On The Scene: An Iraqi House Of Horrors

(CBS)  CBS' Dan Rather is in Baghdad, where he filed this report.

---

U.S. soldiers are searching what remains of one of the biggest and most elaborate prisons in the world, one of Saddam Hussein's most notorious prisons, 18 miles west of Baghdad.

Saddam Hussein never cut corners when it came to punishment.

Abu Ghraib Prison once held tens of thousands of human souls ... criminals, political enemies and those who just happened to get in the way.

A 12-year-old Iranian boy visiting his grandmother near Basra in 1985 was swept up in an Iraqi invasion. He was still here 15 years later.

A young Palestinian, caught in Saddam's invasion of Kuwait, intoned the Koran every night here for 10 years. One night he just vanished.

Every survivor has a story.

"Prisoners were taken to watch executions. Anyone who cried was executed too," said a former political prisoner who spent nine years at Abu Ghraib.

He recounts how he was tortured. "First the left hand and then the foot. Then a black hood on my head. Then they applied electricity."

The apparatus is still in the prison.

Last year, the gates were opened briefly, a final desperate attempt to encourage regime support. Thousands were released, in exchange for a pledge of loyalty to Saddam.

It was too late for those who took the long walk to the execution rooms, or those who slowly suffocated in agony, hanging from the hooks.

"Some killed just for pleasure," said another former inmate, Abdallah Ahmed. "They had a game. They made people drink gasoline, then put them out in open ground and fired guns at them."

U.S. soldiers are finding bodies everywhere.