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Iraqi Prison To Get A Makeover

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The Associated Press

Published: September 6, 2008

BAGHDAD - The notorious Abu Ghraib prison is getting a face-lift: work to reopen the facility and construct a museum documenting Saddam Hussein's crimes - but not the abuses committed there by U.S. guards.

The sprawling complex, which has not held prisoners since 2006, will be refurbished with the goal of taking new inmates in about a year, the government said Thursday.

Also, a section of the 280-acre site just west of Baghdad will be converted into the museum featuring execution chamber exhibits and other displays of torture tools used by Saddam's regime - including an iron chain used to tie prisoners together.

But Iraq's predominantly Shiite government has no plans to document the U.S. military abuse scandal that erupted in 2004 with the publication of photographs that shocked the world: grinning U.S. soldiers mistreating Iraqi prisoners, some naked, being held on leashes or in painful and sexually humiliating positions.

Iraq's deputy justice minister, Busho Ibrahim, said the U.S. brutality was "nothing" compared with the violence and atrocities of Saddam and his Sunni-dominated Baath party.

"There is evidence of the crimes Saddam committed such as the hooks used to dangle prisoners, tools used to beat and torture prisoners and ... the execution chambers in which 50 or 100 people were killed at once," he said.

The gray, stonewalled prison was one of the darkest symbols of Saddam's regime - a place where people only suspected of plotting against him would disappear, be tortured and executed without trial.

Former inmates have told of chemical and biological weapons experiments on prisoners, and the execution of hundreds in the 1990s as part of a campaign by Saddam's son, Qusai, to ease crowding.

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