Iraq records spark controversy.

Millions of Saddam Hussein's records could soon be accessible at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace at Stanford University, but the plan has been criticized by the director of the Iraq National Library and Archives (INLA).

The Washington, D.C.-based Iraq Memory Foundation (IMF) gathered some seven million documents from Hussein's Ba'ath Party headquarters after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and loaned them to the Hoover Institution this year. In between, the IMF's director, exiled Iraqi scholar Kanan Makiya, stored the records in his parents' home in Baghdad, according to The Stanford Report.

Makiya's group began digitizing the records and reached an agreement with the U.S. military in 2005 to store the documents in West Virginia while the digitizing process was finished. When digitization was completed, the foundation decided that Iraq was too volatile to return the documents and opted to send them to Hoover where they would presumably be safer. The documents arrived at Stanford on three semi-trailers in February and are currently being stored off campus, according to Richard Sousa, Hoover's senior associate director. Since then, he said, the collection has been cleaned, sorted, and catalogued.

The Stanford Report said Hoover will hold the documents for five years and then return them to Iraq. Sousa said the institution's agreement with the IMF was approved by Iraq's deputy prime minister, the Ministry of Culture, and the cabinet of the prime minister's office. He said he does not know who technically owns the documents.

However, in June, Saad Eskander, INLA director, wrote an open letter to the director of the Hoover Institution in which he criticized this plan and called the records "illegally seized documents of the former Iraqi state and the archive of the Ba'ath Party." He also stated that the more than five million pages of records are the property of Iraq and should be sent to Iraq's national archives immediately.

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"The Iraqis inside and outside the country have supported my position and disapproved of Makiya, al-Kadhemi [Mustafa al-Kadhemi, IMF director] and the IMF's activities, which are considered to be morally wrong and manifest violations of Iraq's sovereignty" he wrote. "IMF has no right whatsoever to keep these records abroad."

The letter further states that the IMF's actions are "incontrovertibly illegal," according to a 1969 Iraq law that imposes severe punishment on anyone who destroys, hides, steals, forges, publishes, or removes official Iraqi documents. That law states that individuals who collaborate with and provide foreign states with Iraqi records are subject to 10 years in prison.

According to The New York Times, international laws allow for an occupying power to acquire documents or archives deemed necessary for the conduct of war or occupation. The U.S. military has acquired and continues to hold about 100 million pages of other archival material from Iraq. But the IMF, as a private group, does not fall under this provision, said Mark A. Greene, SAA president.

The IMF maintains that Iraqi officials approved its plan. In August 2004, according to the Times, the prime minister's office of the first postwar government authorized the foundation to collect "documents pertaining to harm committed by the former regime" with the intention that they be preserved in a +national institution it would help establish in Baghdad. However, by 2006, the security situation had deteriorated, and the foundation, which had been storing the archives together with other salvaged documents in a house belonging to Maldya's family in the Baghdad Green Zone, abandoned its plans to build a Baghdad museum or archive.

According to the correspondence, the idea of housing the documents "for a period of time" at the Hoover Institution was endorsed by the chief of staff of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in September 2007 and again in April 2008. Yet those endorsements appear to be contradicted by a more recent letter, dated June 23, from Hakim of the culture ministry, expressing the ministry's "absolute rejection" of the IMF's actions.