HRW: "Prison cleansing" campaign at Abu Ghraib - numerous executions, many without due process

[Left Coast Lynn]

...Numerous executions of political prisoners as well as those convicted for criminal offences were apparently carried out as part of the government's "prison cleansing" campaign involving several prisons, including Abu Ghraib and Radhwaniyya. In March, the opposition Iraqi Communist Party's Center for Human Rights submitted to the U.N. special rapporteur on Iraq details on 223 executions that it said were carried out between October 12, 1999, and March 9, 2000. They included twenty-six political detainees executed on November 26, 1999, and a further twenty-six executed on January 27, all in Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad. The majority were Shi'a Muslims from Basra, al-Samawa, al-Nasiriyya, al-Diwaniyya, al-Hilla, al-'Amara and Baghdad, some of whom had been held without judicial due process since 1991 on suspicion of having participated in the March 1991 uprising. The bodies of the victims were reportedly buried in mass graves near the prison...

http://www.hrw.org/wr2k1/mideast/iraq.html

This gives some perspective as we close in on Saddam's execution.