[CPProt.net] America Library Association calls for withdrawal of US troops from Iraq

[Ellie Bruggeman]

    America Library Association calls for withdrawal of US troops from Iraq

At its annual conference in Chicago earlier this summer, the 182-member 
Council of the American Library Association, representing more than 
65,000 librarians, passed a resolution calling for the withdrawal of 
American 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.

This year’s ALA convention featured an event called “Intellectual 
freedom, a casualty of war?” with First Amendment scholar Geoffrey R. Stone.

The ALA has assisted in providing funds for the rebuilding of Iraqi 
libraries. In January 2003 the ALA opposed the limit on the free 
exchange of information between Iraqi and US libraries imposed by 
government sanctions against Iraq, noting that all other countries 
operating under UN sanctions had provided exemptions for educational 
materials. An ALA resolution in June 2003 deplored the consequences of 
the destruction of Iraqi libraries and museums. As the brutality and 
cultural vandalism of the Iraq war has progressed, the tone of concern 
by the ALA has become sharper. This summer’s resolution is one of the 
first resolutions by a major professional organization calling for the 
withdrawal of American troops form Iraq.

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