ACADEMY CALLS FOR INQUIRY INTO US FAILURE TO PREVENT LOOTING

Academics at Cambridge, Harvard, and other universities have criticized the US military’s failure to prevent the calamitous looting of Iraq’s national library and archaeological museum and have called for an investigation, Andrew Gumbel reports in The Independent. Andreas Riedlmayer, an Islamic art and architecture specialist from Harvard, says that American troops’ failure to prevent the looting was a violation of international conventions on the rules of war.