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Saddam Hussein had a secret torture room built in the basement of the Iraqi mission to the United Nations in New York’s Upper East Side, it has been reported. The Iraqi dictator ordered the installation of the “detention room” inside the five-story building at 14 East 79th Street when he rose to power in 1979, two unnamed Iraqi officials told the New York Post. “It was a dark room. The doors were reinforced in a way that nobody could break in or out. You didn’t need to soundproof it,” one official said. The other official added: “You’re not going to...

Bloody Handprint On Wall, Human Nails In Gravel >FALLUJAH, Iraq -- Down a steep staircase littered with glass shards and rubble, U.S. Marines descended Thursday to a dark basement believed to have been one of Fallujah's torture chambers. They found bloodstains and a single bloody hand print on the wall -- evidence of the horrors once carried out in this former insurgent stronghold. "We had sensed that there was a pure streak of evil in this town, ever since the first days of engagement here," said Maj. Wade Weems. The basement, discovered while Marines fought fierce battles with Fallujah insurgents...

FALLUJAH, Iraq -Down a steep staircase littered with glass shards and rubble, U.S. Marines descended Thursday to a dark basement believed to have been one of Fallujah's torture chambers. They found bloodstains and a single bloody hand print on the wall — evidence of the horrors once carried out in this former insurgent stronghold. "We had sensed that there was a pure streak of evil in this town, ever since the first days of engagement here," said Maj. Wade Weems. The basement, discovered while Marines fought fierce battles with Fallujah insurgents last month, is part of the Islamic Resistance Center,...

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Dhia al-Hariri returned to Iraq after decades in exile to reclaim his father's beloved home, only to find Saddam Hussein's regime had turned it into a house of horrors. What was once the backyard is now a dark maze of iron-doored cells. One bedroom has a hook in the ceiling from which interrogators hung prisoners, breaking their arms and giving them electric shocks. "This was my grandmother's bedroom," al-Hariri, 54, said Saturday, standing in a room barren except for the remains of iron bars embedded in the floor where lines of prisoners were chained. For years, neighbors...

The Associated Press BAGHDAD, Iraq Feb. 21 — Dhia al-Hariri returned to Iraq after decades in exile to reclaim his father's beloved home, only to find Saddam Hussein's regime had turned it into a house of horrors. What was once the backyard is now a dark maze of iron-doored cells. One bedroom has a hook in the ceiling from which interrogators hung prisoners, breaking their arms and giving them electric shocks. "This was my grandmother's bedroom," al-Hariri, 54, said Saturday, standing in a room barren except for the remains of iron bars embedded in the floor where lines of prisoners...

"Originally, Saddam was not a religious fanatic and he didn't like communism; the people of Iraq liked this. Later on I saw his torture chambers underground where people had been irradiated and injected with Ricin ... what I saw still haunts me to this day." These are just some of the comments of Dr. Gazi George, a former high-ranking Iraqi scientist who spoke at a conference for the Michigan Tactical Officers Association. His speech dealt with the time he worked for Saddam Hussein and his eventual escape with his family from Iraq. To a standing-room only audience of law-enforcement and...

<p>Coalition forces have discovered numerous torture chambers used by Saddam Hussein's secret police and political operatives to silence opponents, as well as mass graves where executed dissidents were buried.</p> <p>"The whole range of what we expected to find, unfortunately we've found," said a State Department official.</p>

<p>ABU AL KHASIB, Iraq (CNN) -- A torture chamber equipped with hooks hanging from ceilings and an on-site electrocution room has been found in the basement of an Iraqi police station, an embedded reporter with the BBC reports.</p> <p>The reporter said the British Royal Marines from Alpha Company 40 Commando entered the facility -- home to Saddam Hussein's dreaded internal security police -- looking for clues about local militia groups.</p>

Suspected Torture Chamber Found in Iraq By DOUG MELLGREN .c The Associated Press NASIRIYAH, Iraq (AP) - The five tiny, windowless cells were not just used for incarceration, the Marines soon discovered. A wooden stockade, a rudimentary electric chair and photos of burnt bodies testified to a more chilling purpose: The torture that apparently helped Saddam Hussein keep a chokehold on his people. ``It looks a bit too much like Nazi Germany to me,'' said Capt. Pete McAleer, commander of Echo Company of the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit, whose patrol found the compound in this impoverished southern city. At first,...

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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 (news - web sites)'s Military Intelligence Directorate in the northwestern suburb of Kadimiya. ''It is a chamber of death.'' The secrets...

<p>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.</p>

A huge mural just inside the gates of Abu Gharib Prison depicts a smiling Saddam Hussein and a row of black-hooded executioners. Bit redundant, that. The Iraqi president has been known to pull the trigger himself when in the mood for a spot of blood-letting or political avengement. But such was the frequency of formalized extermination under the Baath party regime that executioners were practically guaranteed tenure. Nowhere was the butchery more rife than Abu Gharib, a notorious penitentiary/gulag 40 kilometres west of the capital, and sprawling for miles behind thick stone walls along the main highway into town. It's...

Exposed: Secret and macabre world of jail where thousands were killed By Andrew Buncombe in Baghdad 14 April 2003 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...

The evidence is in the scars, stories and memories of the maimed. The proof is in the cattle prods, branding irons, meathooks and manacles made purely for pain, which was often a prelude to death.In cities and towns across Iraq, US-led military forces and local Iraqis are looking at the hard, cold, bloodstained evidence of what human rights organisations have been saying for years: Iraq had the world's most sadistic system of state-sponsored torture.In Basra, a putty-coloured compound once run by Iraq's internal security police has become, like other such torture chambers, an unholy shrine for people who survived a...

<p>NASIRIYAH, Iraq Sheik Lami Abbas Ajali looked around at the small cell where he spent several bleak weeks of his life and recounted the torture: How he was hit, prodded, had his eyelids pulled back, electric shocks applied to his temples and genitals, how he was handcuffed with tight manacles and then lifted into the air from behind.</p>

THEY called it the Black Hole, for it was the room from which no prisoner ever emerged alive. The walls and ceiling were coated with treacly black paint and there were no windows so it was impossible to tell night from day. The floor was several inches deep in charred remains and faeces, and there was the scuffling sound of something rat-sized in the dark. Whatever had happened in there was so unspeakable that, seven years after being freed from Basra’s most feared interrogation centre, Ismael Samoi could not bring himself to look inside. “They would go into your mind...

Iraq has been saved from a cruel dictator far worse than Saddam Hussein, says the former body double of Uday Hussein, Saddam's eldest son and heir. Latif Yahia had been a school classmate of the dictator's son and looked like a twin brother. He thought he'd been forgotten, but a few years later Yahia, an Iraqi officer serving in the Iran-Iraq war, was suddenly summoned home to Uday's palace in Baghdad. In strode Uday Saddam Hussein. "I want you to be me," the president's son declared, "Everywhere, always. You will be my fidai, my double. You will be the son...

Hello all, I am in need of finding articles and websites about storys and reports of Saddam Hussein's tortures of Iraqis and others. i am also searching for as much proof as possible on his links to WMDs. The reason is a school report due Tuesday that I am currently working on finishing. The teacher has got into constant arguments over the validity of the US going into Iraq and, well basically guys I'll sum it up that she's a liberal (case in point, her current reading material is Shrub). So far all she is arguing is we have not...

BAGHDAD (AFP) Apr 12, 2003 A secret tunnel leads underground from the main administration block to a prison where exposed electrical wires run from wall sockets to a bench in the interrogation room. The walls of cells which housed up to eight prisoners are scribbled with prayers and calendars indicating time spent inside, written in Arabic, Hebrew and even Chinese. Solitary confinement is standing room only and shared with toilet plumbing. The small bathrooms, remaining blankets, prison garb and plastic buckets are filthy. Plaster and paint is peeling off in large sheets and all around are posters, paintings and...