It was meant to be a straightforward job: check out one of Saddam Hussein's prisons and try to find relatives of some of the thousands of Iraqis who have gone missing during the dictator's brutal regime.

Instead we found something a bit more disturbing than that.
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Questioning the troops, it becomes clear that none of them have the slightest idea of the nature of the place they have come to.

To them it is just a set of co-ordinates on the map, another objective on their inexorable march across this battered and bruised country.

I patiently tell the commanding officer, Colonel Ford, about the reputation Abu Ghreib had - "Abu what?" - in the days when Saddam Hussein's secret police could just whisk Iraqi citizens off to oblivion at the slightest hint of troublemaking.

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We walk towards the enclosure, taking in the massive watchtowers, the mean looking wild dogs, and the recent-looking excavations at the foot of the five-metre (17-metre) high wall.

Then the smell hits us, brought on a light breeze blowing from the west across the prison.

"I think that's just the smell of the stagnant water over there, Sir," says one of the military police when I mention it.

I don't demur, never before having smelt three-week-old human bodies left to rot under a few shovelfuls of dry earth.

But then walking around a low bank of earth I can no longer suspend my disbelief.

There on the ground - the flesh eaten away around the mouth, eyes and throat - is an exposed human head and neck.

The rest of the body lies under a blanket of earth, newspaper and cloth, like a kind of grotesque bed.

One of the military police shouts to the commanding officer: "Colonel Ford, Sir, I think you'd better come and have a look at this".
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In the big picture of things, this unfortunate prisoner's fate hardly registers in the array of iniquities committed under Saddam Hussein's rule.

A few kilometres to the west lies the Karkh Islamic Cemetery which contains the graves of 994 Abu Ghreib prisoners, unidentified except for numbered metal markers, although some have no numbers and some graves not even a marker.
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"I don't know why the media keep coming here," the first employee says defensively.

"Most of them were just thieves and murderers who died or were executed at the prison. It's just normal, normal."

"Thieves and murderers?" snorts my driver as we leave the cemetery. "Every single one of those was a political prisoner. When a thief dies they give the body to the family."

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