Americans with illegal Iraq war souvenirs go unprosecuted

HARTFORD, Connecticut: American military members, contractors and others caught with culturally significant artifacts they brought home from the Iraq war are going largely unprosecuted, even as swords, artifacts and other items looted from Saddam Hussein’s palaces are still turning up for sale online and at auctions.
The materials are often returned once they become known, but defenders of Iraqi historical sites and artifacts argue that won’t change anything. Smuggling cases are difficult to investigate, and prosecutors and courts generally have been satisfied to take them no further than forfeiture, said Patty Gerstenblith, director of DePaul University’s Center for Art, Museum and Cultural Heritage Law. “Just giving the object up is not a deterrent,” she said.
No one is suggesting that US service members removed cultural items en masse, and the souvenirs are not on par in value with the destruction wrought by the Islamic State group, which among other things has blown up parts of the ancient Iraqi Assyrian city of Nimrud. But the Iraqi ambassador to the US, Lukman Faily, said last month that Baghdad is committed to preserving its heritage, and that the return of looted archaeological items is a national project.
Defense Department spokesman Mark Wright said the Pentagon does not track cases involving Iraq war trophies and has no indications of any related courts-martial. Such cases, he said, were not considered a major concern in the years after the invasion as the military dealt with a bloody insurgency.
McGuire Gibson, a professor of Mesopotamian archaeology at the University of Chicago, said he knows of only one prosecution, and that was a civilian: author Joseph Braude, who was caught carrying three ancient marble and alabaster seals when he returned from an Iraq visit in 2004 and ultimately pleaded guilty to smuggling. Braude, a Middle East expert who had assisted the FBI and CIA earlier in his career, was sentenced to six months of house arrest.
In a recent case, investigators got a tip that gold-plated items from Saddam’s palaces were up for sale and traced them to an American man who had been in Iraq as a defense contractor. Confronted by investigators, the man acknowledged taking the water urn, door knocker and soap dish.
The suspect’s background as a decorated US military veteran and his forfeiture of the items factored into prosecutors’ decision not to charge him, said Bruce Foucart, the agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations in New England.
The artifacts were returned last month with dozens of other pieces, including an Iraq government seal that a civilian US employee had shipped to a home in Maryland in 2004.