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When Steve Coll and Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press filed suit in 2021 to force the Department of Defense to release digital copies of Iraqi records captured by the US military during the Iraq War and later deposited with the Conflict Records Research Center (CRRC), the Pentagon initially denied most of the lawsuit鈥檚 allegations, claimed insufficient knowledge to address them in any detail, and asserted that the requested records were exempted from both the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and the court鈥檚 jurisdiction.

There was, however, one interesting detail contained in the Pentagon鈥檚 initial denial of the lawsuit: the Department of Defense claimed that the CRRC archive had fallen into disrepair. 鈥淸The] Defendant admits that back-up tapes of the archive, which required forensic reconstruction, were turned over to the Department鈥檚 Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy, Plans and Capabilities.鈥�[1]

In 2024, the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) provided more details about the 鈥渇orensic reconstruction鈥� necessary to preserve the CRRC materials. In response to a FOIA request submitted by Iraqi scholar and former diplomat Alharith Baban, the OSD FOIA Division explained that:

鈥�Regrettably after the CRRC鈥檚 closure, the tape format used to store the archive deteriorated; and the Department has worked to recover as much of the archive as possible, securing it in a modern digital format. The recovered data contains approximately thirty gigabytes of PDF scans of original foreign languages documents, English-language translations, and video and audio files with English-language transcriptions and translations.鈥�[2]

In summer 2022, after Coll and the Pentagon had settled their lawsuit on favorable terms outside of the courtroom, the Pentagon began sharing with Coll records that had been recovered from the CRRC archive. Coll used these materials for his book, The Achilles Trap, and shared copies of them with the 浪花直播 Center. In recent months, the Center鈥檚 History and Public Policy Program has been publishing these documents on the 浪花直播 Center Digital Archive, after . I have also been analyzing their contents in a series of blog posts for Sources & Methods. 

In reviewing the records, it has been difficult for me to parse a thematic logic with respect to what the Pentagon provided Coll, beyond the relatively large percentage of the trove that consists of audio tapes of Saddam鈥檚 meetings. Considering that we know now that the CRRC materials required 鈥渇orensic reconstruction,鈥� and given the presence of partial, corrupted, and missing records in the trove, data recovery now seems likely as at least one of the organizing principles underlying what the Pentagon gave to Coll.

Whether additional records originally held at the CRRC were recovered by the Department of Defense is still unknown 鈥� but this should become clear in the coming months, thanks to a recent agreement concluded by the Pentagon to make at least some of the Iraqi documents accessible once again.

In the spring of 2022, the Hoover Institution Library and Archives at Stanford University under , renewed its efforts to obtain the entire CRRC archive, which were . After the early 2022 outreach, talks between the Pentagon and Hoover continued over the next year, with the final agreement coming  shortly after  hosted by the Hoover Institution Library and Archives on August 17 and 18, 2023. According to the subsequent , the transfer of recovered CRRC records to Hoover was accepted on September 29, 2023, with the final approval taking place on March 5, 2024.[3]

While public details of the decision to transfer the CRRC archive to Hoover are still sparse, the Office of Secretary of Defense did provide a partial explanation in its 2024 response letter to Alharith Baban鈥檚 FOIA request. 鈥淎fter careful consideration, the Department has determined that Hoover Institute has the most appropriate academic expertise to handle this important collection, making it as widely accessible as possible.鈥� Moreover, the Hoover Institution had safeguards in place to protect Personally Identifiable Information (PII) in the records. 

Among the terms negotiated with Hoover were that a searchable index be made available on its website, so that members of the public can register online and complete a user agreement on the handling of the documents. According to the FOIA response, registered researchers will be able to access the records on a closed computer system at and . The letter concludes, 鈥渢he Department made this transfer recently and envisages the collection to be available as described within the next few months once Hoover has in-processed the collection.鈥�  Administratively closing Alharith Baban鈥檚 FOIA request, the Pentagon stated it would provide a notification when the records became available at Hoover.[4]

We still do not know exactly what the Pentagon is providing to the Hoover Institution. Is it an identical set of records that were relinquished to Steve Coll? Is it a larger body of documents than what Coll received, but still not the complete CRRC collection, thanks to lost or corrupted files acknowledged by the Department of Defense? Or was the Department of Defense successful at forensically reconstructing the entire archive of CRRC materials?

Fortunately for the Pentagon and interested researchers, the entirety of the CRRC archive and much more is actually preserved elsewhere: the Harmony Database.

The Harmony Database is maintained by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and is accessible only through the Pentagon鈥檚 secure networks, such as the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network (SIPRNet), Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System (JWICS), Stone Ghost, and the Establishment of Battlefield Information Collection and Exploitation Systems (BICES). The Harmony Database was the centralized repository of captured adversary records, especially from the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which made them available to US government agencies for intelligence and law enforcement purposes.[5]

When the CRRC closed its doors, it contained roughly 143,000 pages of documents and two hundred hours of audio tapes, a small fraction of the 100-200 million pages and several thousand hours of audio tapes in the Harmony Database.[6]  based on the records, prior to the existence of the CRRC, .[7] Every record processed from Harmony to the CRRC was given a new index number, which was in turn reported to the database鈥檚 DIA administrators. 

In other words, outside of a decision being made to delete Harmony records following the , there is no obvious reason why the CRRC could not and should not be restored in its entirety, drawing on the Harmony Database as needed. 

Given the geopolitical concerns of the present, it seems unlikely that the Department of Defense or the intelligence community will prioritize the screening, translation, and release of additional Iraqi records captured more than 20 years ago and still available in the Harmony Database.  The best path forward, irrespective of bureaucratic hurdles, would be to draw on the resources of the Hoover Institution, 浪花直播 Center, and other academic institutions, along with the combined interest, knowledge, and expertise of Iraqi, American, and international scholars who have the ability to responsibly handle records and the motivation to make them available to all who are interested. 

Since the CRRC archive was open between 2010 and 2015, the 浪花直播 Center has been at the to make Iraqi records accessible to the widest possible audience on its , available to anyone anywhere in the world with internet access. This year鈥檚 partnership with Steve Coll has demonstrated it is possible to do this on an even larger scale while screening for PII, which is generally less of a concern with CRRC records than with the at the Hoover Institution Library and Archives. 

With respect to the potential release of additional Iraqi records from the Harmony Database that go beyond the original CRRC collections, it is my opinion that the 浪花直播 Center, as a public-private institution that is strictly non-partisan, is the ideal partner for the Department of Defense. Either in coordination with the Pentagon or in hiring its own contractor linguists with security clearances who could screen and translate Harmony records for public release, the 浪花直播 Center has a commitment to transparency and the experience and vision to make this possibility a reality. 

[1] 鈥淎nswer鈥� in Civil Action No. 21-2777 (RC), p. 3.

[2] Stephanie L. Carr, 鈥淔inal Answer鈥� to FOIA Case Number 21-F-2021, June 21, 2024, p. 1.

[3] 鈥淩equest for Disposition Authority,鈥� Records Schedule Number: DAA-0330-2023-0001, Status: Approved, Date Approved: March 5, 2024, pp. 1-7.

[4] Carr, 鈥淔inal Answer鈥� to FOIA Case Number 21-F-2021, pp. 1-2.

[5] Mike McConnell, 鈥淒ocument and Media Exploitation,鈥� Intelligence Community Directive Number 302, July 6, 2007, pp. 4-6.

[6] 鈥淏ackground Information Concerning Captured Iraqi Documents,鈥� pp. 1-4.

[7] In The Achilles Trap, Coll often cites original records even when drawing on the secondary scholarship, providing the Harmony numbers where relevant. For example, see endnote number 8 on p. 180, along with the corresponding entry on p. 506.  was released and added to the Digital Archive with the first batch of records on February 27, 2024. Its Harmony index number is ISGQ-2003-0004487 and its CRRC index number is SH-MISC-D-000-652.