GALLOWAY TODAY

The Guardian's article is here, and the Times (UK) indicates that Galloway may be toast in light of other, unrelated allegations of shady dealing that have surfaced recently.

A quote from this article in the Guardian (which discusses the procedures that journalists must now go through to look at documents) can be used to underline the concerns I expressed when initially reading about this story:

A small team of Iraqi men from the US-funded Free Iraqi Forces have set up their camp-beds beside the main foyer where a broken chandelier still hangs. They allowed reporters into the building yesterday, but, taking a leaf out of Saddam's book, they insisted that every group had a minder with it. Documents could be read and notes made, but nothing was allowed out of the ministry.

This was in contrast to scenes over the past few days when an American television network took carloads of documents from the foreign ministry and other civil service buildings. Several key treaties from Iraq's diplomatic archives have been removed by the American television reporters.

It is not too much to call this kind of behavior journalistic looting (sorry, John! You should start blogging yourself and tell me why I'm wrong. . .). An official building is smashed up, some things are destroyed and carted off, and some individuals move in to rummage around for things that they want. Again, journalists have a public function that criminal bands of looters do not (pace Derbyshire's weird looting for humanity argument), so the comparison is not exact; we want journalists to try to find things that government officials want to hide, and this process puts journalists at odds with government file systems. Think of the Pentagon Papers, for example. But if you're concerned about the usefulness of files for political reckoning among Iraqis themselves, then you'll probably find the wholesale carting off of documents by American TV crews to be brazen and unacceptable behavior, and you'd also worry about members of the British press rooting around and carting off documents and, apparently, copyrighting them (as the Telegraph seems to have done with the documents it found).

An analogy with archaeology can be helpful. When I was in the Yucatan on an archaeological dig, I learned a lot about the importance of provenience. When you find a shard of pottery, you want to be able to record where it was found on your map of the area so that you can take the isolated shard and put it in the context of other shards and other artifacts. Otherwise all you've got is an isolated object, a kind of broken historical grunt, if you will. The same goes for files: you need to know where they come from, what sort of organizational scheme they're a part of, probably when and how they were found, and so on, precisely so that you can assess the importance of the information by putting it in a context. The Stasi files in Germany were only useful for political and social reckoning with the past, to the extent that they were useful, because they were made useful by a carefully controlled process. The same care should be taken with the Iraqi files. I think that this is extremely important.

I have no idea whether the charges against Galloway are true. If the Washington Times correspondent in Baghdad found some files on Nancy Pelosi, you'd be suspicious, but that wouldn't make the charges untrue. As I said earlier, the charges against Galloway should be investigated thoroughly. In the grander scheme of things, however, even though journalism does fulfill an important public function and we hence shouldn't box journalists out entirely, I'd be concerned with preserving these documents for Iraqi use.

MORE: In favor of the credibility of the journalist in question, see Junius.