Hussein Home Movies

Now that Saddam Hussein is in custody, and his two sons – Uday and Qusay – are dead, more Iraqis are daring to come forward and speak openly about the decades of rape, torture and terror under the Hussein family's regime.

There may be doubts that weapons of mass destruction will ever be found in Iraq, but 60 Minutes II found some Hussein home movies that leave little doubt of the family's violence and repression.

The movies also help explain why the two sons, unlike Saddam, refused to surrender last year, and fought to the death.

60 Minutes II decided to show the revealing home movies to a one-time Hussein family insider, a man named Abbas al Janabi.

When he saw them, he agreed to tell us stories he had never told before -- terrible stories that show why he feared Saddam's sons more than he feared Saddam himself. Correspondent Dan Rather reports.

Abbas al Janabi managed to avoid being killed by defecting to Great Britain. He had been a key player in Uday Hussein's inner circle for 15 years, serving as Uday's press secretary and editor of one of the newspapers he controlled.

Despite the capture of Saddam, and the deaths last summer of Uday and Qusay, Janabi is still terrified by the Hussein family – and Uday in particular.

"He is sadist, in fact. He enjoyed torturing people," says Janabi. "There is no question I have seen him torturing people, laughing, enjoying this many times."

Janabi says one of Uday's favorite tortures was falaqua. One video, which is very hard to watch, shows what falaqua is: a soldier being beaten on his feet. Uday was fond of using falaqua – with a baseball bat -- on his soccer players when his team lost a game.

"You cannot control him, he is kind of insane maniac. He is, you know, he is unstable, psychologically," says Janabi, who has been publicly critical of the Hussein regime's violence and corruption since he defected in 1995.

He has described how many Iraqis, including himself, were tortured. But when 60 Minutes II showed him the home movies of Uday, he agreed to talk to us in detail for the first time about his dark, personal side.

Janabi told us that Uday was never able to keep friends for long, because he enjoyed intimidating them -- even close friends he took with him to his private hunting grounds west of Baghdad. That's where some other home movies were taken.

Uday did not believe it was sanitary to have his dogs retrieve the birds he'd shot, so he would force friends like one man in the home movie we found - a man Janabi knows - to go fetch the bird in icy water. But when the friend started to complain, Uday, who was laughing, shot at him with his pistol until he complied.

Afterwards, Uday invited the man to pose for a family photo. But several years later, Janabi told 60 Minutes II, Uday cut this friend's tongue out when he said he'd had enough and wanted to leave Iraq.

One moment, Uday is out for a horseback ride, smiling and posing for the camera, looking very much like the crown prince, Saddam's elder son, the dictator's heir apparent.

But Uday's violence could explode at any moment, even when the camera was rolling, as it was during a party at one of Uday's private clubs. While the young women dance – or perform, it seems, for Uday – there is a crazed, glazed look in his eyes. And then, just as casually as if he were ordering a drink, Uday puts in his earplugs and fires away at the ceiling with his automatic weapon.

Uday seemed to love violence, Janabi said. And he was obsessed by sex. It was, Janabi says, an addiction: "He's a kind of sex addict. This is the word that describes exactly his attitude toward sex. He is sex addict."

Uday was always on the prowl for women, as was shown in another video that 60 Minutes II found in Baghdad. Janabi says he saw Uday abuse alcohol and drugs, and he says Uday drugged women who turned him down so he could rape them.

"When he became 30, he started to look to women who are 11, 12," says Janabi. "Believe me, believe me. I know what I'm talking about."

Some of the young girls, Janabi says, were daughters of cabinet ministers and government officials. Just as Saddam himself used to do, Janabi says, Uday raped them and videotaped his actions so he could terrorize and control their parents.

"He believed that he is a king and all the people are his slaves. That is how he treated people," says Janabi.

One of Uday's women teachers, Janabi told us, acted as his pimp, recruiting young girls for him. He added that Uday ordered seven of his guards to rape that teacher and kill her husband and son after she told a friend what she had been doing.

That kind of reprisal so terrified Iraqis that no one would turn Uday in -- until American military authorities put a huge bounty on his and his brother's head. The $30 million reward finally convinced an informant to show up at a 101st Airborne base in Mosul last summer.

"He was nervous, I could tell, more nervous than anybody else I've seen dealing with it. Yet he had confidence in what he said. More than most of the other people," says the 23-year-old American military intelligence sergeant who interviewed the informant.

He agreed to talk to 60 Minutes II about it for the first time if we agreed – for safety's sake – to alter his voice and not show his face. "He had exact locations. He also could tell very good descriptions on Qusay and Uday as well, their habits. He told me what exactly they looked like."

At the time, American officials believed that the two brothers were on the run in the desert, perhaps hiding in a tent like the one where they were photographed for their home movies. But the informant told the young American sergeant that the brothers had been holed up for three weeks in one place -- a house in the northeastern Falah section of Mosul.

The informant eventually agreed to take a lie detector test, and passed it. "Is it real? Is it possible? And I thought I'll just treat it just as it is," recalls the young sergeant. "But if it is real, then we've caught two big fish."

Catching them, however, wouldn't be like shooting fish in a barrel. Unlike their father, Uday and Qusay weren't the surrendering type. In the home movies, they're always flaunting guns, using them, and playing with them.

"He started to know how to shoot when he was 6 years old," says Janabi, who adds that Uday had hundreds of guns.

The brigade commander, Col. Joe Anderson, took 60 Minutes II there and told us that on the decisive day, an announcement was made at 10 a.m. in Arabic, urging the people inside to come out peacefully. What happened? "The answer to the bullhorn was bullets," says Anderson.

A team of veteran commandos tried to charge into the building, but they had to retreat under fire. Four soldiers were wounded. Anderson then ordered his men to open fire with 50-caliber heavy machine guns.

Unlike their father, Uday and Qusay refused to give up, even after a helicopter fired rockets at the house and Strike Brigade launched 40 mm grenades at them. That's when the colonel decided he needed the biggest and most deadly weapon he had to bring the brothers down.

Officially, it's called the Improved Target Acquisitioning System. It's nicknamed the TOW, and it's designed to take out tanks and blow up bunkers. It can penetrate 14 inches of steel armor. Sgt. Kory Illenye says he fired 12 TOWs into the building: "I just knew that we were taking fire and that we needed to open up areas so that we could return fire. So we started blowing holes in the wall so that 50 cal and small arms fire was more effective."

It may have been these TOWs that killed Uday and Qusay. A commando team found their bodies in an upstairs bathroom. In a bedroom, the commandos shot and killed Qusay's 14-year-old son Mustafa. His grandfather, Saddam, had always told him he should be ready to fight to the death for his country. It was advice, of course, that Saddam himself later ignored. For his part, Col. Anderson has no regrets that Uday and Qusay were not taken alive.

"Based on what they did to the people of this country, I think the support base they provided, from everything from drugs to havens to terrorists or whatever, you know in the end questioning them has no value," says Anderson. "I think we know so much about these guys. We know what they did. No value added in my opinion."

But Janabi disagrees. He wishes Uday and Qusay, like their father, could be put on trial for their crimes –- a trial that he says would have ended a living national and personal nightmare.

Why are so many Iraqis still fearful of Saddam's two sons?

"This is simply because of their history of harming Iraqi people. Their wickedness, their savage style of life," says Janabi. "I'm still seeing Uday in my dreams. And I see, in fact, nightmares. I'm still afraid of him. And but I am quite sure he is dead. Nevertheless, he come to me in my dreams."