Seizure, Exploitation, and Restitution of Saddam Hussein’s Archive of Atrocity

In the largest documents seizure since World War II, U.S. forces seized vast quantities of records, media, hard drives, and digital devices in the 2003 invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq. In the Iraq war, the capture of enemy records served the immediate necessity of searching for Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction and other battlefield imperatives. From the moment of their capture, the Iraqi documents underwent a process of analysis, translation, triage, exploitation, dissemination, politicization, more analysis, scholarly investigation, and post-war diplomacy. This paper examines the nature of U.S. exploitation of enemy documents in the Iraq war, the limits of the laws of armed conflict regarding their custody and use, and the complications surrounding their return. This article argues that with no international legal constraints, the U.S. was able to exploit these materials to advance its military and intelligence imperatives according to its own discretion.