BUY-BACK PROGRAMS MAY INCITE MORE LOOTING

“Buy-back” programs designed to purchase looted Iraqi artifacts, which have been independently suggested by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art director Philippe de Montebello, and Biblical Archaeology Review editor Hershel Shanks, should be rejected, writes Daniel W. Eck in the Chicago Tribune. Eck, the legal counsel of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, asserts that “even a well-meaning plan to pay bounties for these artifacts would provide an incentive for rampant mob looting in the future.”