Having just read a similar story in the New York Daily News, I went searching for it on the web. Accidentally, I went to the New Times site instead. There I found multiple stories about the subject, but I didn't notice any that mentioned the downsizing of the loss - but, I admit, I didn't read them all. Here's the one from the New Daily News:
"Iraq museum looting called exaggerated
"BAGHDAD - The vast majority of the Iraqi trove of antiquities feared stolen or broken have been found inside the National Museum in Baghdad, according to U.S. investigators who scoured ransacked galleries over the weekend.
A total of 38 pieces, not tens of thousands, are now believed to be missing. Among them is a single display of Babylonian cuneiform tablets that accounts for nine missing items. The most valuable missing piece is the Vase of Warka, a white limestone bowl made in 3000 B.C.
The inventory, compiled by a military and civilian team headed by Marine Col. Matthew Bogdanos, rebuts reports that Iraq's renowned treasures of civilization - as many as 170,000 individual artifacts - had been scattered or lost during the U.S.-led war against Iraq.
Investigators found that intruders had taken some less-valuable artifacts from a storage room in the basement of the museum. That theft, in a little-known storage area, has raised suspicions that the thieves had knowledge of the museum and its storage practices.
Over the weekend, the investigators, armed with sledgehammers, broke through barricades built by Fedayeen Saddam gunners who fled to the museum just before the fall of Baghdad.
Important artifacts, apparently obscured in some instances by the rubble left by looters, emerged largely unscathed, they said. Investigators counted 17 display cases out of 300 to 400 cases there as destroyed.
In addition, investigators have counted 22 items that were damaged, including 11 clay pots on display in corridors. Most of those damaged artifacts are restored pieces and can be restored again, museum officials told investigators.
The most significant of the damaged pieces was the Golden Harp of Ur. But investigators determined that the golden head on the damaged antiquity, feared missing, was only a copy.
Museum officials confirmed to investigators that the original head is in a storage vault at the Iraqi Central Bank.
Knight-Ridder Newspapers"
I mention this only because while some people consider the New York Daily News to be "conservative", I consider it to be less biased than the Times, which as we all know is "somewhat" Liberal. :)
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