America Library Association calls for withdrawal of US troops from Iraq

The resolution stated: “The justifications for the invasion of Iraq have proven to be completely unfounded and the war already has taken the lives of more than 100,000 Iraqis and more than 1700 U.S. soldiers and these numbers will continue to mount as long as the U.S. remains in Iraq, and during the current occupation, many of Iraq’s cultural treasures, including libraries, archives, manuscripts, and artifacts, have been destroyed, lost, or stolen, and as long as U.S. forces remain in Iraq, the inevitable escalation of fighting threatens further destruction of Iraq’s cultural heritage....”

Since the April 2003 looting of the Baghdad Museum and the burning of the Al-Awqaf library with its collection of precious Islamic manuscripts, American and international scholars, librarians, and museum professionals have followed with increasing disquiet the loss of life in Iraq and the systematic destruction of some of the world’s oldest cultural resources. (It is arguable that libraries were invented in Iraq 5,000 years ago.) The Middle East Library Association recently released a report that details the magnitude of this tragedy.

The ALA has been known in the past for its advocacy of freedom of expression and its opposition to the government monitoring of readership in the United States. In 1988, it opposed the Library Awareness Program in which the FBI lied to librarians and intimidated them into turning over lists of “sensitive” books that individuals had borrowed, especially from university libraries.

Although the ALA has not opposed the entire Patriot Act, it has lobbied for the deletion of sections 215 and 505, which have broadened the powers of the state to criminalize the free flow of information. The ALA has made information available to librarians who opposed government intrusion into the privacy of library patrons.

Read More
http://wsws.org/articles/2005/aug2005/alib-a25.shtml