Friedrich --

Fabulous reporting in this Newsweek piece about Saddam Hussein's sons, here. Evan Thomas, Christopher Dickey, Colin Soloway and others turn up scads of amazingly unappetizing details about this amazingly unappetizing family. Old-fashioned newsweekly-team journalism at its best.

Sample passage:

Saddam has always believed in the symbolic power of mutilation. “Under torture, the high and mighty are quite literally exposed as being made of the same stuff as everyone else,” writes Kanan Makiya in his study of Saddam’s Iraq, “Republic of Fear.” As Iraqi ruler, Saddam delivered the broken bodies of his victims to their families. He was aiming at the creation of “a new man” in Iraq, just as Hitler and Stalin had tried to do in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. He may well have made his sons into psychopaths.

Best,

Michael