Palace of the End

Scarcely two hundred soldiers are cobbled together in a remote post between Baghdad and Fallujah after months of exhausting heat, squalor, and privation. They are isolated inside the Sunni Triangle near an insignificant town called Abu Ghraib. They are both protected and trapped by the walls of a prison that had once been a monolith of Saddam’s ruthless regime, a compound that had for decades been a factory of brutal torture and barbaric executions. But soon after Saddam’s overthrow, sadism revisited those haunted confines.

Scarcely two hundred soldiers are cobbled together in a remote post between Baghdad and Fallujah after months of exhausting heat, squalor, and privation. They are isolated inside the Sunni Triangle near an insignificant town called Abu Ghraib. They are both protected and trapped by the walls of a prison that had once been a monolith of Saddam’s ruthless regime, a compound that had for decades been a factory of brutal torture and barbaric executions. But soon after Saddam’s overthrow, sadism revisited those haunted confines. We’ve all seen the pictures and heard and read the stories – a maelstrom of fact and fiction that was never fully clarified. But what really happened in that rancid eddy in the war in Iraq and how did it happen? The reality surrounding the scandal that shocked a nation and impugned the honor of its armed forces and the mission in Iraq is finally coming to light. Palace of the End: Inside Abu Ghraib, Confessions of an Interrogator, is a dramatic narrative of one soldier’s story about how he got there and what he and his colleagues endured. It is a first-hand account of one interrogator’s experience in Operation Iraqi Freedom that ended at Abu Ghraib prison during a time when the scandalous abuses were perpetrated.

Jeff Day mobilized from Army Reserves to serve in Operation Iraqi Freedom as an interrogator from February to December of 2003. He initially worked at Camp Cropper at the Baghdad International Airport until being transferred to Abu Ghraib on September 15. On September 20 he was one of several soldiers wounded in a mortar attack that killed two members of his team. He lived and worked in the prison, the site of countless atrocities during Saddam Hussein's reign, until November 20, through the period when the scandalous detainee abuses occurred. He has first-hand knowledge of the conditions and procedures that led to the abuses, including details that have never before been made public. Day interrogated approximately 250 detainees and also participated in Operation Longstreet along the Iranian border. He recorded the stories of the detainees as well his own and those with whom he served, returning home with a cache of primary information from the epicenter of the most explosive scandal in the Iraq war, including interrogation notes, a personal journal, and dozens of photographs collected during his tour of duty. Following the eruption of the Abu Ghraib scandal in May 2004, Day reached out to the news media in order to tell his story and try to set the record straight. He appeared on On The Record with Greta Van Susteren, on a nationally syndicated radio program, and on a local Portland, Oregon TV news show as well a front page article in The Oregonian newspaper in Portland, OR, which was picked up by the AP and ran nationally. Day has undergraduate degrees in journalism and political science and an advanced degree in international business management. He currently works for the U.S. State Department.