Pat Dollard | Young Americans

BAGHDAD - The notorious Abu Ghraib prison is getting a facelift: work to reopen the facility and construct a museum documenting Saddam Hussein’s crimes.

A large 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 has no plans to document the U.S. military abuse scandal that erupted in 2004. In all, 11 U.S. soldiers were convicted of breaking military laws and five others were disciplined.

Iraq’s deputy justice minister, Busho Ibrahim, told The Associated Press that the actions of a few American soldiers was “nothing” compared with the violence and atrocities of Saddam and his 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.

Abu Ghraib has long been a symbol of the horror and despair of the Hussein years.

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. Others have spoken of tiny isolation cells where political detainees were kept for up to a year without seeing a single person.

Several former prisoners later testified during Saddam’s trial about torture at Abu Ghraib. The deposed leader was convicted and hanged in 2006 for ordering the killings of more than 140 Shiite Muslims.

No one ever knew how many prisoners Abu Ghraib held during Saddam’s era. In the early 1990s, however, tens of thousands of people would gather outside the walls each week to visit inmates.

Shortly before the March 2003 U.S.-led invasion, Saddam released thousands of inmates from the facility, including murderers, rapists and thieves. Many of them were believed to have returned to crime or joined the insurgency after the regime collapsed.

The Iraqi government took final control of Abu Ghraib in September 2006 after the last of the inmates had been transferred to other prisons. In addition to adding the museum, the government plans to rehabilitate the prison’s main building, outer fence and two dozen prison towers.

(AP)