Update: Freed Newsday journalist Matthew McAllester will be on CNN's Larry King Live tonight, 9pm EST. More news on the journalists here and here.

The freed Newsday journalists described their week in Abu Ghraib, an Iraqi prison today.

McAllester and Saman both described a nightmarish week in the prison, the largest in the Arab world. They said they were interrogated separately several times by up to 12 Iraqi intelligence officials at once who suspected they were American spies, despite their adamant denials.

"I was accused of being dishonest and my future depended on my becoming honest," McAllester said. The authorities wanted him to "come up with more information spontaneously without being asked."

The two said they were never mistreated or abused physically, although conditions in the prison were harsh. They often heard and felt bombs exploding in and around Baghdad. "At times it was extremely close," Saman said. "The cells would kind of rumble."

Inside the prison was an anti-aircraft battery that frequently was fired. The pair said they could barely sleep. Adding to the tension, they said, was that they often heard the screams of other prisoners being tortured and saw some with their eyes and faces bloodied and swollen. "There were beatings and torture going on outside our cells, in the corridor, literally," McAllester said. Other inmates hobbled around, apparently because the soles of their feet had been burned or otherwise injured.

The two journalists were given meager rations of bananas, boiled eggs, bread and chicken soup. They were issued two blankets each, along with prison uniforms and slippers. They stayed in small, separate cells, unable to talk to each other, in a block that housed suspected spies and U.S. sympathizers.

The pair also described how they were taken into custody.

McAllester and Saman said their odyssey began about 1:30 a.m. March 24. McAllester was about to file a story, and Saman was near the top of the Palestine Hotel taking photographs as U.S. airplanes bombed the capital. When Saman came back down to the room the two Newsday staffers were sharing, two Iraqi intelligence agents were sitting on one of the beds.

"Right away I figured there was something wrong," Saman said.

The two staffers were handcuffed and initially told they were being taken to Syria. Instead, they were taken to the prison, where the interrogations soon started. McAllester said that at one point the authorities wanted him to sign a statement in Arabic, which he refused to do. Instead, he wrote one out in English saying in part that "I was not sent here by the CIA or the Pentagon and I'm not from any mission."

Saman said he was questioned about his job, what he was doing in Iraq, what kind of photos he was taking and if he had any connection with the CIA or the Pentagon. One agent also asked him if he was Jewish. "The main guy was convinced I was Israeli," Saman said. "I had to tell him, 'No, I'm not.'"

Saman was born in Peru, grew up in Spain and moved to the United States when he was 18. One of his grandfathers is Palestinian, and some of Saman's relatives still living in the West Bank also appealed to the Palestinian Authority to intervene on his behalf, Abington and Newsday editors said.

After the initial interrogations, the authorities left the two journalists alone for a few days, they said. Meanwhile, Abington was making contact with Arafat.

Here's more, including the statement by a Palestinian lawmaker that Yasser Arafat helped win the release of the two Newsday journalists through his contacts in Iraq. Newsday provides this account of the many groups who joined forces to win the pair's release.

Assistance came together from sources as wide-ranging as the Palestinian Authority, Roman Catholic Church, Iraqi diplomats and the Red Cross to win the release of two Newsday journalists from a Baghdad prison, the newspaper said yesterday.

The newspaper itself expended huge efforts towards gaining their release. A great job by all.