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AAI in the News

U.S. to Help Probe Looting of Iraqi Cultural Treasures

By Dan Eggen
Washington Post
Posted on Friday April 18, 2003

More than two dozen FBI agents in Iraq will help conduct criminal investigations into widespread looting at the National Museum of Antiquities and other cultural sites, U.S. law enforcement officials said yesterday.

FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III said the teams will aim to capture thieves, recover artifacts and cooperate with Interpol, the international law enforcement organization, to track sales “on both the open and black markets.”

“We recognize the importance of these treasures to the Iraqi people and . . . to the world as a whole,” he said. “We are firmly committed to doing whatever we can in order to secure the return of these treasures to the people of Iraq.”

The FBI’s looting investigation comes amid a growing international furor over the ransacking of Iraqi museums and libraries that went unchecked by U.S. soldiers, resulting in the loss of countless artifacts from Mesopotamia and other ancient civilizations.

Antiquities experts meeting in Paris yesterday said there is strong evidence that many of the looters were highly organized and had keys to museum vaults, raising suspicions of an organized-crime role in the thefts.

Jean AbiNader, managing director of the Arab American Institute in Washington, said, “A lot of people are going to see this as too little and too late. . . . There is a strong feeling that a lot of this could have been avoided if they had just parked a tank in front of the museum in the first place.”

The agents dispatched to Iraq will also work with the CIA, military investigators and other U.S. officials to identify and interrogate terrorism suspects and sift through documents from the fallen Saddam Hussein government, officials said. More than 25 FBI analysts in Washington are involved in a widespread effort to catalogue and analyze recovered documents, Mueller said.

Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, who appeared with Mueller at a Washington news conference focused on Iraq-related programs at the Justice Department, also said that officials from the Justice and State departments will offer law-enforcement training programs in Iraq aimed at establishing “the rule of law.”

Ashcroft and Mueller said the FBI has almost finished interviewing Iraqi Americans and Iraqis in the United States identified as possibly having knowledge of the government and infrastructure of Iraq. Nearly 10,000 out of 11,000 voluntary interviews have been completed, Mueller said.

Some Arab American and civil liberties groups sharply criticized the initiative as ethnic profiling, but Mueller said he had received only two formal complaints. He also said the interviews yielded more than 250 reports to U.S. military forces about weapons installations, bunker locations, fiber-optic networks and secret prisons.

Van Harp, head of the FBI’s Washington field office, said that his agents in the District and Northern Virginia have interviewed more than 400 people of Iraqi descent. He said they came from all walks of life, including former government or military officials, and were able to give “some specific intelligence that was provided to the overall effort.”

Ashcroft said all the participants were “our unheralded partners in Operation Iraqi Freedom.”

AbiNader said that his group has collected about 80 complaints about the interviews, but that overall he agreed the effort went well. The Arab American Institute was one of several groups that advised Mueller on the initiative.

But Dalia Hashad, Arab and Muslim affairs advocate for the American Civil Liberties Union in New York, said the positive reviews “do not comport at all” with the complaints her organization received. Many subjects felt intimidated and were often embarrassed by FBI agents who confronted them at work or in public, she said.

“The phone calls we get are from people who feel targeted, who feel scared and don’t feel they can say no,” Hashad said. “If you have a team of FBI agents show up on your doorstep, you do not feel free to refuse their questioning.”

Ashcroft noted that five Iraqi diplomats were expelled on suspicion of being intelligence agents, while the son of a former diplomat was charged in New York earlier this week with illegally aiding the Iraqi government.

Neither Mueller nor Ashcroft mentioned that at least 40 Iraqi-born people were also arrested during the interviews in connection with alleged immigration violations.

Authorities could not say whether any have been deported.