Senate moves to prevent return of Jewish archive to Iraq

[starroute]

11. There's a complex and murky back story on this

Here's Miller's account from 2003 of the discovery -- a story that has never quite added up and that inspired a number of conspiracy theories a couple of years later when Miller played a role in the Plame affair.

(On edit: I notice looking up at the OP that the LA Times story has it wrong. They didn't chance on these documents while looking for WMDs. They allegedly chanced on potentially incriminating Iraqi intelligence documents while looking for an ancient Talmud. Which is why the story is so weird.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/07/international/worldspecial/07FIND.html?ex=1129780800&en=895e8c6118182400&ei=5070&th&oref=login

Iraqi Documents on Israel Surface on a Cultural Hunt
By JUDITH MILLER
Published: May 7, 2003

What began today as a hunt for an ancient Jewish text at secret police headquarters here wound up unearthing a trove of Iraqi intelligence documents and maps relating to Israel as well as offers of sales of uranium and other nuclear material to Iraq. . . .

The discoveries, which American military officers called significant but which did not by themselves offer documentary evidence of direct Iraqi links to terror attacks on Israel, were the serendipitous byproduct of one of the strangest missions ever conducted by MET Alpha.

The search began this morning when 16 soldiers from MET Alpha teamed up with members of the Iraqi National Congress, a leading opposition group headed by Ahmad Chalabi, to search for what an intelligence source had described as one of the most ancient copies of the Talmud in existence, dating from the seventh century. The Talmud is a book of oral law, with rabbinical commentaries and interpretations. . . .

Slogging down the dank hallway, the soldiers reached a room where they found hundreds of books floating in the foul water. There they rescued three bundles of older Jewish books, including a Babylonian Talmud from Vilna, accounting books of the Jewish community of Baghdad between 1949 and 1953 and dozens of more modern scholarly books mostly in Arabic and Hebrew — "Generals of Israel," by Moshe Ben-Shaul; David Ben-Gurion's "Memoirs"; and "Semites and Anti-Semites," by the Princeton scholar Bernard Lewis. But no seventh-century Talmud.