The meme metastasizes

The Wall Street Journal picks up the line set by the Art Newspaper, and pushes it still further. No looting on 8 sites? Then there must have been no looting everywhere! No need to pay attention to all those dire reports. "So Much for the 'Looted Sites'", as the WSJ headline puts it.

Not only has the claim of massive looting been refuted, supposedly, but -- new theme -- those making it have lost all semblance of credibility. They pretend to be experts but are really driven by a political agenda, an agenda that the WAC resolution reflects clearly.

I've already detailed, below, the evidence for looting, much of which comes from those political radicals the Polish civil-military brigade and the Italian carabinieri. (I shared all this information with the writer of the WSJ article, by the way, but he chose not to use any of it, for reasons that should be clear.) I note here only that I opposed the WAC resolution, with objections laid out below as well.

It would be swell if we could clear up once and for all precisely how much looting took place year-by-year from 2003 on. All that is needed is time-series satellite or aerial imagery of all or at least most of the areas rich in sites (along with the funding to pay people to count the holes). Will the military provide this imagery? If not, why not?