Part Two: The Worst Team Owner in FIFA History: Uday Hussein

welcome back to behind the bastards a podcast where the president has just found out about that republican member of congress or the member of his administration not congress who's been talking about teleporting places what's that guy's name i spaced on him i just read trump's reaction where he was like i don't know what he's talking about teleporting what i gotta get to the bottom of that i haven't heard it i haven't heard about that that's that's kind of crazy it was a very like normal it was one of those every now and then you get those moments where trump has the same reaction to something as like a normal person and it's just like unaccountably funny because he's clearly just hearing about he's like he's saying what that guy's job he works at like dhs now or something yeah something important kind of important job but he'll teleport to a waffle house if he needs to it's really it's really funny just seeing him react to it it's just clearly like he's who what what what my subordinates was claiming to have teleported to a waffle house you don't know what i get up to in my spare time i don't i don't but i do know what things you claim to do i i at least pay that much attention um that's a big thing to miss like but hey he's got a lot of work to do what he's gonna get to the bottom reflecting pond and the war and such you know molly are you ready to talk about uday hussein some more molly conger host of weird little guys weird little guys weird little guys weird little guys i'm excited excellent all right let me drink more of my horrible health drink yeah drinking strange colored beverage robert's drinking pond water yeah it's from the reflecting pool orange wait your drink is also funny colored no this is plain water in my favorite cup which is a blue jar oh that is weird that's upsetting i don't believe it should be blue it's beautiful i don't like that yeah if god wanted jars to be blue that color would occur in nature this is an iheart podcast 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win and redeem instantly straight to your bank account at legends with a z.com with free to play slots blackjack keno roulette and more experience all the thrills of vegas without leaving your couch legends has it all legends is a free-to-play social casino void prohibited must be 18 plus play responsibly visit legends.com for full details get in the game now and score a 100 match on your first purchase only at legends with a z.com at the time of iraq's first world cup appearance uday hussein was president of the iraqi olympic committee a job he had received at age 20 and head of the iraqi football association he was also the owner of al-rashid iraq's premier football club their team gets to play in the iraqi stars league which is the highest division in the country and since al-rashid was the most prominent club and uday also played in the iraqi stars league he was also the owner of the iraqi stars league and also ran the olympic team this meant that from age 20 on uday is basically dictator of football in iraq right like he's an even if you're not on his team if he's not your direct boss he basically runs how football works in the whole country right he's the football he's the football czar he's the football czar yes saddam made his son the football czar his son who again does not particularly care for football this would be a dream job for someone who liked playing or like was an aspiring player like he does not appear to have any interest in this sort parked him here it's just kind of the job he wound up with like it's different from all of the other nepotism cases like this and that uday does not really seem to want to run a football team he could have made him a general or put him in charge of like he has so many other things he'd rather be doing but he sucks at all of them infrastructure product because didn't he get a degree in engineering he could have made it yeah but i don't think that was a real degree molly he didn't go to real school he has other people doing his classwork for him but he could at least infrastructure you can't i'm not gonna like saddam was not overall a responsible man but you could argue that putting uday in charge of the the football team was like the least damage he could do right yeah like if this guy gets is involved anywhere in like the power grid we're gonna have problems um so we don't know precisely what uday did to the national team after what he considered to be their failure at the world cup but there are suggestions that he began torturing his players around this time uh rod hamoudi one of his best players retired the next year which is kind of like sometimes seen as a sign that that's probably why that like rod retires early which is really weird and maybe it's because after this defeat uday fucked him up right it wasn't a chill vibe yeah i don't want to be in this is the this is football i don't want to be in this kind of football um uday had his people construct a series of red rooms and what they called red rooms in iraqi state sporting facilities these were places where players who failed during important points in games or training or otherwise irritated uday could be sent and punished depending on the trespass in question this could vary from mere threats uday was particularly known to threaten to chop people's legs off that was like one of his well you're not going to get any better after that no that's not going to improve their but he never i don't think he ever did this this appeared that was just something he would repeatedly threaten he may have had some legs broken though he would also that would also not improve your soccer play not gonna help he would also threaten to uh like feed pieces of players to dogs you know um and he would also use dogs or threaten to use dogs to abuse them uh the meetings that players yeah i don't know how often he actually had the dogs maim them because they usually didn't hurt them all that badly because again they are still playing um but when he would beat them like there are ways you can punish people that won't make them less able to play soccer yeah and i do think most of these are like threats of the crazier stuff because when it talks about the actual beatings that i mean it's usually most of the claims that uday ordered people to do these beatings some accounts will say that uday participated in torture some accounts will say he never did i don't actually know which is is true but i think he generally at least generally these are people who are working for him doing the the torture and they're administering they're usually the way they're physically punishing these guys is whipping them with electric cables right um like that's kind of the the go-to physical punishment at least why not make them run laps they do that too but that's not really torture that's just like normal workout stuff i mean you can do it in a way that's abusive certainly but that's not that's not going to satisfy a guy like uday um he is alleged and there's i mean they did find uh you know the uh like the the iron maiden that thing where it's like this big metal coffin you put someone that's got spikes on the inside that you can screw into them they didn't find one of those at a facility that was supposed to have been uday's like they're like they're like they're like they're like they're there are accusations that he was really into that like specifically into like old-timey torture techniques again it's kind of hard to tell how much of this is literally true because i don't i've never run any accounts of him actually that are of any detail of him iron maidening somebody to death maybe he just had one because it looked scary um right he was just he may have iron maiden people to death who weren't on the team i just haven't heard of him doing that to team members you know um or maybe yeah maybe he never got around to it yet you know it's like his unpainted or whatever in the corner right um because creativity is kind of what gives life its zest uday took to experimenting or at least having his torturers experiment uh over time as the early methods of violence did not improve the team's functioning he found that in time uh whipping people bloody with an electric cable was fun but what really took things up a notch was afterwards if you would throw them into like a pit filled with sewage you know then you could really mess people up they get these horrific infections and stuff um and so we said we've done that a lot yeah that definitely helps that helps their game is giving them fucking staff infections um the red rooms uh i think as far as i can tell probably got their name both for like the obvious reason and also as a reference to the red cards that are thrown out in football games when a player makes like a penalty um and if you if you're not aware of sports right a penalty shot is one of those moments in competitive sports where everything comes down to the actions like a single player right if you get to take a penalty shot no one else is kind of it's just can you make this shot Right. As an individual player. This means that one person is to blame if a penalty shot is missed. And because people who fail on the Iraqi football team get beaten and tortured, most members of al-Rashid started refusing to take penalty shots because you can't be like, oh, but that wasn't my fault. It was this guy or it was I didn't get the ball in time. Right. Like everyone watched you fail to make that shot. And so nobody's willing to do it. Eventually, they only have like three guys on the team who are willing to actually take penalty shots. And these are brave men. One of them was Abbas Rahim Zaire. He told The Guardian many of the footballers refused to even touch the ball. But then we realized that if no one accepted, we would all be punished. So Zaire basically agrees to be one of the guys who will make penalty shots so that they don't all get tortured. It's the only way to deal with that. In one game, Zaire attempts a penalty. Zaire takes a penalty shot and misses. Two days later, when the team returned home to Baghdad, he was ordered to show up at the Olympic Committee headquarters, which had become Uday's lair, complete with a basement torture chamber. Per The Guardian, he was blindfolded and taken away to a prison camp for three weeks. He shrugged. End of story. That's him like talking to the reporter there that he doesn't want to talk about having the prison camp. I do have some details from other people what happens at the prison camps. So getting a penalty was just as bad, if not worse, than failing. Failing at a penalty shot, right? If you fail at a shot, you're going to get tortured because you didn't make a point when you could have. If you do a penalty and the other team gets to make a penalty shot, you're going to be punished for giving them that point, basically, right? Being the goalie has got to be the worst position on the team. There's no good position on the team under Uday Hussain. But goalie is one of the only positions on the team where, again, it's like the penalty shot where it's on you. It's all on you. You let the ball run. There's a lot of opportunities for you. It's up to you to be the guy who gets the blame. That's obviously not fair, but that's how it's going to be looked at by fucking Uday. I wouldn't want to be Uday's goalie. I would not want to be the goalie under Uday Hussain. So that piece in The Guardian describes what happened to Yasser Abdul Latif, former team captain, in 2000 after he was accused of hitting the referee during a club match in Baghdad. Quote, He was taken to the Radwania prison camp on the edges of the capital and confined to a cell two meters square with a tiny window high in the wall. His head and eyebrows were shaved and he was stripped to the waist. He was in order to perform press-ups for two hours. Three guards flogged him with links of electric cables, spelling off when their arms grew tired. The torture continued in two-hour sets with an hour's break in between, and the beatings grew more savage as Latif tired. The only relief, if it can be called that, came when he was let outdoors into the winter cold and doused in freezing water. Cool. I don't know that that's. I mean, you shouldn't put your hands on the ref. Does that help with their footballing? You shouldn't put your hands on the ref. But I don't think that's a fair punishment. I think, obviously, it's bad to put your hands on the ref. That seems outside of the. It was a red card for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. A red card, maybe. Perhaps not. You know, maybe a five-match ban, depending on what you did to the ref. Being whipped for days in a cell. That's, I think, excessive. Yeah, maybe extreme. I think it's. Yeah. Did he rejoin the team after this, or was that kind of it for him? No, no. He stays back on the team. It is. It takes more. I'm just kidding. He noted in his interview. First off, he's in that prison camp for two hours. For two weeks. He goes through this for two straight weeks. And then he goes back to. And it's more than. It takes. Well, first, it takes a month before he can even sleep on his back again. But yes, after he recovers, he goes back to play for the team. And this is what he said. Because the Guardian asks him basically what you did. They're like, and you went back? And he says. I mean, I guess he didn't have a choice. Yeah, that's what he says. I never had any choice. They threatened me. If I didn't participate in the team, they said they would beat me again and again and consider me an enemy of the regime, and that would mean death. So, again, he doesn't have. He's not good at soccer, unfortunately for him. Yeah, I mean, it's also probably hard to find. Like, after a while, you would stop wanting other people to know you were good at soccer in Iraq. You would not put your kids in youth soccer, for sure. Yeah, I might avoid that for my kids. You're not playing pick-up games. Yeah. So, the power and money Uday got from his position and from being able to torture people were far more of his passion than, you know, football. Most people who knew him will note that he wasn't a big sports guy and hadn't cared about the national team until Saddam told him, Hey, you can win my approval if you avoid fucking that up. The Guardian's reporting notes that in order to burnish his team's performance, he, quote, kept a private torture scorecard with written instructions on how many times each player should be beaten on the soles of his feet after a particularly poor showing. And you'll find allegations like that repeated by numerous sources, where some differ is in whether or not Uday participated in the torture himself or was just a fastidious manager. Now, the team coach for most of this time was Emmanuel Barbosa. Baba Dawood. Better known as Ammo Baba. He's a fucking cool guy. Ammo Baba. Like, Ammo like bullets. Baba. Cool nickname. Yeah, very cool nickname. Ammo was a former footballer himself. He'd been a star in the 1950s during the Iraqi team's early days of glory. And he became the team coach in 1978. Again, when I said probably the reason why the team performed so well, Uday's first couple years in charge, is because a better, a really good coach had started a couple years earlier. Because he's letting a professional do it. Right. Baba. Ammo starts working there in 1978. By the time Uday comes in, like four to five years later or whatever, he's gotten the team like into a really good position. Right. So because Ammo is so clearly good at his job, he is beloved by Iraqis. And that means he's one of the few people with some clout. He's able to resist Uday on occasion without getting murdered. Right. Because Uday can't quite murder him in public. Right. You can't mess with a good thing. Yeah. And they do argue a lot. Uday doesn't know shit about football. Right. So the two have like screaming fights with some regularity. Sophie's going to show you a picture of Ammo Baba, by the way. This guy looks fucking awesome. Yeah, look at him in his fucking Puma. He's so cool. He's wearing his fucking Puma track suit. He's clearly a Puma track suit. Fucking like black, dark Einstein, almost styled hair. Like he's so cool looking. I can't believe he's not smoking. He looks like he should be smoking. What a fantastic. No, that's Grandpa Munster. What a fantastic nose this man has. He's got an amazing nose. He's so cool looking. I love him. I love him so much. I'm so sad that he had to deal with Uday. Oh, you're going to love Ammo more because Ammo Baba's fucking cool. Here's how Justin Sherman describes Ammo for these football times. Quote, Baba's outspoken nature against Uday would garner admiration and cult-like devotion for many Iraqis, effectively shielding him from being killed because of the unrest it would unleash through the streets. Still, his lofty status could not always protect him as Uday once personally beat him in front of 50,000, spectators at the Al-Shab International Stadium. He talked nonsense, Baba recalled about Uday. I told him to go to hell. I said he knew nothing about football. How did I survive? Because the people loved me. So cool. So, you know, I've been watching the World Cup and I keep telling my husband, you know, like, because one of the first matches we watched, there were like an insane number of red cards, like a record number of red cards. And I was saying like, yeah, it's kind of, it's kind of more fun. It's a little bit more fun when it gets a little, it gets a little testy. You know, people are pushing each other a little bit. I take it back. I take it back. I don't want to see. I don't want to see that. I don't want to see the manager of the team flog the coach on the field. Flog the coach in front of 50,000 people? And Ammo basically just stands there and is like, all right, if you're going to beat me, just beat me. You know, like, he's so fucking cool. You're the one who looks stupid. This guy is so cool. I cannot exaggerate how chill Ammo Baba seems. At least how chill he comes across. That's the right attitude to bring to the beating. Like, you're the one who looks foolish here, bud. Yeah. You're the one who's losing control. You're the one who's losing control and being an asshole in public, you know? So, by the way, I also figure, since we just saw Ammo Baba, I should show you a picture at this point of the big guy, Saddam Hussein, and his oldest son, Uday, together. This is from around the time we're talking. This would be like the 80s, somewhere around then. Yeah. They're handsome guys. Look at them. Look at them. Look at dudes. They've got matching mustaches. He looks so happy. Yeah, mustaches are good. Honestly, Uday's is a little whiter than his dad's. You know, it's a little exaggerated. It's kind of like, it's a little much. I think he's trying to make his dad proud. You know, you can definitely tell Saddam's the novelist of the two. You know, he has that novelist's eyes. I like that shirt, though. Oh, yeah. Saddam's? It looks great. Yeah. He always looked good. God, he's handsome. I just want to go on record that I do not think Saddam Hussein's handsome. It's just a joke. I, so there's this, yeah, no, I won't tell that Saddam Hussein story yet. One day. One day. One day. In the same year, Uday made what many regime watchers would argue was his biggest mistake. This is 1988. So, Kamal Hana Zhajo was Saddam Hussein's official food taster and valet. This is basically his body man, you know? Zhajo's the guy Saddam always wants in the room with him, right? And if, when you're Saddam, that means something, right? This guy's in a dude who has, like, a high official rank, but he gets a lot of time with the boss, and the boss genuinely cares about him. So, Zhajo is about as close to Saddam as anyone. And arguably closer to him than his fuck-up fail son, Uday, because Saddam doesn't want Uday around him all day, right? He wants Zhajo in the room. This is the Iraqi equivalent of that young woman who prints off articles from the internet for Trump. That's exactly right. And just as Trump clearly likes her more than all, both of his sons put together. He loves her. Both of his older sons put together. Saddam clearly likes Zhajo a lot more than Uday, which may have been why Uday hated him. So, the following story that I'm about to relate took place. During a party at an island resort after a dinner to honor the wife of Hosni Mubarak, Egypt's president at the time. So. So there's this big diplomatic event between Iraq and Egypt, and they're having a party at this island resort, and that's when this all happens. And I'm going to quote now from 2003. Nothing good happens on an island. Nothing good happens on an island party. Resort party? No. With the president of Egypt and Iraq? No. It's not going to be. Something weird is going on already. Something bad is going to happen. So this is from a 2003 LA Times article. According to the most widely accepted account, a large group of Hussein's bodyguards had gathered for their own party on the island while the state dinner was taking place. They were firing weapons in the air in celebration, and Zsa Zsa reportedly refused Uday's order to stop. So Uday killed him. Furious, Hussein jailed his eldest son and vowed to prosecute him to the fullest extent of the law. It was only after a letter, purportedly written by Zsa Zsa's father and published in the state media, asked that Uday be forgiven that Hussein freed him and sent him to Switzerland less than 60 days after his imprisonment. So this is when a lot of people will say Uday stops being the heir apparent. Because he killed his dad's favorite friend. He killed his dad's best buddy, yeah. Yeah. Kind of his dad's surrogate son. That'll do it. That will mess it up for you. I mean, there's a lot of psychology there, right? Like, he just wants his dad to love him and he can't. Yep, yep, yep. He wants to follow his dad's footsteps. This sort of this equivalent of the Secret Service, right? Like. They're getting drunk and using their weapons improperly. Oh, yeah. Just shooting off guns. Absolutely. You know, we're all the same all the world over. So it's just like the American Secret Service. If I was the elite guard, or hell, if I was like the president at a fucking big political event like this, I would want to shoot off guns afterwards just to blow off some steam. You know, they can't stop the president. It's just nice to know that people are the same everywhere. Yeah. That is something we haven't had happen yet as a country is like at a diplomatic event, the president just. Going to a Secret Service guy being like, give me, give me that machine gun. I just want to, I just want to fire off a few rounds into the dirt. We don't know that doesn't happen at Camp David. Yeah, I, yeah, yeah. I, I, I'd love to see it. Why not? America's not doing so, so hot. We could use something lighter, something fun. The president firing a machine gun blindly at a diplomatic dinner in Switzerland, you know? Why not? I guess the Swiss probably don't want that to happen. Speaking of the Swiss. As punishments go, being forced to live in Switzerland with millions of dollars isn't that bad, right? I would love to be punished. Today's not in a terrible situation. I would love that punishment. Yes. I think we'll all take exile in Switzerland with millions of dollars as a punishment if it's on the table. Take me. One of the downsides is Swiss law doesn't really care if you're some two-bit dictator's son, right? Maybe if you're like a high-grade dictator's son, you can get away with a lot in Switzerland. I mean, how many millions? Maybe a million isn't. You got to have a lot more than a few million, right? If you want to get that kind of preferential treatment, you know? You're not as Uday. You're not going to walk around breaking Swiss laws without consequences unless you pay some pretty hefty bribes at a high level. You can't be serial raping. No. And in Uday's case, it's even – I mean, thankfully, it's not that bad. Although, who knows? But, like, not long after he moves to Geneva, he gets into a fistfight with a cop at a bar. And his dad makes him come home and marry the daughter of one of his friends. Fistfight with a cop at a bar? I mean, you're just making him sound relatable. This does sound cool. And you know who else got into a fistfight with a cop at a bar recently? Certainly not me. Nope. But the sponsors of our podcast did. Oh, yeah. Each and every one of them. Whoever comes up to advertise next on this show just staggered out of a bar with the blood of a police lieutenant on their hands. And it might be the next ad. The Portland Police Bureau or the Washington State Highway Patrol. We don't know. Whoever it is, they just assaulted an officer. It's true. This ad is brought to you by Veve Healthcare. They're makers of Devato Dolutigravir Lamivudine. If you're living with HIV, do learn about Devato. Devato is a complete HIV treatment by prescription only for some people 12 and older. 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Visit devato.com or call 1-877-844-8872. Wait, this is a soda? Yeah. And it has protein? 10 grams. No sugar? Zero. And it actually tastes good? It's Skypop! Skypop Protein Soda delivers the refreshing taste you want from a real soda. Crisp and delicious with 10 grams of complete protein, zero sugar, and just 45 calories. So you're not choosing between great taste and real benefits. You're getting both in every sip. Skypop Protein Soda. Reach for the sky. Get your Skypop Protein Soda now at Target, Walmart, or Kroger. I decided to do some cleaning this weekend. Step one, open the closet. Step two, immediately regret opening the closet. Behind the coats? Wedding gifts we still haven't sorted. Our wedding was three years ago. So I posted a task on AirTasker. A tasker organized the closet, tackled the garage, and even hand-wrote the thank you notes. Post your task, set your budget, and choose the tasker who's right for you. Go to AirTasker.com or download the app. AirTasker. Get anything done. Warning. The following song has been rated dangerously catchy and may not be suitable for grown-ups. A, B, C, D. In the morning, brush your teeth. A, B, C, D. In the morning. Brush your teeth. E, F, G, H. Hurry up and don't be late. E, F, G, H. Lingo Kids. Only suitable for kids. If it gets stuck in mom's head, that's not our problem. Lingo Kids. Everything kids love. Download now for free. And we're back. So, Uday's forced home. His dad makes him marry the daughter of one of his best friends. And this is not a love match, to say the least. Uday's wife leaves him after just a few months, complaining that he'd started beating her. So, when Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1990, Uday was not in a great position within the regime. He's not super high up. And some sources I've read will say that Uday's body double at the time was made to, like, pose at the front in and around combat positions to make it look like Uday was participating in stuff. But that said, most of those accounts come from the body double that we heard from earlier, Lateef Yahya. The guy making things up. The guy making things up a lot, right? Now, I don't—Uday doesn't—I don't have any evidence that he did anything meaningful during the invasion, either. I'm not saying that. Just, like, Lateef exaggerates and lies constantly. Now, if you, as I mentioned earlier, grew up in the 90s and early 2000s, you know that Saddam Hussein was infamous for his use of body doubles. This was a cause of much hilarity in popular media. And contributed somewhat, I think, to the sheer glee with which Hollywood movies post-Desert Storm loved to feature characters dressed like Saddam Hussein. You know, think of, uh, fucking The Big Lebowski, right? Fucking a Saddam impersonator shows up in that. There's, like, a weird number of, like, Saddams that you run into in, like, 90s movies and some early 2000s movies. Very much a part of our consciousness. Yeah, and so it was just, you know, Saddam Hussein, Desert Storm had happened. He was, like, a major bad guy in the American public consciousness. But some of it, I think, is all these gleeful stories of Saddam lookalikes definitely, I think, fueled some of that. Now, I want to do something, a dedicated thing on Saddam and his body doubles because there's shockingly little real evidence behind a lot of the claims about his body doubles. Again, I don't doubt that he had people impersonate him for security purposes, but, yeah. Is this what really sort of seeded into our consciousness, this idea that all of these world leaders have all these bodies? It's like a big QAnon psychosis, right? Right. That all these people have body doubles. Is that where this comes from? That those body doubles are people living, like, whole lives as this person and, like, they have all these restrictions in place and they're constantly watched. As opposed to, like, well, whenever we're traveling with the president, we make sure there's a couple guys who kind of look like him from behind if you, like, drape, like, a coat over him. So if we think there might be a shooter, we can, like, run this guy out who looks like the president and maybe they take a shot at him, but it's just guards, you know, and then we can deal. Like, I think that happens a lot. Stuff like that, probably. But the crazy stories you hear about these, like, harems of body doubles of Saddam, these, like, gangs of them, I think are mostly fantasies. Just like a Love Island mansion full of Saddams. Right. Right. Yeah. Too many Saddams. Now, Uday is also famously alleged to have had a body double. And by that, I mean he is alleged to have had several, but the guy everybody knows is Lateef Yahya. And Lateef's claim is that he knew Uday in grade school, as we talked about, and people had commented how much they looked alike. And then, you know. Years go by, and in 1987, Yahya has been drafted, and he's fighting in the Iran-Iraq War, and he's somewhere near the front in 1987 when he gets recalled. He's called to Baghdad, and he finds himself sitting in a palace. In Yahya's book, The Devil's Double, here's how he described a meeting with Uday Hussein that, again, probably didn't happen. He tells his old school buddy that he wants to take him away from the front and make him his fideh, which is a word that means double. Although, per Yahya's book, a fideh is more than a mere double. A fideh is everything. In Arab culture, a fideh means disciple, a fighter, and a partisan, a serf who must always be prepared to give his life up for his master. I have seen so many different news articles quote him saying this. I don't think that—I haven't found any other writing about a fideh, at least not under the way it's spelled in this. I've never heard of this concept. I think he's kind of making it up that this is like a prominent concept in Arabic culture. I haven't found that, at least, and I think I would have. He doesn't speak any Arabic language, and this has been before it was easy to Google things. He could just be making it up and assuming you'll never know. I'm not going to say I've, like, asked anybody who would be a comprehender, but no one I've talked to was familiar with this concept. And I couldn't just Google around, searching around, find anyone but Yahya talking about this apparently universal Arabic social role of the fideh, which he's like, all of our great kingdoms had this. I don't know, man. Really? Because you're the only one talking about it that I'm finding. Maybe I'm missing a bunch of shit because it's just not written in English, but, like, I did try to account for that, and I didn't run into fucking anything. So, whatever. When he was released, Yahya says, he was given a choice. Serve Uday as doppelganger or have his family murdered and his sisters raped, per an article in The Independent. Yeah, to give you an idea on how this story that's fanciful is reported on by credible-seeming papers. Here's how The Independent, in an article by Jerome Taylor, reported on all this. Yahya claims he fled to Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq and led her to Austria with the help of the CIA. Again, I don't have any, like, outside evidence other than this guy's claims of any of that. Any of that shit. I would need a second source on some of that. I would need a second source, and there just isn't. And there are a couple of journalists who, like, looked into this and tried to. And, like, everyone who's investigated this has been like, I have found no evidence to corroborate any aspect of his story. That said, his story was eventually. And it's like, you don't need to embellish. Like, we know he's torturing. We know he's raping. Right. You don't need to spice it up. You don't need to make these stories up. But this guy, I mean, there was money in it for Yahya, I think. But I don't know fully why he did what he did, although that's my guess. Because he was eventually portrayed in a film adaptation of his book, also called The Devil's Double. Dominique Cooper played Uday Hussain and Latif Yahya. Oh, wow. We only need one actor. Of course. Yeah. Right. Of course. Of course. That makes it efficient. Foreign press loved talking to Latif in the years between the Gulf War and the 2003 invasion. And he always wove a good yarn. But he was also obviously lying about a ton of it. And, again, I will say for his part, he always says, I was actually against the Iraq War. He would say, I never wanted the U.S. to invade because I knew that would make things worse. He just, I think, was trying to monetize off the fact that Saddam Hussein was, like, the famous bad guy in Western society for a while. Right? And the network news loves to have a guy on. And a guy on that will always say yes and will always say something crazy. Exactly. Exactly. So British journalist Ed Caesar finally actually interrogated Yahya in the early 2000s after years of him making these claims, not with minimal pushback. And he found no evidence to support Yahya's claims to have worked as a body double for Uday. Again, there, yeah, there is some evidence that he was tied to some regime attempts to maybe, like, there's some sketchy stuff people have alleged he may have been involved. And we'll talk about that all at a later day. What I want to talk about next is everyone's favorite U.S. military adventure, the Gulf War. Right? So 1990, Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait. And the subsequent international response led to the United States is a disaster for Saddam's military and regime. Uday had to endure the years of sanctions that followed, although he would ultimately profit mightily as a result of the some of the different, like, programs that were put in place. I think. Oil for food is one of them. Like, he's, like, like everyone who's tight and high up in the regime going to take advantage of all of this to make money for himself. But this isn't, like, a great time for him or his dad or his brother. Right? The immediate years after the Gulf War. Things are very messy for the Husseins. Not as bad as they're going to be. Right. Now, Uday's personal situation within the regime is worsened by the fact that as the 90s went on, it's become increasingly clear to everyone that Kusei is, going to be the heir apparent. Right? That's gotta hurt. Saddam's now, Saddam's, he's, he's younger enough that Saddam learned from his mistakes. He raised a somewhat gentler son. Kusei still does some violent stuff, but not as, like, uncontrollably and not in a way that's, like, bad and dangerous for the regime. You know, he's able to, like. And learning, learning that he's been passed over is definitely going to improve his behavior, right? Yeah. He's going to start behaving better. Yeah, Uday's going to be a lot nicer guy now. Yeah, he's going to be normal now. Yeah. Kusei's just kind of, like, a much steadier guy. And he's also, like, a planner, right? While, while Uday is torturing soccer players, Kusei's taking control of Iraq's intelligence apparatus and the Republican Guard, its elite internal paramilitary force. And the fact that Saddam gives him. That seems, like, more productive. It gives you an idea of, like, how Saddam views his sons, that he's, like, yeah, you can keep running the football team that sucks now since you took over, but Kusei gets, like. The CIA, basically. The CIA, basically, yeah. Oh, man. So he's still got soccer, though, like, through the 90s. He's still got, he's still, he's still got football soccer. So he's, maybe he's, maybe he's getting better at it, right? Like, I mean, he didn't start out knowing anything about soccer, but he's been in charge of soccer for, like, 20, 20 years. Did he ever learn? Yeah, yeah. Is he getting better? There's not much evidence of that. There's not much evidence of that, right? Now, because I am not a rube, I'm always careful when trying to validate stories of horrors in Saddam's Iraq, not because it wasn't replete with them, but again, because of all the disinformation that's out there, in part by, like, angry dissidents who wanted to encourage U.S. intervention against Saddam. One reason that I feel comfortable saying all of the specific stuff with the football team actually happened is that the sources on this are a ton of Iraqi pro soccer players. Like, a bunch of their best former football players have all talked about being tortured by Uday Hussein, so I assume this is all true, right? And I'm sure in some of these cases, there's, like, physical evidence. I can't think of any other reason they would really want to be doing that in this case. Yeah, and there's some people who had injuries and stuff, like, and torture equipment was found in a lot of these. Like, we found, like, physical evidence of this stuff. Wait, so this isn't some unnamed teacher who allegedly died in an unnamed way at an unnamed time. This is somebody saying, this happened to me, and here is my scar. Yes, exactly, exactly. We're going to hear from them now. So, one of these players was Sharar Haidar Mohammed al-Hadithi. He was a top-level player in Iraq who did well enough that he got to represent the country international on several special teams, including during the 1988 World Cup. For an article I found in an archive from the September 11th, 1999 edition of The Mirror, quote, he says he was hit repeatedly on the soles of his feet, dragged on his bare back through a gravel pit, and then made to jump into a tank of sewage. So that the wounds would become infected. He was deprived of sleep and fed bread and water. So, yeah, that's fucking, again, that's a claim by a specific guy of a specific torture that was done to him. Yeah, and that's fucking nightmarish, right? Because of the team not doing well in that year's Olympics. And, again, that's not going to make you any better at soccer. Not going to help. Not going to help. Sewage in open wounds rarely makes football. I know that there are some, I mean, the Patriots famously get a lot of sewage in their open wounds. But that's just… That's just because they're the Patriots. You know, that's not best practices for anyone else. I mean, Tom Brady thinks drinking water prevents sunburns. He might think that sewage in an open wound makes you run faster. He might be able to get Brady doing that. So in 1993, Iraq's premier team lost a friendly match against Jordan. If you know Uday at this point, you know the man absolutely did not believe in friendly matches. He had four players, including Sharrar, who we've just heard from, forced into a van and driven to a prison camp. Here's how… Sharrar describes his time in soccer prison. Quote, Sharrar says a favorite trick of one sadistic prison guard was to tell them to catch a mosquito in their cells. When half anesthetized with fatigue from lack of sleep, they held the insect out for inspection. Their captain would mock them, saying, But that's a male mosquito, you fools. I want a female one. Start looking again. It went on day after day, night after night. One player had a nervous breakdown. Others were injured, and others, like Sharrar, quit football and fled abroad. So yeah, that's pretty bad. That's… That's… That's bad. That's really bad. Creative. I'll give that specific prison guard that. I haven't heard of that one yet, you know? We have to respect ingenuity here, don't we? But, you know… Probably not when it's torture. Over the course of managing this team all these years… Actually. He's not actually interested in getting better. is he he just likes doing because at this point he knows he's interested in torturing more this is not improving you would think right he just likes i think he just likes doing the torture to be honest i think he's just i think he thinks yeah that may be it or maybe he knows this isn't improving the team because he's got it with this nobody else is doing it this way you know the top they're not putting ronaldo in a cell no and at this point he's he's kind of crashing out as a person he knows he's not the heir apparent anymore um he's doing a lot of drugs he's you know having mood swings in part probably as a result of that he's being violent and he's murdered committed several times there are several murders he's accused of throughout this period too just at like parties so this is a guy who's kind of regularly spinning out of control and i think to your point molly i don't think he's focusing much on whether or not this is making the team better i think this has just become an outlet for his anger like he gets to go punish the team when he's pissed yeah yeah he just likes it now these are just toys it feels weird to say my favorite but my favorite soccer themed account of nightmarish crimes against humanity comes from an account given by uday's former press secretary abbas janabi after janabi fled iraq he told reporters about what had happened after the team failed to qualify for the 1994 world cup uday presented them with a concrete ball and made them kick it for hours upon hours at a time just awful guy again he does not care about the team at this point this is just about lashing out right right man in 1995 uday had another we'll call it incident he was at yet another party he was drunk and probably on molly or coked up he was on molly a lot in the 90s or you know yeah um so no no no no mdma you know yeah yeah uh so when one of his kin folks gave a toast and mocked uday's speech impediment at uday as the story goes oh he just started blasting yeah he just starts shooting right this guy makes fun of him and uday just pulls a gun and opens fire with an automatic weapon what the hell kind of drugs was the other guy on that you would make fun of uday's speech impediment i know right because you would have to think you'd stop at a certain point he just shoots people periodically maybe you're just so fed up with the fucker right that you just can't hold it in anymore he must have been pretty annoying the vibe of this party had to have been awful i don't think it was a good party even though uday's on fucking ecstasy so as the story goes he just he just starts firing and he six people he kills six people uh all of the dead are supposed to have been bodyguards but his relative who had made fun of him was badly injured so yeah that's the kind of guy he is uh uday was also brutal in a bad mood other iraqi team yeah in a bad mood while fucking rolling now uday was also brutal to any other iraqi team that had the misfortune to play al-rashid and i'm going to quote again from george woodward's article in tribuna special punishments were reserved for those who committed offenses against al-rashid for example injuring one of their players for such an offense al-zahra defender abir jamal was arrested he was taken to the stadium where the match had been played and in front of the al-rashid players sentenced to 65 lashes such as the fate of anyone who defies football and does not respect the rules of fair play said the local police chief wait so his team would have to always win because you're gonna let him win well that doesn't happen a lot which probably doesn't help the team like they would win all their domestic matches but then when they play somebody outside of iraq they're not gonna let i don't think they did win they didn't win all their domestic matches but i do think there was a lot of a lot of people would get especially if you ever foul his team you're going to get fucked up but if they get beat he's gonna fuck them up his team would be fucked up you know yeah so abbas talawi uh the captain of the of an opposing iraqi team once annoyed uday by complaining that the referee had been ruling unfairly against his team quote the referee it seemed to me was was against us he ignored fouls by the opposition and gave a penalty against us as captain i protested and got a red card that made me furious and i spat at the referee after the game i was told i was banned from football for a year and to make me understand my offense better i was sent for 33 days to uday's private prison in al-radwania there every morning his personal executioners beat me 50 to 70 times with an electric cable so we're seeing this again when it comes to like truth and stuff these are all very consistent stories from a lot of different guys under their own names you know and it's all very similar kinds of torture and this to me is more believable than some of those stories about sort of specific person like very detailed accounts of him his own personal actions whereas this is yeah delegating this violence to a state apparatus that we do know did exist we know the prison is doing that a lot we know the prisons existed and like you know periodically he probably did lash out personally with violence like against that coach and just start beating people but generally he's he's delegating that because he's got goons that's the benefit of being the dictator but you could just point to a guy and say put him in the pit yeah god if i had goons i would have fun i would have fun with my goons don't don't don't you agree uh that's where that nope not going to make that joke anyway it will not surprise you that many other players and officials claim that while uday hussein ran iraqi football it was basically a crime to beat rashid sometimes sports journalist salah hassan explained a red card for an al-rashid player was forbidden many of their goals were scored from official from obvious offsides leaders of opposition teams would be suspended before facing al-rashid and when the team was on a winning streak life could occasionally be good players who performed well were lavished with role-playing olex watches and supercars no normal iraqi could ever afford not worth it but not worth it no when top players failed they were punished like anyone else ahmed radi was one of iraq's greatest stars of all time he's the guy who scores their only goal in the 1986 world cup here's an account he gave reporters later once i was unable to attend a team meeting with uday uday sent a car for me in the middle of the night i was taken somewhere outside the city beaten and told i would no longer play football i was punished five or six times had my head shaved for the first time three times was held in custody twice including exile to a military camp where i was made to do hard labor and that's their best guy that's their best guy that's like they're fucking messy that's they legend that's crazy also i'm very proud of you for knowing who messy is good job of course i've spent time in iraq i have to know who messy is yeah a quarter of the people i met had a messy jersey yeah um it's interesting i i came across in one of the articles i was reading about that paragraph because he's one of the things uday would do was like when he was pissed he would have the everyone's heads shaved he would have people's like like his players shaved and is that like a one article thing yeah yeah yeah and one of one article felt the need to go into like in in muslim culture you know you're not supposed to shave your head and so this was like directly demeaning and that's not at all what's going on i'm sorry you don't need to do this like here we have to explain why these why these muslims would be hurt by having their head shaved it's humiliation any culture no no no you take here's an experiment get some goons go up to any random person restrain them violently and forcibly shave their head and see if they're traumatized people don't like doing that you know it doesn't matter that they're muslim i mean it's what they do to french collaborators too like it's it's right culturally legible yeah exactly yeah it would be like if you were like and in french culture being beaten while having your head shaved in the street is bad it's like there's bad everywhere man in the french culture this is particularly negative yeah nobody likes having that happen to them and it's also this misunderstanding of iraqi because like the picture it was painting is that like as muslims they never shaved their and that's just not at all iraq iraq has a massive thing of like barbers are a huge deal in iraq one of the coolest things that when i was in like iraqi kurdistan in the north during ramadan one year because like it's ramadan shit gets started in the middle of the night because it's too fucking hot during the day and you can't eat or drink anyway so like everyone becomes nocturnal for a lot of things and like i remember going out with a buddy because he wanted to get a haircut it's like fucking midnight and the barber's like using fire and stuff to like cut his hair in parts it was really cool it was a really elaborate really good hair like and my buddy who's in iraqi was like no iraqis have the best barbers in the world he was very proud about this article where they were like here's how this strange foreign culture feels about having their head shaved like that's just racism guys like if they were six you would have to explain that this is particularly uniquely bad yeah it's not they just nobody likes it when you forcibly shave their heads while beating them it's generally unpleasant for people you know who else will forcibly shave you and beat you no hopefully not the sponsors of this show i would hope not good god i just let's just go on for a second here this ad is brought to you by vive health care the makers of dovado dolutigravir lamivudine if 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He would spend the rest of his life in wheelchairs or using a cane. This contributed to Uday's further slight. Yeah. And this does not make him. Better or, like, calmer. The fact that he's now grievously injured and in pain all the time. He's just not having a change of heart? He's not normal now? Yeah, the assassination attempt doesn't make him kinder. Not a turning point. This contributes to his, yeah, kind of derangement. And it also, he gets, you know, starts taking this out on his players. By 1997, Uday Hussain had been the head of Iraqi football for more than a decade. Which meant he was a fairly well-known figure within FIFA, right? This is a guy who is not. At all a fringe figure in the world of professional football. He can't be. These are not crimes that are completely. And FIFA's not saying, like, you can't sit with us. No, no, they're not. No, they're not. Even though he's basically, like, a team owner and manager rolled into one a lot of the time. So in 1997, Uday's team failed to win a qualifying match with Kazakhstan and lost their chance to attend the 1998 World Cup. Uday lost his shit and once again ordered players whipped and beaten. This timed to such an extreme that he was reported repeatedly to FIFA. They carried out an investigation, but Iraq denied anything had happened. And after FIFA's experts examined 12 players, they found there was no evidence to support any of the allegations against Uday and the team management. Famously honest, ethical FIFA. Like, concerned with human rights. Yeah. So I, yeah, absolutely. I think FIFA definitely investigated. Yeah, they love that stuff. Human rights. Yeah, for sure. So earlier I told you about Sharrar al-Hadithi. The famous player who was beaten on the soles of his feet, dragged across concrete, and then made to jump into sewage. He was one of the players swept up in this. And he claims the team wasn't inspected by FIFA until weeks after they'd been beaten. He also claimed, per the Mirror, team captain Radhi Shanishal had been thrashed with an electric flex, but had refused to tell FIFA what happened. Right? That another guy had been very recently beaten. Because he's terrified. And they saw injury, but he wouldn't say how he'd been injured. Now, it should be clear. But that does show that the FIFA inspection. The inspector saw injuries on at least one player, according to his account. Right? That is important to note. It should be clear to everyone that these athletes were loath to tell FIFA what was really happening because their families were essentially hostages of the regime. That sucks. But FIFA definitely had evidence and should have known something was going on with the Iraqi team. And I'm not saying FIFA should have saved these. Like, FIFA's not an international humanitarian organization. They're not going to help them. No, no. But they should have said, you guys can't play in FIFA games anymore. Yeah. You're out of FIFA. I'll even go so far as to say, I'll hear a number of arguments about what they should have done. But what's undeniable is they did nothing. Right. Right. Right. Right. And I think that's the, I'm not going to say, I don't know what would have worked best. But they don't do fuck all. Right? They just continue acting like everything is fine. And Uday is a normal. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Uday is a normal team, you know, owner or whatever. It's just a coincidence that every guy on the team has these weird scars on his back. Yeah. Yeah. It's just a weird little coinkydink. It's cultural. It's cultural. All these stories from former players who keep escaping the country. Yeah. In 1999, after Sharrar escaped Iraq, he brought claims of abuse against Iraq's team back into the mainstream. FIFA was forced to address the situation again. And per the Mirror, quote, FIFA said last week it considered the matter as still closed unless Sharrar was prepared to talk directly to it. Well, if he wants to report directly to us again, you know, maybe we'll reopen it. But he didn't come to us. You know, there's just a bunch of articles about him saying this stuff. So because playing for Iraq in Iraq was so darn miserable, many of the best players in the country were killed. Many of the best players in the country tried to get hired for teams overseas. Anyone who managed this found themselves in the unhappy position of having to convince Uday Hussain that they should be allowed to leave the country rather than stay. He was often willing to agree for 60% or so of a new player's salary. That's what he would take from these guys who, like, went to play for European teams. Per an article in the Mirror, Janabi confirms this. Once I collected for Uday a total sum of $350,000 from players for just six months, he says. So it is. Doing pretty good grift here, you know? I mean, that's good money if you can get it. It also, and it kind of, I wonder if, well, maybe it was part of his grift. If I just make it being a nightmare to play football in Iraq, the best players will get hired overseas, and then I can take money from them? Like, I wonder how conscious a part of the grift that became for him. I mean, it probably wasn't intentional the first time, but once it started happening, once the first guy signed in Italy, he was like, you know what? Yeah. This could be lucrative. This could be a lot of money. Yeah. So Uday's grifts in the latter years of Saddam's regime were legendary. As the BBC reported, quote, Uday's criminal empire was involved in smuggling sanctioned goods such as oil and cigarettes and cocaine alongside running a fast food restaurant chain called Super Chicken and an ice cream company called The Wave. He also headed television and radio stations, was chairman of the board of seven newspapers, and was at the helm of Iraq's most successful sports club. Uday took particular pride in the fearsome image he cultivated and referred to himself as Abu Sarhan. The father of wolves. Because he's like, he's got his fedayeen too. He's got like his little militia at this point who wear like Darth Vader helmets, literally. They have like fake Darth Vader helmets that they wear. They never fight. They like, they get their, they last like three seconds in combat. These guys immediately run. And he ran a chain of ice cream stores. That, that for me is the line. He was a renaissance man. You know, he runs a football team. He tortures a football team. He runs an ice cream company. He tortures ice cream sales. How many locations were there of Super Chicken? And was it good? I, you know, I do want, I do want to eat at Uday Hussein's Super Chicken. I want to eat Uday's forbidden chicken recipe. I need to track down a review of Super Chicken. Because was he as good at running a chicken restaurant as he was at running a soccer team? I'll guess he was as good. I'll guess he was as good, Molly. You know what? I think that's probably fair. Was he delegating? Was he really involved in the chicken? From a food safety standpoint? From a food safety standpoint, I would hope he was delegating quite a lot. Because I don't trust him to like, be good at that. Yeah, he has, there's a lot of sewage in the Uday Hussein story. So I don't feel great about that chicken. Uday also extended his control in Iraqi sports to the national volleyball team, which he had imprisoned in the basement of the Olympic National Committee building where he kept his torture dungeon in what he described as a motivational exercise. I want to keep, make sure the team really knows I mean business. So I'm going to imprison them in the basement for a while. I mean, they would be really motivated to get out of there. Yeah, I bet that would motivate your volleyball team. Maybe more volleyball teams should try this. Look, for too long, Uday Hussein's been ignored for his coaching wisdom. But maybe it's time we revisit him. You know, maybe this is what could make your own personal peewee volleyball team really, really cross the limits. Create a torture dungeon and lock them in it. Depending on the dimensions of the pit, it could really motivate them to get better at it. Jumping and leaping. Sure, exactly, exactly. This could create a whole new generation of Olympic, whatever that sport is, where you jump and there's a stick, the pole vault. We can make kids better at that. You know, maybe torture's not so bad an idea. Maybe we have like they just had the enhanced games where all of the athletes were on steroids and actually they weren't particularly impressive. It kind of sucked. Yeah. What about the torture games where all the teams work the way Uday's did? Everybody has sexes. Yeah, everybody has. sepsis it's just a hospital ward That's the whole competition. So Uday continued trying to impress his father, leaning towards, by this point, but kind of the later period of Saddam's regime, Saddam doesn't really want to be dictator as much as he wants to be a novelist, an artist. And that's how he really wants to spend time during kind of the latter years of his reign. Uday knew that he'd failed to earn his father's respect as a future dictator candidate, but he could still do it as a writer. And so in the last years of the regime, Uday got his Ph.D., publishing a 400-page thesis titled The World After the Cold War, which was written by a guy Uday paid and printed en masse to be distributed around the country. Per the BBC, quote, in it, Uday argues that American domination of the world stage will fade by the year 2015, and new superpowers such as Japan, China, and the European Union will challenge the United States' moral and economic position. A couple of interesting things. 2015, not bad, honestly, on guessing the year, Uday. You could have done worse. Like, could have done worse. Close. But in terms of the new superpowers being Japan, China, and the European Union, I don't know, man. That might not be the specific list I'd have gone with. Like, Japan, especially, is kind of a weird one. No shade to Japan. I just wouldn't really call it the new superpower in the wake of the U.S., you know, fading. Nor the EU. Really? Again, nothing against them. That's just a weird way to. Anyway, it's not quite what happened. Well, I mean, it's not Uday's fault. It's the guy he paid. It's the guy he paid's fault. I do want a copy of Uday's thesis, because the cover apparently has, like, a picture of Saddam Hussein as St. George slaying the dragon. Oh, I bet we could get a copy. Really suck it up to your kid, Uday. Yeah, hopefully. Somebody out there has found one. Yeah, so, in 2003, the United States invaded Iraq. In April. How'd that go? Yeah, I mean, initially, pretty good. The Saddam's regime did not last long, right? It was stuff afterwards that didn't go so well. In the immediate aftermath of the invasion, like, April of 2003, U.S. Army soldiers found at the Olympic headquarters in East Baghdad, Uday's old stomping grounds, a medieval torture chamber that was linked back to Uday. Was that the one that had the. Yeah, that's the Iron Maiden. Yeah. Yeah, the Iron Maiden. Yeah. Yeah, good stuff. Yeah, it's very fun. They also found, you know, his personal zoo, which had lions, cheetahs, and a bear. They found his. Only one bear. his drug collections. Yeah, I think he had one bear. He had a lot of drugs. He had a lot of liquor. He was noted by the U.S. soldiers who, like, found his home as having, quote, the biggest collection of naked women I'd ever seen. He has a massive, like, porn, printed-out porn collection. Okay, well, to be fair, have those guys been to Clarence Thomas? No, no. Although Army Captain Ed Belonco of Montville, New Jersey, said, it looked like something out of the Playboy Mansion, which is very funny. That's from a Washington Post article by Nico Price. To quote from that article, among the photos were those of Jenna and Barbara Bush, President Bush's 21-year-old daughters, dressed up very nice in evening clothes, Belonco said, adding that the soldiers took them to protect the president. You know what? That's the funniest Iraq War era writing I've ever seen. That's actually funny. It's so funny. And just the – it is very America in 2003 that, like, these – we're going to protect the president by getting the pictures of his daughters out of here. You know? The fact that that would wind up in a Washington Post article is extremely funny to me. So funny. Obviously, Uday and his brother are killed by U.S. forces at a compound that they were inhabiting. I'm not going to go through – like, it's not worth really going into a ton of detail about that. He's killed. And, obviously, his days as a soccer – as a force of power within the world of professional soccer come to an end, tragically. Not really. Uday would have loved AI. He would have. Because he could have made those pictures of George Bush's daughters naked. Yeah. I got to say, the interview this guy Belonco – He would have used Grok to address them. Yeah, he would have been Groking hard. He would have loved Grok. The interview with that Captain Belonco about, like, what they found in Uday's house is endlessly entertaining. This is the Captain. There were Dom Perignon, French wines, some 30 or 40 years old, a lot of very good brandy, a lot of good whiskey, Belonco said. There were boxes of Cuban cigars that said Uday Saddam Hussein on them, hundreds of them. My guys smoked them. He said there were also – this is the Washington Post. He said there were also six bags of heroin, but he didn't know how much they held. I'm going to guess not all that heroin made its way back to their bosses. If I know soldiers – How much of that heroin got done? I don't know. Not very much, actually. It was a lot of bags, but some of them were empty. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I'm going to – yeah, it's one of those, like, yep, they found eight bags of heroin, and three bags were returned to custody at the base, and an entire bag of heroin was returned to the – you know. I'm imagining there being shrinkage at several points here. Yeah. Anyway, that's the Uday Hussein story. Well, that's the story. That's not his – this is not the whole Uday Hussein story. This is Uday Hussein as a – Soccer arc. Team owner. Yeah. And it looks like – it looks like the Iraqi team – so they are in the World Cup again this year for their second turn. Yep. I think they got crushed earlier today. Yeah, but they made it back. That's what matters, right? And that's the thing. Let's all be happy. Getting to the World Cup at all – Big deal. Is a big deal. Huge deal. Even if you get out of it, at least spanked by Senegal at the group stage. And it – you know, it says a lot. I think you can – obviously, Uday Hussein isn't the only setback that Iraq has in terms of its football team. There's other things that go on in that country that – They've had some other struggles. They've had other struggles? A lot of them caused by the ES. Some other struggles, just non-football-related struggles. Yeah. Yeah. But that said, you know, it's really good. I'm really happy for the country that their team is now, without Uday, made it back to the World Cup and is there again. That's great. That's hopeful for the future. You know, I want good things for Iraq. How are you feeling, Molly? You know, that was fun. Not the torture parts. Not the sewage in the wounds parts. That sucks. That sucked for everybody. But, I mean, overall, in terms of what you could have presented to me today. I'm one of my friends least likely to want sewage in an open wound, you know? Thank you. I think about that a lot. I'm really opposed to it. I love a clean wound. I can tell. But in terms of things – We all do. That's why lightsabers are great. In terms of things you could have presented to me today, I'm very pleased. Yeah, good, good. Yeah, I thought you'd enjoy Uday Hussein, soccer team owner. Good stuff. Anyway, Molly, your podcast, Weird Little Guy. As people can and should, and also legally must, listen to it. They have to. You are committing a felony. If you don't, right after this podcast, listen to Molly's. You know? You could be shot. You probably can't. I'll put you in the secret room I keep under my podcast. You're right. You're right. Molly's got a red room for people who don't listen to her podcast. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Anyway, well, goodbye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. 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