PEOPLE — INCLUDING SOME DEDICATED, SELF-ORGANIZED IRAQIS — ARE FINDING OUT MORE about what Jacques Chirac’s buddy Saddam was up to:

“My brother disappeared in 1981. My mother and father kept asking at State Security for his body and one day they disappeared, too. They told us don’t come here asking again.” Amin Hashem Amin raises both hands, displays eight fingers, thrusting them forward until he’s recognized. “Four first cousins and four good neighbors I lost,” he says. “We found the body of only one of them. Then they took our houses and our farm.” His face crumples, the other men look away politely, and Amin weeps. Some of these people are just looking; others, like Amin, have found their loved ones’ names on the lists. “I have 16 dead of my friends,” the next man to raise his hand says. “They gave us back two bodies, both without their eyes.”

And so it goes now at the offices of the Committee, hour after hour, day after day. Anyone who doubts the brutality of Saddam Hussein’s regime need only spend a little time here, at the epicenter of efforts to unravel what happened, account for the dead and missing, locate the bodies in the mass graves that are daily being discovered throughout the country.

The Committee’s view is that Saddam Hussein’s regime slaughtered 8 million people; in a country of 25 million that’s a pretty extreme estimate. “Hitler was a minor student in the school of Saddam, and not a very good student by comparison,” Idrisi said. “Just in my small family, my cousin was in prison, my father, brother, and five or six other cousins disappeared,” he said. Saleh agreed. “No family in Iraq is without its missing. My brother, too. Still I haven’t reached his grave, but I saw the file.”

Challenging such over-the-top figures provokes annoyance among the Committee members. “How can we have 8 million? I’ll show you.” Saleh produces an armful of fat file folders. “Look at this one. Look at the file number.” It’s stamped TOP SECRET, labeled Department of General Security, Branch 45, File No. 12584. Branch 45 specialized in the banned Shiite group Al Dawa. This is a case file concerning one Satter Jaber Meslain, an investigation that lasted from 1981-1983. As the result of his confession and other investigative leads that his interrogation produced, 55 persons are implicated; all are listed here as condemned to death on one page, and then, on a paper dated hours later, confirmed “hanged by a rope until dead.” On the front of the file folio is a strip of computer stickers, the kind used to track inventory, bearing the number 507989493; they seem to be file locators. “Look how big that number is. It was indescribable what they did. There are millions of files, millions.”

However many there are, it’s a lot. The guy who runs the copy shop that my wife uses is an Iraqi exile — something he didn’t talk about until after the war. He told my wife the other day that when he was still living in Iraq in 1991, the family next door in Baghdad was killed by Saddam’s thugs one night, and he decided to leave the country the next day. He was quite harsh to a UT professor who tried to show “support” by saying that he had opposed the war.