Conflict Records Research Center in the FY 2014 NDAA

The compromise FY 2014 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) draft released yesterday (available here) includes an important new statutory provision (see § 1071) related to the Conflict Records Research Center (CRRC), which has been providing access to an impressive collection of captured records from Saddam's Iraq and Afghanistan.  An earlier post discussed the CRRC's funding crisis, which was due, in part, to the delay in the consideration of the NDAA in Congress.  According to its last update, the CRRC has subsequently been operating with bridge funding and one employee.

Section 1071 of the FY 2014 NDAA draft is entitled "Enhancement of the capacity of the United States Government to analyze captured records." It includes a provision that will become, if passed, 10 U.S.C. § 426 called "Conflict Records Research Center" that authorizes the Secretary of Defense to establish the CRRC.  This may seem odd given that the CRRC of course already exists within the National Defense University, but providing an explicit statutory basis for the CRRC may place it on more firm footing going forward.

Moreover, the other substantive provisions appear to be designed to broaden the CRRC's ability to obtain funding.  According to the "Joint Explanatory Statement" the "additional statutory authorization would allow the [CRRC] to be funded collectively by the Department of Defense, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and other departments and agencies, rather than rely on discrete partner funding for each activity."  The provision "would also allow the [CRRC] to receive funding from other agencies, states, or other foreign and domestic entities, including academic and philanthropic organizations, to support important research in international relations, counterterrorism, conventional warfare and unconventional warfare."

Other noteworthy detail includes the statutory "purposes" of the CRRC:

(1) To establish a digital research database, including translations, and to facilitate research and analysis of records captured from countries, organizations, and individuals, now or once hostile to the United States, with rigid adherence to academic freedom and integrity. 

(2) Consistent with the protection of national security information, personally identifiable information, and intelligence sources and methods, to make a significant portion of these records available to researchers as quickly and responsibly as possible while taking into account the integrity of the academic process and risks to innocents or third parties. 

(3) To conduct and disseminate research and analysis to increase the understanding of factors related to international relations, counterterrorism, and conventional and unconventional warfare and, ultimately, enhance national security. 

(4) To collaborate with members of academic and broad national security communities, both domestic and international, on research, conferences, seminars, and other information exchanges to identify topics of importance for the leadership of the United States Government and the scholarly community.

Finally, the draft includes a statutory definition of "captured record:"

The term "captured record" means a document, audio file, video file, or other material captured during combat operations from countries, organizations, or individuals, now or once hostile to the United States.

Voting on the FY 2014 NDAA could begin later this week.

"Lost to History: Missing War Records" - ProPublica & Seattle Times

In case you missed it, Peter Sleeth from ProPublica and Hal Bernton of The Seattle Times have an important two-part piece on the U.S. military's failure to create or maintain adequate records of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and the consequences, both personal and historical, of that failure. The first part (available here) is called "Lost to History: Missing War Records Complicate Benefit Claims by Iraq, Afghanistan Veterans" and the second part (here) is "A Son Lost in Iraq, but Where is the Casualty Report?"

The reporting relies, in part, on some fascinating government documents and reports including this brief on a "GWOT [Global War on Terrorism] Archive Project" and this 2009 Army "information paper" on "Army Operational Records" that begins by noting that the "long-term ability of an Army to learn from its experiences, prepare effective doctrine, adequately train and care for its Soldiers, and generate an able and ready force requires that it develop methods and procedures to capture its own operational data" and later states that between 2004 and 2007 "very few Operation ENDURING FREEDOM records were saved anywhere, either for historian's use or for the services documentary needs for unit heritage or for the increasing challenge with documenting Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)."

The pieces provide a powerful example of the too-often-ignored importance of recordkeeping.

"Threat Finance" Analysis & DOCEX

A interesting new piece in Small Wars Journal by J. Edward Conway entitled "Analysis in Combat: The Deployed Threat Finance Analyst" discusses the work of intelligence analysts deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq focused on terrorist finance networks. He describes the work of interagency "threat finance cells (TFCs)" and highlights the role of DOCEX:

The TFCs also proved to be particularly adept at document exploitation (DOCEX) – drawing value from media picked up in the field. For example, TFC agents accompanying U.S. troops on a hawala office raid would seize forensic data such as financial ledgers, which TFC analysts could then process in a matter of days due to in-house TFC interpreters/translators. Benjamin Bahney (who was detailed to the ITFC in 2008 and 2009 while at RAND) along with several of his RAND colleagues affirmed the value of DOCEX in their open source analysis of Al Qaeda financial ledgers. Their analysis shows how in-depth exploitation of financial data can increase our understanding of an organization’s decision-making hierarchy and vulnerable sources of revenue and expenditure, but most importantly, Bahney et al. make a strong case for the relationship between an organization’s financial health and its ability to conduct attacks – validation of the need for threat finance analysts as originally proposed by the CFR back in the wake of 9/11.

The Full AlSabri Opinion Released

The D.C. Circuit in Alsabri released its full opinion, available here (thanks Lawfare), late last week. It is unredacted and also unsurprising.

As revealed its the earlier one-page judgment, the Circuit upheld Judge Urbina's lower court decision that held that Alsabri was lawfully detained.  I previously discussed Judge Urbina's evaluation of the 92-page collection of captured documents, AFGP-2002-800321 (originals and translations), including his assessment of the authenticity and reliability of the documents and the importance, in my view, of separately considering the context of individual pages and the value of consulting the original documents. I ended by stating that it was "unclear what, if anything, the D.C. Circuit might make of these issues."

In its opinion, the D.C. Circuit does briefly discuss the captured documents, but largely avoids substantively examining the issues they raise in any depth by applying a highly deferential "clearly erroneous" standard to its evaluation of Judge Urbina's decision.  In a passage that seems to confirm that only English translations were consulted, the Circuit summarizes that:

the government introduced evidence that Alsabri did in fact receive weapons training. The principal evidence was an English-language translation of a 92-page collection of documents that the government maintains were internal Taliban or al Qaeda records. A Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) record, which the government submitted as a supplemental exhibit, indicates that the documents were captured by Coalition forces from the "Director of Al-Qa'ida Security Training Office," and are "similar to other materials recovered from enemy forces."

The Circuit then notes that "Alsabri contends that the district court erred in concluding that the records of scheduled and completed training refer to him." It does not engage the arguments in detail, however, but rather simply holds that "the district court did not clearly err in finding that the documents refer to Alsabri."

In a footnote the Circuit Court also notes that Alsabri specifically took issue with Judge Urbina's characterization of a list of "arriving brothers" as a "training roster" when not even the government had argued that the "arriving brothers" were necessarily "arriving" to a training camp.  On this point the Circuit commits, in my view, the same error as Judge Urbina and assumes that because the 92 pages of documents form part of AFGP-2002-800321 in the Harmony database they necessarily are related to one another rather than being, as Alsabri had argued (and the originals provide some support), a "hodgepodge of materials."  Specifically, the Circuit states that "[g]iven the context provided by the remainder of the documents" Judge Urbina's "characterization of the list is not clearly erroneous." The "context" on which the Circuit is relying here may unfortunately be nothing more than an artificial context created by the individual that chose to scan these 92 pages together as one file and assign one Harmony number (for an explanation of that process, see the Standard Operating Procedures for the Combined Media Processing Center in Qatar available here).

Introducing the Captured Documents Index

In advance of tomorrow's release of captured Bin Laden documents by West Point's Combating Terrorism Center (CTC), I've gone live with a Captured Documents Index that I've been compiling for while (a permanent link to it is also now on the right side of the Document Exploitation blog screen).

The Index is incomplete (many more documents to add) and it is still very much a work in progress, but the long-term intention is to provide, in one place, a list of (and, where available, links to) the wide variety of captured documents that have been released or cited publicly.  I have put it up today in the event that some of the documents (which include, among other things, copies of passports that purport to belong to Bin Laden's family, which were filed in a military commission case) might be useful in analyzing tomorrow's release of Bin Laden documents.

A few initial notes on the Index.

• Coverage is currently limited to Harmony era (largely Iraq/Afghanistan) documents and is organized by Harmony number for reference and convenience.  The fact, therefore, that Harmony AFGP documents from Afghanistan are placed between 2RAD and BIAP documents captured in Iraq should not be read as any comment on the relationship, or lack thereof, between Saddam and al Qaeda.  For more on Harmony and its numbering system see the CMPC SOP or this Army DOCEX manual.

• In most cases the Harmony number is a hyperlink that allows you to download the document itself from either its original online source or from a new link (for docs whose original source is more difficult to access). Sometimes there is both an Arabic document and an English translation, sometimes there is only one or the other, and sometimes there is simply a description of the document.  

• The documents and descriptions come from a number of places including the 2006 Iraqi Freedom Doc Dump (despite the fact the portal was shut down in Nov. 2006, many of the posted docs remain available online in, among other places, the Internet Archive), West Point's CTC's Harmony Program, Guantanamo case filings, military commission filings, the five-volume "Saddam and Terrorism" study by the Institute for Defense Analyses from 2006, and other sources. Documents and descriptions are sourced both for verification purposes and to provide full credit for the individuals or organizations that posted them.

• The Index does not (yet) include documents from the extensive collection of Iraq and Afghanistan documents at the Conflict Records Research Center (CRRC).  An index of documents in the CRRC's Saddam Hussein Collection and its Al Qaeda and Associated Movements Collection is available here and here.  The CRRC has also posted a number of documents online (see here, here and here).   

I have plans to make the Index more complete and improve it over time, but any suggestions would be gratefully received at docexblog@gmail.com.

A Captured Document Turducken

I recently came across an odd exhibit in a military commission filing that consists of documents captured by the United States that, in turn, consist of copies of seized U.S. documents.  The exhibit, which is from the military commission in Bahlul, is a collection of captured documents with Harmony number AFGP-2002-800755. That captured document file consists of a collection of published copies of U.S. classified documents seized from the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979.  As described in the exhibit:

The publicly filed exhibit contains only the cover page and a second page on which there was handwriting rather than duplicates of the whole collection. On the cover page, however, the Arabic numerals indicate "39-40" which appears to be volume numbers for the published U.S. embassy papers. Volumes 39 and 40, which are available elsewhere online here and here, do primarily contain what purport to be seized U.S. Embassy records related to Kuwait.

Alsabri v. Obama: Captured Documents in Court

A Guantanamo case currently awaiting an appellate decision from the D.C. Circuit, Alsabri v. Obama, illustrates the difficulty of using captured documents as evidence. Thus far public analysis of the captured documents angle in the case, however, has been lacking for a very good reason: heavy redactions.

The 92-page collection of captured documents referenced both in Judge Urbina's redacted February 2011 District Court opinion (denying Alsabri’s habeas petition) and in the parties’ redacted appellate briefs - appellant brief, appellee brief, appellant reply (thanks Lawfare) - is completely redacted in the government factual return publicly filed in 2009 (save for page numbers). However, in another striking example of inconsistent redactions in GTMO filings, an almost completely unredacted version of the full 92-page collection - AFGP-2002-800321 - was filed in a different case (compare the 92-page redacted and unredacted filings for yourself). This allows one to fill in many redacted holes in the opinion and briefs.

While there are many other issues and other evidence in the case that may determine the ultimate result (and giving the D.C. Circuit the benefit of the doubt that results in detainee habeas cases are not always inflexibly predetermined - see, e.g., Silberman's concurrence), the captured documents are a uniquely central issue in the litigation.

Judge Urbina on Context, Authenticity, and Reliability of Captured Documents

During the habeas hearing before Judge Urbina, Alsabri’s attorneys argued that the government had never provided any source or contextual information for the 92-pages of documents that became “Government Exhibit 29” or - in Judge Urbina’s opinion - the “AFGP Documents.” At the hearing, however, the government suddenly provided for the first time a DIA record (the admissibility of which is an issue on appeal) that stated that “the AFGP Documents consist of English-language translations of Arabic-language documents captured by coalition forces during Operation Enduring Freedom” and that the record “seem[ed] to reflect” they were recovered from the “Director of Al-Qa’ida Security Training Office” and that the DIA, “which prepared the translation,” indicated that they “contain[] [t]he names of the students admitted to the training in the tactics of [a]rtillery, communication, infantry and their distribution.”

Based, in part, on the “DIA record indicating that the exhibit represents a DIA translation of training records,” Judge Urbina rejected Alsabri’s argument that the government had “not established the reliability of the AFGP Documents.” Further, while Judge Urbina noted that the failure of the DIA record to specify “when and where the AFGP Documents were recovered” was “significant,” he nevertheless found that the absence of such information did “not necessarily undermine the reliability of the AFGP Documents.”

In the end, Judge Urbina held that there was “substantial evidence” of the “authenticity and reliability” of the AFGP Documents and that “[t]hese internal al-Qaida records indicate that after applying to attend an al-Qaida training camp, [Alsabri] did, in fact, receive such training.” Based, in part, on this evidence, Judge Urbina denied Alsabri’s habeas petition. Al-Sabri appealed.

Three Entries in the 92-Pages of Captured Documents

An evaluation of Judge Urbina’s treatment of the captured documents becomes more interesting when the details on which the government relies are fleshed out in the appellate filings and in the unredacted version of the documents. Three pages are at issue.

"Bin Ladin's Audiocassette Library" in CTC Sentinel

The cover story from October's CTC Sentinel from the Combatting Terrorism Center at West Point is "Insights from Bin Ladin's Audiocassette Library in Kandahar" by Flagg Miller. The article notes that more than 1,500 tapes were "acquired" by CNN "in early 2002 from Bin Ladin's Kandahar compound" and that after "the tapes were reviewed by U.S. intelligence agencies shortly after their acquisition, the collection was sold to the Williams College Afghan Media Project run by American anthropologist David Edwards."  The tapes were later transferred to Yale which began making them publicly available online as "Islamic Fundamentalist Audiotapes."  For "provenance" of the tapes Yale states, "The materials were a gift of David B. Edwards" and for copyright states "Copyright status for collection materials is unknown."  Yale's own description for the collection states:

Originally said to have originated in Osama bin Laden's compound in Kandahar, Afghanistan, these tapes endured a long journey to the United States and to their final home in Yale University. In the weeks following the Taliban's evacuation from Kandahar on December 7, 2001, the audiocassettes were initially acquired by a CNN producer and his Afghani translator. After the FBI declined stewardship of the tapes, CNN transferred the materials to Williams College's Afghan Media Project, headed by anthropologist David Edwards. After several years of work with the tapes, Edwards determined that Williams did not have the resources to preserve them. Yale was approached because of its well-known collections, scholarship, and database development related to Middle East studies. The tapes, many of which are in fragile and deteriorating condition, arrived in September 2006 and are housed at the Library Shelving Facility. Physical ownership of the tapes resides with Yale. 

The origin and custody of these tapes would perhaps provide an interesting compare/contrast with the IMF/Hoover/Ba'ath Debate.