Palace of the End

Scarcely two hundred soldiers are cobbled together in a remote post between Baghdad and Fallujah after months of exhausting heat, squalor, and privation. They are isolated inside the Sunni Triangle near an insignificant town called Abu Ghraib. They are both protected and trapped by the walls of a prison that had once been a monolith of Saddam’s ruthless regime, a compound that had for decades been a factory of brutal torture and barbaric executions. But soon after Saddam’s overthrow, sadism revisited those haunted confines. We’ve all seen the pictures and heard and read the stories – a maelstrom of fact and fiction that was never fully clarified. But what really happened in that rancid eddy in the war in Iraq and how did it happen? The reality surrounding the scandal that shocked a nation and impugned the honor of its armed forces and the mission in Iraq is finally coming to light. Palace of the End: Inside Abu Ghraib, Confessions of an Interrogator, is a dramatic narrative of one soldier’s story about how he got there and what he and his colleagues endured. It is a first-hand account of one interrogator’s experience in Operation Iraqi Freedom that ended at Abu Ghraib prison during a time when the scandalous abuses were perpetrated.