[1] A U.S. defense contractor, the Iraq Memory Foundation (IMF), discovered and took possession of millions of pages of documents in the basement of the Ba'ath Party headquarters in Baghdad.
[2] The IMF encountered obstacles to their plans to create a national memorial to Saddam's victims of human rights abuses, so in 2005 they turned over the documents temporarily to the U.S. military.
[4] In 2011, the CRRC publicly released a small batch records, including notes from a meeting called by Saddam Hussein in reaction to the revelation of the Iran–Contra affair in 1986 and strategy deliberations from the early days of the Iran–Iraq War.
[7] The Hoover Institution's archive included 11 million records and was used by researchers on the Ba'ath Party's governance, repression of dissent, use of religion in the state, and demographic policies.
The IMF argued in response that Iraqi national institutions would need to exercise extreme caution handling the documents, as many of them named victims of Saddam's abusive regime.