Infact if it was the topic I would come up with dieas of Mesopotaemian history the way I know it but I want to concentrate on the reports of looting and the *real* tears shed in the west when it comes to archaelogical treasures IN THE BELIEF THAT IT IS A WHITE ORIGIN MUMBO JUMBO.

DO you deny that the pigMedia is currently full of this shit.
Not just cradle of civilisation as you see it but as cracle of the white nation! Abraham, then that idiot who does not know how to fuck, his rib, apples, snakes, bollocks .
Do you get it?
I am not attckacking your anarcho - pimitive interprtations of mass hysteria among the white people instead the reality as it is that makes a good 500 million peopel so braindead.

WAKEUP! Maybe stop smoking pot and take a haircut if the needs be.

I am not preaching to you personally unless you pay attention to THE PIGMEDIA's views that 'any criticism of the white supremacist mass murder that is currently happening is 'paranoia''

Just try following my posts with an open mind and you will see that I am attacking the ignorant white fools who are so braindead that it takes abuse to constant repetion to get them to see my simple points. Whether it works I do not know.

ram


No chill until the world is free of violence

16.04.2003 14:46

To the attention of anarcho-primitive hippy who wants to chill when the world is burning all around him.

Note the newsweek shit posted as the first comment has the sentence
'...the cultural patrimony of Western civilization.'

Even in your chilled state why do you get all worried about my attack on this very western civilization?

I like to call it pig shit? Does it bother you?
It is important for me to know as I am desperately trying to understand the apathy in the west to the way their luxurious chill is being facilitated.

ram


luv ya ram

16.04.2003 22:10

I for one,carry on...

dh


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