ICA Human Rights Working Group Newsletters

I wanted to highlight briefly a valuable resource for information and recent news related to archives and human rights, the Newsletters of the Human Rights Working Group of the International Council on Archives.  Each newsletter begins with a brief essay on a different article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and how it relates to archives.  There are then brief summaries of international and national news related to archives from the previous month.  The newsletter is compiled by the great Trudy Huskamp Peterson, a former acting Archivist of the United States who is also the author of "Archives in Service to the State" which is required reading on the issue of captured documents in war.

You can also subscribe to the Newsletter here.

Authenticity of Documents in Guatemalan Genocide Case

Emily Willard has a recent post on Unredacted (the blog of the great National Security Archive) called "Genocide Trial against Rios Montt: Declassified Documents Provide Key Evidence" which discusses documentary evidence used by a Guatemalan court to determine that there was sufficient evidence to "charge former dictator Efrain Rios Montt with genocide and crimes against humanity." The post notes that a

key piece of evidence to prove chain of command that was presented at the trial is the collection of secret Guatemalan military documents, Plan Sofia. The official Guatemalan government records of this counterinsurgency operation prove the criminal responsibility of senior government and military officials in the country's genocide by detailing how the chain of command functioned during the war, says National Security Archive senior analyst Kate Doyle. [See Doyle's first-hand account of her testimony, here.] The 365-page document was smuggled out of a secret military archive, given to Doyle and made public by the National Security Archive in December of 2009 after a lengthy authentication process.

The whole story is interesting, but the authentication issues are particularly relevant for the topic of captured documents where there are frequently questions of authenticity (see, for example, discussion here).  As the National Security Archive described earlier, Kate Doyle testified in the Guatemalan case about "the authenticity of the documents" based on "months of analysis, which included evaluations of letterheads and signatures on the documents and comparisons to other available military records."  Ultimately, the analysis concluded that "these records were created by military officials during the regime of Efrain Rios Montt to plan and implement a 'scorched earth' policy on Mayan communities in El Quiche."

"Archives in Wartime" Upcoming Wilson Center Event

The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars has an upcoming event entitled "Archives in Wartime: WWII to the Invasion of Iraq" on February 24, 2012 from 3:00-5:00pm.  Full details and RSVP information are available here.  The description states:

From the first days of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, United States forces seized official government records created by Saddam Hussein’s regime and exploited them for valuable military intelligence. Millions of pages of these Iraqi state records were then transferred to the United States for further research. Digital copies were even made available to scholars, providing a wealth of new insights into the recent history of Iraq and Saddam Hussein’s regime.

Yet their continued storage and use in the United States remains controversial. The Iraq National Library and Archive has repeatedly demanded the immediate return of all archival material captured during the war, arguing that these records are an inalienable part of Iraq’s national heritage. Negotiations have dragged on as it remains unclear if Iraq is truly ready for these records, which document decades of suppression and abuse, and contain the names of both informants and targets, perpetrators and victims alike.

The seizure of these Iraqi records is not without precedent, as archives are routinely captured by enemy forces during wartime. “Archives in Wartime” will feature a panel of expert archivists and historians who will discuss the current dispute over the Iraqi records within this larger historical context, examining the complex political questions at stake, as well as the tangled legal, historical, and archival issues which arise when state records are captured by invading forces.

Redacting Captured Documents in the Guantanamo Litigation

The usage of captured or seized documents in the ongoing Guantanamo Bay detention cases raises a number of meaty issues.  For this post I want to briefly highlight issues of classification and redaction.

Current U.S. doctrine provides that as"a general rule, captured and acquired documents and media are considered unclassified" and that while "[c]apturing units may classify document and media to protect sources and methods or on-going operations, . . . such classification should be kept to the lowest level possible and with minimal use of caveats." Given this, in reviewing recent public filings by the government in Guantanamo habeas cases that include captured or seized documents, it is striking how the same document can be treated in often very different ways from one case to the next.

As one example, compare two versions of AFGP-2002-600875 (here and here) filed in two cases one month apart.  In one, the document was classified SECRET//NOFORN (crossed out at the top) and in the other it was FOUO//LES.  More conspicuous of course is that what is completely blacked out in one version is completely unredacted in the other:

Contextual information about the captured documents can sometimes be found in Intelligence Information Reports (IIRs) in the same filings.  So, for example, in IIR 7 739 7062 03 you learn that the government interprets the document above as "lists of over 150 Al-Qaeda members scheduled for tactics, artillery, security, snipers, and anti-aircraft training dated March 2001 by the Office of Mujahideen Affairs" and that the document was "recovered by U.S. Coalition forces from an Al-Qaeda house in Kandahar//GeoCoords:3135/06545E//, Afghanistan (NFI)." The IIRs also illustrate similar redaction inconsistencies: in the case of this IIR, for example, a later filed version of the same IIR actually contains, in at least one place, more redactions:

Sometimes an IIR will provide information from the captured document that is redacted in the captured document itself. A good example is captured document AFGP-2002-900092 which is completely redacted despite the fact that detailed information derived from it is contained in two different intelligence reports IIR 7 739 0382 02 and IIR 7 739 0391 02 filed in the same case on the same day.

There are plausible explanations for some of these situations, including, for example, the possibility that a document's classification status could have changed between filings. Nevertheless, such examples raise legitimate questions about the procedures being used to classify and redact these captured records. The lack of consistency seems particularly odd for documents that are presumably contained within, and obtained from, the same centralized Harmony captured document repository.

For another issue related to captured documents in the Guantanamo cases (in particular the reliability of government records documenting what property and documents were in the possession of individuals upon their capture) see Emptywheel's recent post on the Latif case.

A Document Evacuation Order from Saddam's Iraq

Following up on Saddam's thoughts on document preservation in wartime, I just came across captured Iraqi document file IZSP-2003-00300934 (warning: large file), which includes an interesting December 2001 order which was translated as the following: