March 31 issue —  Saddam Hussein’s inner circle is a special kind of club. Only murderers need apply. “All the members were tested by Saddam in one way or another,” explains an Arab intelligence chief who’s dealt directly with several of the top thugs. “They would not last if they were not brutal enough to satisfy Saddam, and when you meet with them they brag about this. They don’t hide it. The more people they’ve killed, the more ‘credible’ they are.”

THE SLAUGHTER THEY carried out has been vast, like the genocidal killing of Kurds in 1988 that used both conventional means and chemical weapons. And it has been terribly intimate: murdering fellow members of the Baath Party, or even relatives. Yet the list of those formally considered “irredeemable,” as one Bush administration official put it, is remarkably short: not even a dirty dozen, but a “Dirty Nine,” including Saddam and his sons, Uday and Qusay.