The Savage Sunset of Saddam Hussein

...They accused me of being a spy and demanded that I make a full confession," Salih recalled...

...By this stage in his long career Saddam had developed a siege mentality...

...Salih and his companions genuinely believed that they were all going to be executed because of their association with the disgraced men...

...He saw that the walls of his cell were spattered with blood, and on them he found a number of inscriptions which read, "My name is so-and-so and I am to be executed on suchand-such a day...

...But they were very expert in their trade...

...His cousin and defense minister, Ali Hassan al-Majid, was the campaign's chief cheerleader...

...A soldier, using a loudspeaker, called to those inside the house, "You must surrender, you are surrounded...

...By the mid-1990s Uday's activities, in particular, were a cause of much friction...

...The cells were located in the basement and included sensory-deprivation cells, which were sealed, painted red, lit with red light bulbs, and contained a tiny slot for the passage of food...

...You must get hold of them and cleanse this stain...

...Sensing an opportunity to avenge himself, Saddam established contact with his sons-in-law through his security agents...

...Uday's utter disregard for the state's institutions created friction with Watban, his uncle and Saddam's half brother, who controlled the Interior Ministry...

...On rare occasions guests were subjected to an intrusive medical examination to check that they had not concealed any poison or explosives in intimate areas of their bodies...

...A few days later Uday, in a drunken rage, attacked his unde, shooting him in the leg and killing three of his companions, while they were attending a private party in Baghdad...

...Although the Kamel brothers put up a brave fight, they eventually ran out of ammunition and were killed, together with their father, their sister, and her son...

...Some of those held were simply ransomed by Uday—in 1995 the going rate was said to be $100,000...

...No attempt was made to arrest the Kamel brothers, but Uday took his sisters Raghda and Rana and their children into his motorcade...

...While Saddam was a nuisance, he was regarded in Washington as a containable nuisance, and any concerted effort to remove him might upset the delicate balance of the Arab-Israeli negotiations...

...The rest was spent on the increasingly opulent lifestyle of Saddam's immediate family and other leading members of the regime...

...Salih was left in the cell for a week and fed a diet of bread and water...

...Uday was the most profligate and corrupt, closely followed by his brother-in-law, the preening Hussein Kamel...

...He was jailed and tortured...

...In 1996 a young waitress at the Presidential Palace had agreed to serve him poisoned food...

...UNSCOM was readmitted to Iraq and Ekeus resumed the inspections, this time equipped with incontrovertible evidence of Iraq's nonconventional weapons infrastructure, including new data on biological weapons, such as anthrax, botulism, and VX nerve gas, and new information on Iraq's attempts to acquire nuclear weapons...

...They were distinguished from the other guards by their olive green uniforms, a white lanyard, and special-issue guns...

...Uday arranged for the paperwork to disappear and had the man arrested...

...One of the guards entered the bus and told everyone to stay quiet, on pain of death...

...Even these elaborate precautions could not prevent the occasional security lapse...

...The Iraqi public saw the executions as nothing more than a cynical attempt by Saddam to deflect the general discontent with the high living of his elite...

...Most of the time he worked in a small building in a sealed corner of the presidential complex, and very few officials ever ventured into his inner sanctum...

...I saw them stored under swimming pools and on farms...

...On the eve of the planned attack, Lake sent a message to the CIA team based at Salandin ordering them to tell the INC that "the United States would not support this operation militarily or in any other way...

...frequent offenders were to havetheir left leg cut off from the knee...

...Saddam spent most of his time at Baghdad's Presidential Palace, which by the 1990s had become a massive, sprawling complex of about one thousand acres...

...The INC went ahead with the attack and, even without American support, achieved a degree of success, capturing several hundred Iraqi prisoners...

...A final postscript was added to this unhappy saga in February 2000 when the mother of Hussein Kamel and Saddam Kamel—the only surviving member of the family—was stabbed to death and her body cut into pieces in her home in Baghdad...

...The phrase used by Anthony Lake, Clinton's national security adviser, to officials working on Iraq was, "Don't give us sweaty palms"—i.e., do not provoke any crises...

...He was reported to be suffering from heart trouble and the resulting dizzy spells caused by a lack of blood reaching the brain...

...Salih, who had been recruited for his job by Saddam's son-in-law, Hussein Kamel, was not unique...

...The bodies were then loaded onto a garbage truck and driven away...

...Even though he dyed his hair and suffered back problems, Saddam was still presented to the Iraqi people as a heroic, virile leader...

...No one took any liberties with them...

...Salih was blindfolded and driven to the Presidential Palace compound...

...His [Saddam Kamen] family has unanimously decided to permit with impunity the spilling of blood...

...This small family within Iraq denounces this cowardly act," said the statement, which was read live on Iraqi television...

...Saddam's security forces raided the headquarters of the Olympic Committee and freed all those being held in Uday's private jail...

...Salih could see the distinctive markings of Uday's silver Mercedes in a side street...

...Sami Salih and others who visited the palace regularly said there was always an air of tension: no one—not even most of the OSS guards—knew whether or not Sad-dam was present...

...Clinton was certainly less obsessed with Saddam than Bush had been...

...Another key figure in the sanctions-busting operation was Saddam's estranged half brother Barzan...

...The lion's share of the income Saddam received from these various illicit activities was spent on arms...

...Matters came to a head in true Tikriti fashion in the spring of 1995 when Uday forced Watban's resignation by running a series of disparaging articles about him in his newspaper, Babel...

...Some of the merchants were tied to poles in public with signs declaring: "We are bloodsuckers...

...All around him he saw other prisoners being tortured by teams of Saddam's tormentors...

...But without U.S...

...Later that evening Saddam summoned relatives and associates of the disgraced men to the Presidential Palace...

...The most essential aspect of the sanctions-busting operation was that it enabled Saddam to continue to defy the demands of the UN weapons inspectors...

...Before meeting any member of his government, Sad-dam would insist that they first wash their hands, a precaution against poison on their fingers that could rub off in a handshake...

...they would have murdered my wife, my children, my friends, my relatives—anyone remotely associated with me...

...He provided a detailed account of Iraq's weapons program, including hitherto hidden chemical weapons plants and front companies helping with Iraq's weapons procurement and Saddam's VX nerve agent program...

...Overall control of the complex was in the hands of the Republican Palace Guard, while the safety of Saddam and his family was entrusted to the Organization of Special Security, headed by Qusay...

...It suited Saddam to have the population weak and fearful...

...Most were recruited from Saddam's tribe in Tikrit, and to guarantee their loyalty they were afforded better privileges than most Iraqi cabinet ministers...

...Within two years of the commencement of one of the most all-encompassing sanctions ever imposed by the UN, Saddam's security forces had set up a complex network of companies, middlemen, and smugglers that enabled him to sell large quantities of oil on the black market and use the proceeds to finance the regime...

...Hussein Kamel was fully debriefed by both the CIA and Britain's MI6, and then by the UN's Rolf Ekeus...

...Secret arms deals were negotiated with such disparate countries as China, North Korea, Russia, several former East bloc satellites, and Serbia...

...Occasionally American and British warplanes would react to the provocation by bombing antiaircraft missile batteries in Iraq...

...He was taken to a place called the "property room," where he was stripped, given an old pair of blood-soaked pajamas, and thrown into a cell...

...They were then taken to the Interior Ministry—which was controlled by Saddam's half brother Sabawi—and hanged...

...Saddam's security forces would do everything in their power to impede the work of the inspectors, make false claims about the true extent of the Iraqi weapons programs, and devise new schemes for concealing the more sensitive material...

...Saddam won the plebiscite with 99.96 percent of the vote...

...Access to Saddam was strictly controlled by Abdul Hamoud, his private secretary, who occupied a separate building in front of his private quarters...

...The favored smuggling routes were through Kurdistan and...

...At the same time three high-ranking army officers were executed on Saddam's orders for questioning Uday's military capabilities...

...In September 1994 the CIA established its base at a heavily fortified villa at Salandin while the Iraqi National Congress created a ministate, complete with its own television station and newspaper...

...Oh glory of God...

...His most startling revelation was that Saddam had been within three months of testing an atomic bomb at the start of Operation Desert Storm in January 1991...

...Even the medical supplies shipped in by the UN ended up being sold on the black market in Jordan, the profits being channeled back to the Presidential Palace in Baghdad...

...At the same time, the Clinton administration was increasingly involved in efforts to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict, which after the signing of the Oslo Accords was enjoying one of its most constructive phases in years...

...He then arranged to have the deposit transferred to his own account and the businessman brought in for interrogation at the Olympic Committee...

...The per capita caloric intake was half what it was before the war...

...Westem intelligence officers were prepared to debrief him and his brother, but had no desire to perpetuate the relationship...

...Even so, Clinton was eager to avoid face-to-face confrontations with Saddam, and his advisers wanted to keep Saddam off the front pages...

...The UN could do nothing to stop us," he said...

...Saddam had her taken outside the dining hall and shot...

...The main road access was across a bridge, which had been rebuilt after being bombed in the Gulf War...

...They would present the Iraqis with incontrovertible evidence and force them to hand over the offending material...

...By God we have always found you in the most difficult conditions as a roaring lion and courageous horseman, one of the few true men...

...In their view he was arrogant and vainglorious, too closely associated with Saddam's regime to be considered as a viable alternative...

...He announced a referendum in which eight million Iraqis would vote on the question: "Do you agree that Saddam Hussein should be president of Iraq...

...Eventually, when he had calmed down, he called in Uday, whom he believed bore primary responsibility for the defections, and stripped him of all his positions...

...In the summer of 1995 yet another plot was uncovered, this one organized by Mohammed Madhloum, an air force commander who tried to launch an uprising against Saddam...

...Sami Salih, who spent five years based at the Presidential Palace running the sanctions-busting operations, said that Saddam never had any intention of complying...

...In another a victim was being tortured with electric shocks to his genitals...

...Their overtures for sanctuary in the West met resounding silence...

...Hussein Kamel and his younger brother, Saddam Kamel, believing that they were next on Uday's list, fled into exile in Jordan, taking their wives, Saddam's daughters Raghda and Rana...

...When they crossed the border at Trebeil, the two families were met by Uday and his guards...

...Another huge money market was cigarette smuggling, which he managed through a number of routes through Europe and Cyprus...

...His private fortune was estimated at hundreds of millions of dollars, much of it secreted at locations throughout Iraq...

...There were missiles hidden all over Iraq...

...Saddam would not be in any of them, but would most likely have left by another exit, or through one of the secret underground tunnels that were connected to the presidential bunker...

...Visitors invited to Saddam's guesthouses were first driven around Baghdad for hours, in cars with blackened windows...

...When the fighting was over, Majid went over to the body of Hussein Kamel, put his foot on the neck, and fired one last shot into the head...

...I thought I was going to die then and there...

...You are not in danger:' The occupants of the house responded by firing at the car, which sped away...

...Initially the Clinton administration left the Bush approach essentially unchanged, and Clinton renewed Bush's "finding" authorizing Saddam's overthrow...

...Their homes were filled mafiosi-style with valuable Persian rugs, gold fittings, and fixtures, much of which had been looted from Kuwait...

...Saddam was so enraged by the defections that for a time he was not able to eat and refused to talk to any of his close associates...

...Guards said they were taking him to the "operations room...

...For example, he was personally involved in the resale on the black market of the humanitarian aid Iraq received from the UN...

...He personally phoned them at their Amman hideout, offering a presidential pardon if they returned...

...Sami Salih, who was still head of Iraq's oil-smuggling operation, was one of those present...

...The widowed Raghda and Rana vowed never to speak to their father again and went with their children to live with Saddam's estranged wife Sajida...

...Saddam had the ability to cause the Allies immense irritation, and the various schemes to remove him met with little success...

...The silence was eventually broken when a bulletproof Mercedes pulled up in front of the villa...

...Uday harbored a sadistic streak from which not even his closest colleagues and advisers were immune...

...Get rid of them:' Saddam then staggered out of the room and the "guests" were taken into the presidential compound, where they boarded three Toyota buses...

...Majid said in an official broadcast...

...Without any hint of irony, in the summer of 1992 Saddam ordered the execution of forty-two of Baghdad's leading merchants, who were accused of profiteering...

...The most basic security functions were performed by trusted members ofthe Republican Guard—more sophisticated measures, such as electronic surveillance, by the Special Republican Guard...

...For once Saddam Kamel protested against the decision of his overbearing brother, saying, "You donkey...

...Others were imprisoned to force them to participate in a fraudulent scheme that Uday had devised...

...They told me, 'Saddam Hussein has personally ordered your detention and interrogation...

...Every six months they received a new car, usually a Mercedes...

...The Palestinians in particular were sympathetic to Iraq and would use any attack on Saddam as an opportunity to accuse the United States of anti-Arab bias...

...The ensuing battle went on for thirteen hours...

...During the fifteen years he worked for Uday, Janabi was jailed on eleven separate occasions, including one spell in Uday's office at the headquarters of the Iraqi Olympic Committee...

...They were mainly businessmen or the children of wealthy families who Uday thought were ripe for exploitation...

...The proceedings were filmed by a presidential cameraman, while Uday and Qusay watched from the safety of their bulletproof Mercedes...

...overcome by fear, she confessed...

...As one former official at the Presidential Palace commented: "They fear only God, and their God is Saddam Hussein...

...The OSS guards were the elite...

...He was led in blindfolded, and immediately heard the screams of other people being tortured...

...The INC and Samurrai were confident of success, although Washington was concerned that, if it supported the revolt, it could find itself embroiled in a messy war in Iraq...

...By late 1994 most of the intelligence activity was based in the Kurdish safe haven in northern Iraq...

...Most of them earned twice the wage of an Iraqi cabinet minister and, when off duty, they were generally allowed to do as they pleased...

...Then he wrapped it in a Kleenex and took it to Uday to show he had done the job...

...It also made trouble with Hussein Kamel, Sad-dam's son-in-law, who saw his own position as a potential successor being eroded both by Uday's acquisition of wealth and power, and to a lesser extent by Qusay's emergence as a more sober influence on the government...

...Like so many Iraqis who had contact with the West, Salih eventually was accused of spying and arrested...

...UNICEF claimed that in 1993 between eighty thousand and one hundred thousand children died because of the sanctions...

...He personally controlled a fleet of barges based at the southern Iraqi port of Basra and paid an Iranian partner to protect the oil as it passed through Iranian waters...

...In the mid-1990s Uday expanded Iraq's oil-smuggling operations by forming an unlikely trading agreement with the Iranians...

...While the Iraqi people were starving, destitute, and afflicted by outbreaks of typhoid and cholera that followed the 1991 Gulf War, Saddam's ruling clique grew rich on the profits of oil smuggling, enforced by a reign of terror...

...The constant threat of plots, coups, and invasions did little to ease Saddam's peace of mind...

...The pattern up to 1995 replicated that established when they started work four years earlier...

...For many years Uday's prison complex at the Olympic Committee was kept secret from his father...

...Saddam's guests had their photographs and fingerprints taken, and the OSS had the right to strip-search cabinet members prior to any meeting with Sad-dam...

...When Saddam left the Presidential Palace, a number of decoy motorcades—never fewer than five—would sweep over the main bridge and into Baghdad...

...Aid from Spain, donated to the Ministry of Health, met a similar fate...

...The only area in which Saddam's elaborate security arrangements lacked effectiveness was in controlling the activities of his family...

...Uday had no qualms about how he acquired his money...

...Watban, who feared for his life, claimed the shooting had been an accident, even though hisinjuries required him to have his leg amputated...

...Ekeus struggled on with the mission despite Saddam's constant brinkmanship, one day threatening to reinvade Kuwait, the next threatening a new atrocity against the Kurds...

...The defection of Saddam's two sons-in-law in August 1995 was potentially the most damaging blow he had suffered since seizing power in 1979...

...In one case an Iraqi businessman had arranged to import a shipment of steel for a construction project and had deposited his payment with a bank in Baghdad...

...He had always taken his security to ludicrous extremes, but by the mid-1990s the sixty-something tyrant—his precise date of birth has never been established—had become almost dysfunctional in his obsession...

...Saddam moved quickly to demonstrate that he was still the strongman of Baghdad...

...We hope you enjoyed the show," the commander said...

...Even Tariq Aziz, one of Saddam's most trusted lieutenants, was not immune from such degradation...

...Just when I was losing consciousness they stopped and let me down...

...They lived with their families in comfortable villas inside the presidential compound, with their own sports and health club, hospital, and schools for their children...

...On one occasion he changed the labels on a consignment of Japanese milk, which had been donated to help Iraq's undernourished children, and sold it, keeping the profits for himself...

...Whichever office Saddam used to receive his visitors was equipped with cameras and recorders...

...I was more than willing to comply, but I had no idea what I was supposed to confess to...

...on one side the Tigris provided a natural boundary, while the rest was protected by an electrified perimeter fence, with guard towers every fifty yards...

...Finally one of the special forces commanders walked over to the buses, where the terrified occupants had been trapped throughout the day's events...

...The gates and the fortress itself were guarded by a confusing number of different security forces, who were there as much to keep a watchful eye on one another as to protect Saddam and his entourage...

...Then they were shot...

...He was waving his gun around and screaming abuse:' Saddam said that the brothers had shamed everyone in Iraq, particularly their family...

...Uday and Hussein Kamel were also heavily involved in an international smuggling operation, which was linked both to the Russian mafia and Latin American drug-smuggling rings...

...support the offensive petered out, leaving the Iraqi exiles deeply disillusioned about the sincerity of Washington's commitment to overthrowing Saddam...

...While the regime flourished, the people suffered...

...You want us to go back to our deaths...

...Each of them was tortured by having his fingers cut off, one by one...

...After about half an hour they came to a halt...

...On one occasion in 1991 Uday's private secretary Janabi inadvertently upset him by writing an article about the state of the Iraqi army...

...He was given a stark choice: either make another payment for the steel, or die...

...At the Habur checkpoint on the Iraqi-Turkish border, Iraqi trucks with specially adapted tanks capable of carrying substantial quantities of oil became a common feature of everyday traffic...

...By 1992 it was estimated that fifty thousand barrels of Iraqi oil were moving through this crossing point daily...

...sometimes they appeared at different events simultaneously, causing difficulties for the state-owned media's daily reports on Saddam's itinerary...

...Hussein Kamel, as head of Iraq's weapons procurement program, was particularly well equipped to provide Western intelligence with a treasure trove of detail about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction...

...By 1993 it was estimated that Barzan, taking full advantage of the closed world of Swiss banking, controlled a complex web of undercover investments worth $20 billion...

...By now Saddam had established one of the most extensive security structures in modern history...

...Once past the main checkpoints, visitors were sent to one of several gates that were specially designated for different groups: the military, politicians, businessmen, or personal friends and acquaintances of Sad-dam's family...

...The Iraqi Olympic Committee's downtown headquarters had sufficient capacity to hold up to 520 detainees...

...However much they wanted to see the back of Saddam, they did not want him to be replaced by one his clones...

...the buses had been parked a short distance from Hussein Kamel's family villa...

...In one corner he saw a naked man being lowered slowly into a vat of boiling water...

...Since April 1991, when President Bush signed his "finding" authorizing Saddam's overthrow, American policy had been based on a twin-track approach: to contain Saddam through a combination of sanctions and no-fly zones, while Western intelligence agencies worked within Iraq to bring him down...

...The CIA and Britain's MI6 were nevertheless still fully committed in their attempts to organize a coup...

...The house was surrounded by Iraqi Special Forces, heavily armed...

...Had I declined they would not just have killed me...

...Her accomplices were tortured and executed...

...In Baghdad alone there were at least five other palaces that accommodated his retinue, and he would move from one to the other to escape detection...

...He recalled that Saddam was "drunk, red-eyed, and wild...

...Ordinary Iraqis were not allowed near the compound and risked a jail sentence if they approached without permission...

...Because of his expertise in running export-import companies, he was summoned to the Presidential Palace after the Gulf War for a meeting with Saddam and was asked to set up an international sanctions-busting network...

...The meetings took the form of a royal audience, and guests were supposed to talk only after he had spoken, and then to keep their answers concise...

...Uday's garage was filled with Ferraris and other expensive models...

...It would have been impossible for me to refuse," he said...

...By the end of the year Hussein Kamel, Saddam Kamel, Saddam's daughters, and their retinue were confined to one of King Hussein's guesthouses in Amman...

...The attempt failed and Madhloum and his accomplices were captured...

...An expert himself in poisoning opponents, Saddam not surprisingly took great care to ensure that he did not become a victim...

...By 1995 there was still no clean drinking water, and the electricity system could only provide three to four hours of power a day...

...Kroll Associates, the New York-based firm of financial investigators, reckonedthat Saddam had personally siphoned off about $200 billion from Iraq's oil sales since 1981, and that he was able to exploit the secretive network of companies set up prior to the Kuwait crisis to circumvent the UN sanctions...

...In 1994 Saddam's response to the growing desperation of ordinary Iraqis to feed themselves and their families was to order that thieves should have their right hands cut off...

...Despite all the provocations, the inspectors under the cool leadership of Rolf Ekeus continued with their painstaking task...

...But the regime would do nothing to help...

...Majid performed another important service for Saddam by issuing a public denouncement of his cousins for defecting to Jordan...

...The INC had devised a plan to attack Mosul and Kirkuk, the two major cities in northern Iraq, which, if successful, would seriously weaken Saddam...

...Despite the lucrative smuggling trade, however, little of the profits went to improving the lot of ordinary Iraqis...

...Unlike most of the other victims, Salih, using his smuggling contacts, escaped to the West...

...Salih, who had workedwith Hussein Kamel for many years, recognized the location...

...Hussein Kamel responded by pulling out his pistol and replying, "You will come back...

...From the comfort of a fortress-like villa overlooking Lake Geneva, he combined his duties as Iraq's representative to the UN mission with working as Saddam's private financier...

...He had turned the Olympic Committee into his personal fiefdom, and by controlling much of the country's media output, he had unlimited access to one of the regime's key components, the propaganda machine...

...Sad-dam personally tore off their badges of rank from their uniforms—Hussein Kamel was a lieutenant general, while his brother was a lieutenant colonel...

...Turkey, and through Jordan, where King Hussein turned a blind eye to Iraq's illegal oil shipments through the Jordanian port of Aqaba...

...No one betrays the Iraqi people and lives:' The buses were driven back to Baghdad while Saddam's cameraman returned to the Presidential Palace to deliver his videotape...

...The INC was greatly assisted in its planning by General Wafic al-Samurrai, Saddam's former head of military intelligence, who had defected in December 1994 after learning from his colleagues at the Presidential Palace that Saddam planned to kill him...

...Having accepted the assignment, Salih set up a number of front companies through which Iraq sold its oil and bought arms...

...As Salih lay on the ground recovering from his ordeal, he was able to look beneath his blindfold...

...The special forces, commanded by Ali Hassan al-Majid, the disgraced brothers' cousin, opened fire...

...The oil was then sold to Turkish middlemen for foreign currency, which was-then passed back to Saddam's coffers at the Presidential Palace...

...Oh lofty mountain...

...The guards tied his feet together, hung him upside down, and whipped his body with lengths of cable and wire, until he was covered in blood...

...Many of those held in Uday's cells had broken no law...

...According to Abbas Janabi, who worked as Uday's private secretary for fifteen years before defecting to the West, by the mid-1990s Uday had become undoubtedly the wealthiest man in Iraq...

...On their arrival in Baghdad, the two men were summoned to the Presidential Palace and forced to sign papers sanctioning their immediate divorce from their wives...

...Prisoners would be held for up to three months in these conditions...

...Indeed, much of the funds donated by the UN to assist Iraqi civilians went directly to Saddam and his ruling circle...

...Although he rarely appeared in public, by the mid-1990s he had some eight "doubles" who could impersonate him at public functions...

...and armed robbery would carry the death penalty...

...He was then given ten blank pieces of paper on which to write his "confession...

...If Hussein Kamel had expected a hero's welcome in the West for his defection, he was sorely disappointed...

...By the mid-1990s it was estimated that Saddam had regained 80 percent of the military hardware destroyed during the Gulf War...

...Apart from the embarrassment their revelations on the arms program had caused, Saddam's honor as the family patriarch had been compromised by, as it appeared to Arab eyes, the abduction of his two daughters...

...Yet another was strapped to a table in the center of the room, where the guards were extracting his toe- and fingernails...

...Uday sent one of his bodyguards to the prison, and he used a pair of pliers to pull out one of my teeth...

...Instead they were driven through the suburbs of predawn Baghdad...

...He then sent them to stay at their father's villa at Assadiyah, on the outskirts of Baghdad, to await their fate...

...He told them, "You must remove this shame...

...For the first time two members of the Tikriti ruling circle had escaped Saddam's authority and were threatening to betray the regime's innermost secrets...

...Limited medical aid was provided, but only to favored party members...

...Salih, the imprisoned oil-smuggling chief, had previously worked on secretive weapons procurement projects at Iraq's Military Industrialization Organization...

...At one point he managed to look beneath his blindfold...

...Although Saddam had his sleeping quarters within the palace compound, he rarely slept there...

...They were so powerful that even ministers called them 'sir' when they entered the Presidential Palace...

...In the interests of security no indignity was spared...

...Disillusioned by their reception in Jordan—and arrogantly believing that they had taught Saddam a lesson—in February 1996 Hussein Kamel and Saddam Kamel agreed to return home with their families...

...On another occasion Janabi saw Uday torture a man who had looked after his business interests in Jordan, beating him with a baseball bat on the soles of his feet, then suspending him from a revolving ceiling fan and flogging him with a cable...