ASMEA Video: Watch "The Saddam Tapes 1978-2001: The Inner Workings of a Tyrant"
The Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa
The 4th Annual ASMEA Conference
Video of the "Saddam Tapes 1978-2001: Inner Workings of a Tyrant Roundtable"
The Conflict Records Research Center hosted a round table at the ASMEA Conference in November, 2011. Speakers Mr. Michael Eisenstadt, Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Mr. David Palkki, Conflict Records Research Center, Dr. Mark Stout, Johns Hopkins University, and Dr. Kevin Woods, Institute for Defense Analyses, discussed the latest product of their collective research. Dr. Shibley Telhami, University of Maryland joined the roundtable for comments on the work.
ASMEA presents the roundtable in its entirety - which can be viewed here.
The Conflict Records Research Center (CRRC) was established to fulfill the Secretary of Defense’s intent to enable research into captured records with “complete openness and rigid adherence to academic freedom and integrity.” The CRRC’s mission is to facilitate the use of captured records to support research, both within and outside the government.
Electronic copies reside in a restricted U.S. Government database. The CRRC’s primary purpose is to make copies of a significant portion of these records available to scholars in the CRRC’s researcher database. We seek to make these copies, along with full English translations, available as quickly and responsibly as possible, while taking into account legitimate national security concerns, the integrity of the academic process, and risks to innocent individuals. Established at the direction of the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense (Policy) (OUSD(P)), the center operates under the National Defense University’s Institute for National Strategic Studies (INSS).
The CRRC researcher database currently consists of two distinct collections: 1) Saddam Hussein’s Iraq; and 2) al Qaeda and Associated Movements (overwhelmingly from Afghanistan). It contains over 1,200 records, constituting over 34,000 pages, with new records added weekly. All records in the CRRC consist of a file information sheet containing basic background information, a digital copy or audio file of the original record in Arabic, and a full English translation. The CRRC researcher database includes software that can search the full breadth of the English-language information sheets and translations, though not the Arabic texts. Please note that the quality of the translations and Arabic transcriptions (in the case of the audio) varies, and that the Arabic audio files and digital documents are the official records, not the translations or transliterations.
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