More stories of Abu Ghraib

Witnesses speak of Abu Ghraib's torturers pulling out nails and teeth, and administering electric shocks. Victims were whipped and had their skin cut with razors. Women were brought naked in front of their husbands and sons and threatened with hanging to extract confessions.

Of course, this is the 'other' Abu Ghraib: the one not so much discussed round the dinner tables of Crouch End; and the images, these, not so widely put about by the liberal, and anti-liberation, media of the West; nor at the forefront of the minds of people for whom an instrument of evil is, not one with which you pull out a person's nails, but... American sentimentality. And there were other places than Abu Ghraib, if you can bear to read about them:

Um Talal's grim odyssey did not end at Abu Ghraib. Women, children and the elderly were moved to a huge prison in Bassiyah, stuck in the desert that stretches towards Iraq's border with Saudi Arabia.

"No one could come in or escape," she said, describing how she and her daughters spent 4 [and 1/2] years incarcerated. In an act of appalling cruelty, she said, the guards killed Raida, her pregnant daughter-in-law, by tying her legs together when she was in labour.

"She screamed in pain for hours," she said. "They left her in labour and would not untie her. Eventually she and the unborn baby died."

Afterwards Raida's son Muthana, who was six, was taken away to the men's section of the prison. He died there later.

Other survivors echoed Um Talal's terrible story. One was 10 when she, her parents and her elder brothers were arrested. She is the only survivor. "I used to cry with my mother each time they brought her back from interrogation and torture," she recalled.

Had the coalition of the righteous stopped the war they 'could not stop', this is what they would have been leaving in place. Just a reminder.