Hoover Institution to Accession Looted Documents
This is rather unbelievable. Two shipping containers of records from the Baath Party of Iraq – about seven million pages – are being transferred to the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, over the objections of Iraq’s archivist, the celebrated Saad Eskander. They have been in the possession of a non-profit run by Kanan Makiya, an Iraqi professor at Brandeis University whom Eskander calls a political operator.
The Chronicle of Higher Education released a story about it today and is not requiring a subscription to view it: Disputed Iraqi Archives Find a Home at the Hoover Institution, by John Gravois.
One comment on “Hoover Institution to Accession Looted Documents”
Makiya is more than just a political operator; he wrote “Republic of Fear,” which was a strong polemic against Saddam’s Baathist regime. Even though he wrote it under a pseudonym; that took some degree of political courage.
However, he was one of those Iraqi dissidents (if not the most prominent one) who encouraged and cheered on the Coalition invasion of Iraq. Because of his close ties to the Occupation forces, one wonders if Makiya and his group are considering honest brokers by the Iraqi people. It is sad to see him involved with this mess.
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