Initially, Mr. Hussein appeared intent on describing the privations that other defendants, including his half-brother, Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, the former head of the mukhabarat secret police, had complained about during earlier courtroom sessions. Referring sarcastically to "this democracy in which the Americans have imprisoned us," he said that he, like the Dujail prisoners, had been kept in a cell with no windows. "There is no sun for Saddam Hussein," he said, reverting to a habit of referring to himself, mantralike, only by his full name.

It was then that he made his claim of beatings and torture by American guards. Since his capture in a spider hole near his hometown of Tikrit on Dec. 13, 2003, Mr. Hussein has been held in American military custody. American and Iraqi officials, as well as Mr. Hussein's lawyers, say they have met with him at Camp Cropper, an American detention center about 20 minutes' drive from the Baghdad airport's main passenger terminal. American officials have said that he is kept in solitary confinement, but allowed exercise periods in a small yard where he tends plants. They say he is given three meals a day, including, often, the dry-pack rations known to American soldiers as meals-ready-to-eat, or MRE's.

Mr. Hussein's torture allegations were dismissed by Chris Reid, a Justice Department lawyer who heads an American Embassy unit known as the Regime Crimes Liaison Office, as "bogus claims designed to ambush the court" and to counter the allegations made by the Dujail victims.

Speaking in a CNN interview after the court outburst, Mr. Reid, whose office has helped to set up and run the Iraqi court trying Mr. Hussein, said that he had toured Mr. Hussein's quarters in the detention camp, and that the claims of torture and beatings had never been made previously been raised by Mr. Hussein or any of his co-defendants. "No claims of this kind have ever been made before" he said.

One of the Dujail witnesses who testified on today, Ali Hassan al-Haideri, aged 37, was 14 when he was arrested, on the day after the shooting that broke out during Mr. Hussein's visit to the Shiite town.

He said he learned only after the American-led invasion in April 2003 that seven of his brothers who were arrested with him had been executed. He said other people from Dujail had been tortured with plastic hoses that had been melted with heat and stabbed onto victims' torsos, leaving a plastic residue in the wounds that ripped chunks of flesh as it was removed.

Another witness, testifying from a curtained-off dock to disguise his identity, said one of his sons, a farm worker, had been shot dead by Mr. Hussein's forces on the day of the clashes in Dujail, and four others had been executed on the orders of Awad al-Bandar, chief judge of the revolutionary court, who is on trial with Mr. Hussein.

The witness, now more than 80 years old, said he only learned his four executed sons were dead when an Iraqi group tracking down missing persons after Mr. Hussein was toppled found a list of 148 Dujail men and teenage boys whose death sentences had been handed down by Mr. Bandar in 1984.