Blinded by the sunlight

Here was a prison where healthy men would beg hospital patients to spit into their mouths so that they could contract a disease and get a comfortable bed in the hospital ward. Inside these walls was a system of spying, paranoia, and punitive violence that was a distillation of the society that lay beyond the walls. For eight terrifying days in March 2003, while Baghdad was ablaze with bombs, Pulitzer Prize-winning Newsday journalist Matt McAllester and four other Westerners were imprisoned in Abu Ghraib, now infamous as the site of prisoner abuse by American soldiers, but then known only as the most horrific prison in the Middle East. There, he ceased being a reporter and became an innocent victim, along with thousands of others whose lives had come to a violent halt when Saddam's secret police came knocking. Illustrated with the powerful photographs of his Newsday coworker and prison mate Moises Saman, McAllester weaves together his own account of incarceration and the larger story of how the Iraqi people suffered more than two decades of totalitarian oppression.