treasurer of the group and has also represented the National Association of Dealers in Ancient, Oriental and Primitive Art. Ashton Hawkins, former lawyer of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and current president of ACCP was reported in the Art Newspaper article as stating the following: "We believe that legitimate dispersal of cultural material through the market is one of the best ways to protect it. We're interested in the protection of culture as much as the protection of legitimate collecting.". The ACCP's board of directors included President Ashton Hawkins, Vice President Arthur Houghton, Treasurer William Pearlstein, Educational coordinator Kate Fitz Gibbon and Secretary Arielle Kozloff. American invasion of Iraq and activities of ACCP The council appeared in the forefront of cultural heritage protection debates during the American 2003 invasion of Iraq. A 2003 article in Science discusses Ashton and Pearlstein's advocacy for "liberalization" in the issuance of foreign-dig permits in Iraq and reconsideration of Iraqi cultural heritage laws to allow “some objects [to be] certified for export." On ACCP's activities concerning Iraqi cultural heritage, Zainab Bahrani's article "Looting and Conquest" takes a critical counter-position. Bahrani wrote that “William Pearlstein, of the American Council for Cultural Policy (ACCP), an organization that met with the White House and the Pentagon right before the [Iraq] war and right after the looting [of the National Museum of Iraq], is appealing for the cultural theft to continue by other means, calling Iraq's antiquities-preservation laws "retentionist," and saying he "hoped that Iraq would grant more excavation permits and consider export permits for redundant objects." She adds that such “opportunism opens the door to more cultural and historical plunder, a base scramble much like the parceling off of sites and antiquities that occurred in the nineteenth century.” Publications ACCP Advisory Board member Kate Fitz Gibbon, who served on the Cultural Property Advisory Committee to the US President from 2000—2003, has recently edited a book entitled Who owns the past: Cultural Policy, Cultural Property, and the Law (Rutgers University Press 2005), which mostly features contributors affiliated with ACCP (e.g. William Pearlstein, Shelby White, Kate Fitz Gibbon etc.), and intends to propagate the legitimacy of "the ability of museums and private collectors [in the US] to own art from other countries" in the public opinion. Jean M. Borgatti (Clark University) published a favorable account of this book on H-Net reviews. According to Borgatti, the book in the overall sense