A month after American troops occupied Baghdad, the family of Dr. Taki al-Moosawi was gathered at his Baghdad home, watching one of the Arab satellite channels that have become popular since the toppling of Saddam Hussein made it possible for any Iraqi, not just the ruling clique, to have satellite receivers.

Dr. Taki al-Moussawi, once jailed with his young nephew Mehdi, recently learned of Mehdi's grisly death in 1985.

And suddenly there it was: Old film clips of executions looted from the archives of the General Security Directorate, the most powerful of Mr. Hussein's secret police agencies. There, too, in the last terrifying moments before he was blown apart by a grenade his executioners had taped onto his chest, was the nephew who had disappeared without trace more than 18 years before, Mehdi Salih al-Moosawi.

When the secret police came for him and other males in the family in December 1984, Mehdi was a quiet 22-year-old student at a Baghdad technical college, a karate champion just back from service as an infantryman in the Iran-Iraq war, the father of two infant children.

He was accused, along with Dr. Moosawi, of planting bombs in Karamanah Square in Baghdad, though Dr. Moosawi says that the charge was false and that the real offense was speaking, among friends, in ways that were critical of Mr. Hussein.

In all the years since Mehdi's arrest, there had been no rest in the search for his nephew by Dr. Moosawi, a British-trained physiologist. The doctor himself was released after several months, on the intervention of an acquaintance who was a cousin of Mr. Hussein, but he was haunted, he says now, by the anguish of having left Mehdi in the dungeons of the secret police headquarters in central Baghdad.

When he saw the tape on Al Jazeera, an Arab station that has frequently been criticized for whitewashing Mr. Hussein's rule, Dr. Moosawi said, he was overcome with anger and disgust, as well as shame that it had been Mehdi who died, not him. He also felt at that moment, he said, that any price Iraqis paid for the overthrow of Mr. Hussein, including the ravages of the American invasion, had been worth it.

"In my own mind, I was already dead from the moment that Mehdi disappeared," he said. "I wished only that it could have been me, sitting there in the desert. Only later on, when I remembered that the Americans had come here to end this terror, did I begin to think, well, we were all dead, but we have been resurrected, we have been born again."

What happened to Mehdi, and what became of his family as they balanced their quest for him with a relentless theater of fealty to Mr. Hussein, is a grim — and grimly familiar — parable of the terror inflicted on 25 million Iraqis during the 24 years of Mr. Hussein's rule.

The critical view the family now takes of the American-led occupation may also hold clues for the United States as it confronts a brutal insurgency and grapples for some formula that will bring American troops home.

"They did a very good job for America and for Iraq in getting rid of Saddam, and we thank them," Dr. Moosawi said. "Now, they are young boys lost in a foreign country, and every day there is a bomb in the road. They live a terrible time. So please tell them, we would like that they would leave our country as soon as possible, as soon as they have arranged a stable government to replace Saddam."

Dr. Moosawi embodies much of what America has brought to Iraq. On the instruction of American officials, all 63 of Iraq's universities and technical colleges held elections this summer for presidents, vice presidents and deans; Dr. Moosawi, once a pariah among his colleagues because of the taint he bore from his brush with the secret police, is now vice president of Mustansiriya University, a proud if dilapidated institution in Baghdad that was founded by one of the ruling caliphs of the Islamic world in the 13th century.

Through all the years of the search for Mehdi, the family's hopes had been sustained by contacts with a senior officer in the mukhabarat, one of the prime agencies in Mr. Hussein's constellation of secret police agencies, which exacted money from the family, saying it would buy food, clothes and medicine for Mehdi in an undisclosed prison. It was a deceit of a kind that became common as Mr. Hussein's government came ever more to resemble an entrenched mafia whose brutality and greed metamorphosed into unrelenting terror.

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