24 January 2006
The huge dining room's domed roof still stands, as do the pillars decorated with ornate plaster, but everything else in the room is destroyed beyond recognition.
In the middle of the circular hall, where the great and the good of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party would have sat around a huge, luxurious table, are two deep trenches.
Look up, and the two overlapping holes slap bang in the middle of the dome show where the bunker busting bombs entered the palace from more than 12,200 metres (40,000 feet).
Everything else is rubble. Concrete reinforcing rods have been bent around a pillar by the force of the blast.
The walls are deeply charred and daylight streams in through crumbling walls, but underneath the dust, debris and twisted metal is what the American bombs were aiming at.
The whole palace is just an elaborate disguise for Saddam Hussein's nuclear shelter and underground command centre.
It's huge - 1,800 square metres - and was not even scratched by any of the seven bunker buster bombs, or 20 cruise missiles fired at it during the war.
The palace still stands - from the outside just like the many huge lavish buildings that are scattered across Iraq.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4642916.stmSo bunker busting bombs couldn't destroy Saddam's palace and bunker but a passenger jet penetrated three rings of the Pentagon, a building that was supposedly built to withstand a nuclear attack?