This article from the Independent is just one of many that begins to detail how Saddam ruled the country.

Wednesday was the day for killing and Thursday was the day relatives paid to collect the bodies of the dead. How prisoners were executed depended on an order from above – a bullet to the back of the head for those deemed to deserve a degree of mercy and the rope for those destined to suffer.



On the morning of their deaths, prisoners were asked their permission to be killed: those who agreed first received a glass of water and a brief reading of verses from the Koran while those who said no went straight to the hangman's noose.

These were the workings of the notorious Abu Ghurayb prison, a sprawling complex of barred cells, razor wire and watch towers 20 miles west of Baghdad and, at various times during Saddam Hussein's rule, home for up to 75,000 prisoners. As the closed and secret world of the Iraqi regime continues to give up its secrets, there is perhaps nowhere more disturbing than Abu Ghurayb. "Millions of people were killed here," said a man in a red T-shirt who was walking around the prison yesterday morning with friends who seemed to know in disturbing detail the workings of the execution chamber.



Here's another article from USA Today:

Pictures of dead Iraqis, with their necks slashed, their eyes gouged out and their genitals blackened, fill a bookshelf. Jail cells, with dried blood on the floor and rusted shackles bolted to the walls, line the corridors. And the screams of what could be imprisoned men in an underground detention center echo through air shafts and sewer pipes.



''This is the place where Saddam made people disappear,'' said an Iraqi soldier named Iyad Hussein, 37, describing Iraq's Military Intelligence Directorate in the northwestern suburb of Kadimiya. ''It is a chamber of death.''

The secrets of Saddam Hussein's reign of terror are beginning to emerge. Iraqi civilians who had long feared speaking out about the atrocities for fear of government retribution are revealing in detail what the Iraqi dictator and his regime inflicted on some of the country's 26 million people.

They paint a picture of arrests, killings and torture that have led human rights groups to condemn the Iraqi leader in the strongest terms. The groups have charged that tens of thousands of Iraqis, from Kurds in the north to Shiites in the south, were tortured and killed after Saddam seized power in 1979.

Thousands were arrested on charges ranging from criticizing the Iraqi leader to cooperating with the United States.

Only a few walked out of the jails alive.