Babylon trashed?

I would love to read the Pentagon's response to this report by the British Museum, assuming the Guardian article is reasonably accurate- I don't understand what was so important about Babylon's position that it justified such treatment. Babylon is hardly one of those sites obscure to the layman.

He saw a 2,600-year-old brick pavement crushed by military vehicles, archaeological fragments scattered across the site, and trenches driven into ancient deposits.

Vast amounts of sand and earth, visibly mixed with archaeological fragments, were gouged from the site to fill thousands of sandbags and metal mesh baskets. When this practice was stopped, large quantities of sand and earth were brought in from elsewhere, contaminating the site for future generations of archaeologists.

Of course, until seeing the actual report- the Guardian doesn't seem to link to it- one might also wonder how much unmentioned agendas influenced either the report or the article. That is part of the frustration in trying to figure out what is going on. Single sources are clearly suspect in anything politicized, and nowadays it seems nearly everything is.