By Anne Barnard and Marcella Bombardieri, Globe Staff, 5/4/2003

BAGHDAD -- Munir Mahmoud Hamid charged down the street, pounding his fists on the trunk of a car as it pulled away. ''You know what you did!'' he shouted. The man inside was Alaa Maki, Hamid's former boss and a close associate of Saddam Hussein's son, Uday.

Breathing hard and sputtering, Hamid, a television sound engineer, turned to a crowd of former colleagues from Uday Hussein's Youth TV channel who had gathered near their bombed-out offices. And then he told his story: In 1995, he edited a song recorded in Uday's honor by a Jordanian pop singer. Because Hamid took $10 rather than work for free, he said, Maki informed authorities that he ''did not respect Uday.''

Guards shaved Hamid's head and forced him to to sit at the office door as passing co-workers spat on him. Then, he said, he spent three months in prison, and Maki visited to ensure daily beatings.

As several colleagues nodded to confirm that they had been forced to spit, Hamid, 31, looked up with an air of relief.

''I kept it secret before,'' he declared. ''Now I feel that I am free to say it. And to get revenge on the people who were unjust to me.''

Hamid's experience is one tiny chapter among volumes of stories being told out loud for the first time across Iraq, less than a month after the fall of Saddam Hussein broke through the country's carapace of fear and silence -- or at least dented it.

Tales of torture and humiliation pour out, on the streets, in family rooms, in mosques, at the headquarters of political parties that have sprung up in buildings taken over from the former government. Sheaves of dusty files were dragged from security offices to the Tigris River villa of the Committee of Free Prisoners, newly founded by former inmates who until recently were afraid to be seen together.[...]