IMF/Hoover/Ba'ath Debate

The IMF/Hoover documents are a collection of Ba'ath party documents removed from Ba'ath Party Headquarters in Baghdad in 2003 and held first in the Iraq Memory Foundation headquarters in the Green Zone and then later transferred to the United States and eventually placed on deposit at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

For brief coverage of debate over the IMF/Hoover documents see Hugh Eakin,"Iraqi Files in U.S.: Plunder or Rescue?" New York Times, July 1, 2008, John Gravois, , "Disputed Iraqi Archives Find a Home at the Hoover Institution" in the Chronicle of Higher Education, January 23, 2008.  See also, the 2008 joint Society of American Archivists/Association of Canadian Archivists statement on the records, Hoover's response, and Iraqi National Archives Director Saad Eskander's open letter to Hoover.

On research in the IMF/Hoover documents, see "'The war will never end': Saddam's regime in Hoover Institution archives," Stanford Report, Aug. 1, 2011.

For more extensive commentary see Bruce P. Montgomery, "Immortality in the Secret Police Files: The Iraq Memory Foundation and the Baath Party Archive" (2011) in International Journal of Cultural Property; Trudy Huskamp Peterson, "Archives in Service to the State" in Political Pressure and the Archival Record (2008); Michelle Caswell, "'Thank You Very Much, Now Give Them Back' : Cultural Property and the Fight over the Iraqi Baath Party Records" (2011) (abstract only) in American Archivist; Bruce P. Montgomery, "Returning Evidence to the Scene of the Crime: Why the Anfal Files Should be Repatriated to Iraqi Kurdistan," (2010) in Archivaria (esp. pp. 145-49); Douglas Cox "Archives and Records in Armed Conflict: International Law and the Current Debate over Iraqi Records and Archives" (2010) in Catholic University Law Review (esp. pp. 1044-1051).