Operation Iraqi Freedom Documents

Operation Iraqi Freedom documents are some 48,000 boxes of documents, audiotapes and videotapes that were discovered by the U.S. military during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The documents date from the 1980s through the post-Saddam period. In March 2006, the U.S. government, at the urging of members of Congress, made them available online at its Foreign Military Studies Office website, requesting Arabic translators around the world to help in the translation.

In early November 2006, the entire set of documents was removed. Media reports stated that the website was taken offline because of security concerns regarding the posting of sophisticated diagrams and other information regarding nuclear weapon design prior to the 1991 Persian Gulf war.

The Ba'athists were said to be "meticulous record-keepers." The documents were found in government offices in Iraq and Afghanistan. A debate ensued inside the government regarding whether these documents should be released to the public. Because the documents were not being made public through the normal channels, certain documents began to leak out through unconventional channels.

The first set of documents was released to an online media outlet called Cybercast News Service. A second set of documents was released to The Intelligence Summit, an international intelligence conference that resulted in an ABC story on some of the audiotapes of Saddam Hussein talking to his top officials. A spokeswoman for John Negroponte, the Director of National Intelligence, noted that "Intelligence community analysts from the CIA and the DIA reviewed the translations and found that while fascinating from a historical perspective, the tapes do not reveal anything that changes their postwar analysis of Iraq's weapons programs, nor do they change the findings contained in the comprehensive Iraq Survey Group report."

Congressman Pete Hoekstra, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, described the rationale for the public disclosure of the documents as follows:

Negroponte at first tried to delay the release of the documents, but softened his opposition to releasing after conversations with Hoekstra. President Bush directed Negroponte to release the documents and they were slowly being made available until they were taken offline in November 2006 due to security concerns (see below).

The website issued a warning that:

While the government has made an effort to keep known forgeries out of the set of documents posted to the web, a senior intelligence official observed that "the database included 'a fair amount of forgeries,' sold by Iraqi hustlers or concocted by Iraqis opposed to Mr. Hussein." A congressional inquiry covered many of the accuracy concerns on April 6, 2006 and while the multiple reviews aimed at keeping forgeries out do not rise to the level of a guarantee of authenticity, a good faith effort has apparently been made to clean out forgeries.

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Wikipedia