Own a Piece of Captured Document History - Noriega's Business Card

Following up on an earlier post on Saddam's sword and war souvenirs, there is only about 24 hours remaining in an auction on MurderAuction.com for a "General Manuel Noriega original business card in great condition - This is not a copy."  Minimum bid is $49.99.

The issue of Gen. Noriega's business cards have a long history.  Not long after the December 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama, news stories began popping up about Noriega's business cards being sold in California for $10 a piece.  A Jan. 31, 1990 piece in the Ellensburg Daily Record, for example, stated that "Entrepreneur Joel Peterson" was selling business cards and stationary obtained from "the general's desk in Panama City." His brother, Army Sgt. Mark Peterson, reportedly "had been sent to Noriega's headquarters in the mop-up operation after U.S. troops stormed the compound."  Sgt. Peterson reportedly "gave his brother a signed, hand-written note certifying 'that these cards belonged to General Manuel Noriega and were personally acquired by myself at Noriega's office . . . on 22 Dec. '89 during operation 'Just Cause.'"  Morever, the article stated that according to Sgt. Peterson:

An Army policy announced during the Panamanian action allowed soldiers to take souvenirs as long as they were not weapons, drugs or anything that might have been used as evidence in criminal proceedings.

This did not escape the attention of Noriega's lawyers who had already been trying to ensure that the Government was preserving the documents seized in Panama for possible use in his defense to criminal charges in Miami.  On February 2, 1990, Noriega's lawyers filed this "Motion for Inventory and Return of Stolen Property" arguing that "soldiers ransacked General Noriega's residence and stole numerous articles of personal property belonging to General Noriega," that "one Joel Peterson, brother of Sergeant Mark Peterson, is selling stolen business cards of General Noriega in Southern California," and that this was apparently permitted by U.S. Army policy.

"Conduct of this nature, by the United States Army," the motion continued, "is reminiscent of ancient times when Attila the Hun and barbarians sacked and burned cities and later divvied up the booty among themselves."

The government's response in opposition to the motion denied that any property had been "stolen" and noted that the only specific item mentioned in Noriega's motion was "business cards, items which by their nature are meant to be distributed" and that "it is difficult to image what if any evidentiary value applies to the business cards."  In a classic U.S. government argument, the response stated that the U.S. "submits that to the best of its knowledge, none of defendant's property has been stolen" (emphasis mine) and that "[i]nsofar as any items may have been removed from those locations with the government's knowledge, they were removed in compliance with applicable military regulations and directives" without ever addressing whether such regulations or directives, as Sgt. Peterson and the original motion had claimed, allowed individual soldiers to take Gen. Noriega's property as war souvenirs.

More pressing issues soon overtook the Noriega case and the motion was later denied by Magistrate Judge Turnoff without comment in July 1990.  With time, however, the allegations in the motion have found additional factual support, not only in the ongoing auction, but in numerous stories over the years.  As just one example, see this account involving not only a business card and stationary, but even a "reproduction of an ancient map of the world produced on fabric" that a soldier "found in Noriega's office while his unit emptied the Panamanian leaders files" which later had "an honored spot on the wall" of that soldier's "Englewood home."  Another one of Noriega's business cards ended up, perhaps more appropriately, in the Business Card Archives founded in Iowa by Walter Day.

Turkish Armed Forces To Return Seized Documents to Turkish Government

I wanted to briefly highlight an interesting piece in Today's Zaman from last week entitled "General Staff to return documents seized in coup times" which involves the return of seized documents from one part of the Turkish government to another.  The article reports that the Turkish Armed Forces are "aiming" to return documents seized "from the Office of the President, the Prime Ministry and Parliament during the May 27, 1960 and Sept. 12, 1980 military interventions" to "their rightful owners." The piece notes that

In addition to key information about the events that occurred during the two coups, the archives to be returned include documents on the Dersim massacre of 1938 and the 1915 killings of Armenians under the Ottoman administration. There are thousands of official documents, orders and images among the archives, which were seized from various institutions.

The article states that the documents are expected to be delivered "by Sept. 12, 2012" and that "[h]istorians and researchers will be able to access these documents for research once they have been returned."

Why are they doing this now?  The article notes that the Turkish Parliament is "preparing to establish a new commission to investigate Turkey's past military takeovers at the request of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan" and that the return of the documents "is also part of a wider project by the military to consolidate its archives." Given the reference to some of the documents including information relevant to the "1915 killings of Armenians under the Ottoman administration," however, I also wonder whether the timing could also be related to the recent controversy between Turkey and France over a proposed French law criminalizing the denial of the Armenian genocide.  In late February, the French Constitutional Council struck down the draft law, but, as the N.Y. Times reported,

controversy over the bill is likely to persist, however.  President Nicolas Sarkozy, who backed the legislation, vowed to submit a new bill with revised language.  He has in the past indicated that he would push to see that denial of an Armenian genocide is made a crime even if the council ruled against the draft law.

Finally, an aspect of the article that might raise a red flag for archivists is the repeated references to the armed forces "reorganizing" and "re-categorizing" the documents prior to returning them, which may present concerns about the preservation of context.

Actually, That Might be Saddam's Sword After All

Spencer Ackerman over at Wired's Danger Room had a great piece last week called "Sorry, That's Not Really Saddam's Sword You're Buying" which strongly questioned the provenance of a sword auctioned off recently in New Hampshire that purportedly belonged to Saddam Hussein.  Based on a closer look at the evidence, however, it appears just as likely that the sword was legitimate.  The dirty little secret is that the DoD's practice of permitting war trophies is alive and well.

The central thrust of the Danger Room piece relies on the unquestioned assurance of a spokesperson for U.S. Army forces in the Middle East that "[i]f this were an actual Saddam Hussein sword, it would be considered a museum piece and turned back over to the Iraqi government."  This assertion, unfortunately, is false both factually and as a matter of U.S. law and policy.  Need some evidence?  See, as just one example, this exhibit entitled "Saddam Hussein Sword and Rifle" that features an authentic sword captured by the 4th Infantry Division that is on display not in an Iraqi museum, but rather at the U.S. National Infantry Museum in Columbus, Georgia.

National Infantry Museum "Hussein Artifacts" "Exhibit: 'Saddam Hussein Sword & Rifle'"

As noted in a military report on legal issues related to Operation Iraqi Freedom, designating "enemy material seized on the battlefield" as "historical artifacts" of U.S. combat operations is standard procedure.  The Army's Chief of Military History, in fact, "deploys military and civilian personnel" as recovery teams that are "responsible for identifying, collecting, registering, and returning to the United States all significant historical artifacts, in coordination with unit commanders." This is entirely consistent with the auction house description of the Saddam sword sold in New Hampshire which states that the sword was obtained from Saddam's office within a military command complex in Baghdad and was initially sequestered for possible military history use by the 126th Military History Regiment, which, as noted here, "crossed the berm from Kuwait into Iraq" in March 2003.

Moreoever, as I explained in an earlier post on possible criminal charges in the U.K. for importing a buttock from a toppled statute of Saddam, at the time of the invasion the U.S. was not treating property that normally might qualify as museum pieces - such as statutes, paintings, and, perhaps, ceremonial swords - as protected cultural property when that property belonged to, or glorified, Saddam or the Ba'ath Party.

Ackerman's Danger Room piece also questioned the authenticity of the sword as an individual "war souvenir."  His incredulity is understandable given the reasonable assumption, also implicitly encouraged by the Army's spokesperson, that individual war trophies are a part of the uncivilized past.  In relation to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, the DoD specifically and explicitly pushed this view as part of the larger narrative that the U.S. came to liberate, rather than subjugate, Iraq (see, e.g., the American Forces Press Service,"No War Trophies Allowed from Iraq, Afghanistan" from Dec. 2003).

What the DoD did not publicize, however, was that in February 2004, less than a year after the Iraq invasion, the Secretary of Defense quietly implemented a 1994 law (codified at 10 U.S.C. § 2579) which "recognize[d] that battlefield souvenirs have traditionally provided military personnel with a valued memento of service in a national cause" and permitted individual servicemembers to retain certain items, with proper approval, as souvenirs.  The 1994 law followed an earlier military assessment of Operation Desert Storm that noted: "Only sex seems to arouse as much passion in ordinary human beings as does the lust to acquire war trophies." The details of the 2004 implementation authority for the 1994 law is buried in a footnote in the military report mentioned above:

Once again, this is consistent with the auction house description which states that, after the sword's seizure for possible military history purposes and after the sword was subsequently "never claimed by the U.S. government," the seller, who was a military historian, "requested and was granted permission to take the sword home as a souvenir."

The belated 2004 implementation of the 1994 war souvenir law may also help explain a final point noted in the Danger Room piece.  The auction house description states that the DoD form documenting the sword as a souvenir has the date "March 9, 2003" which arguably undermines its authenticity given that the invasion had not yet started then.  The chance that this is a simple date error for the date of the sword's initial seizure, however, becomes more plausible with the added information that the time at which the form was filled out would not have been contemporaneous with the seizure. The form would have been filled out no earlier than February 2004, or almost a year later.  The date that was intended was most likely April 9, 2003, the day on which Saddam's statute was iconically pulled down in Firdos square.

Of course, this is all just speculation without being able to consult and investigate the actual documentation for the auctioned sword and online auctions are clearly awash with Saddam memorabilia of suspect authenticity. The simple point, however, which may be shocking and hard for some to accept, is that U.S. law and policy would not necessarily preclude individual ownership of captured Iraqi property as war souvenirs nor would it necessarily compel the return of even museum-worthy pieces to Iraq.  If the Army wants to claim something different, they can tell it to the Marines.

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.

Conference Report on Captured Records & Al-Qaeda

The Homeland Security Digital Library includes among this week's "critical releases" a copy of the Conference Report on last year's joint Conflict Records Research Center (CRRC) - Johns Hopkins University conference "Ten Years Later: Insights on al-Qaeda's Past & Future through Captured Records." The Report has also been available on the CRRC's website.

In connection with the Conference the CRRC also publicly released 12 records with full English translations here.  The index to CRRC's larger "Al-Qaeda and Associated Movements" collection is available here.