Iraqis pour out tales of Saddam's torture chambers
BAGHDAD — 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 longed feared speaking out about the alleged 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.
