I suspect we'll be reading a lot more stories like this one in the weeks to come from the Times Online about Saddam's brutality.

“I frequently thought we were going to die,” said Mr McAllester, 33, a London-born Scot raised in Edinburgh and now working for the New York Newsday newspaper.



Describing how Iraqi prisoners were in cells across a narrow corridor, Mr McAllester said that he had to turn his back to avoid watching other inmates being dragged away and tortured each night.

“We could hear screams, especially at night,” he said. Unshaven, rib-thin and wearing a crumpled Thomas Pink shirt, he slowly detailed the conditions inside Abu Ghraib, where Amnesty International claims 23 political prisoners, mainly Shia Muslims, have been put to death.

“They were being taken from their cells for a session, or meeting or whatever you want to call it and were being beaten in front of us, a yard or two away from where we were sleeping, with some kind of implement,” he said. “One night one guy was moaning for about an hour and it sounded like they brought a doctor for him.

“I have no idea who was doing it, whether it was the interrogators or the prison guards, but we saw a lot of people inside that prison who had been in there a lot longer than we were and who didn’t have the support network to get them out.”