Witness: The New Iraq Is Grim, Hopeful and Still Scary:
"With no metal chaff or magnesium flares to fool missile guidance systems, the pilots on the 600-mile flight from Amman pray they will outwit attempts to shoot down the aircraft by keeping their spiral over populated areas of the city and a stretch of desert reaching northwest to the town of Abu Ghraib. Landing is a relief, still more so for a first encounter with the polite, American-trained Iraqi immigration officials who have replaced the thugs of Mr. Hussein's time who imposed compulsory AIDS tests and searched every bag for forbidden 'spying equipment' like satellite telephones."

Even the path of descent into the airport seemed a metaphor for a reporter who spent months before, during and after the American-led invasion in Baghdad, covering the last chapter of Mr. Hussein's rule and the first weeks of the American occupation.

Nothing was so grim in that compelling and often frightening passage as the events at the Abu Ghraib prison on Oct. 20, 2002. Mr. Hussein, seeking to counter President Bush's characterizations of him as a murdering tyrant, ordered 100,000 prisoners released from his prisons then, many of them from the vast, forbidding complex at Abu Ghraib.

The day turned into a parable of his terror, and, because of what some criminals released that day have done to support the violence now directed at the American occupation, a harbinger of much that followed. At the prison, emaciated men emerged into the sunlight after long years incarcerated, often for nothing more than whispering against Mr. Hussein; women in black cloaks fell to the ground in despair, appealing to Allah, when husbands, brothers and sons they hoped had survived proved to be gone forever.…

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/16/weekinreview/16BURN.html?pagewanted=all&position=