Saddam appeared in gay pornos

KUWAIT CITY -- Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein has been caught with his pants down -- literally. A shocking 1968 porn film has surfaced, in which the flamboyant strongman appears performing raunchy homosexual acts!

The image quality of the grainy 16mm film, uncovered by the Kuwaiti secret police, is poor -- but experts who've taken a close look at the hairy-chested actor are "100 percent certain" it is a younger, trimmer Saddam.

"There is no doubt in my mind that this is Saddam -- there's no mistaking those eyes and that distinctive nose," declares Hussein biographer Sadiq al-Sabah of Kuwait, who's seen the eye-popping footage first-hand.

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Still photographs from the sizzling XXX-rated film, La'iba al-Waladaani (The Two Boys Played), were leaked to a Kuwait news magazine after authorities found it amid a stash of illicit porn in the vault of a recently deceased sheik.

Release of the pictures has resulted in howls of protest from Baghdad.

"President Hussein is the manliest of men. He would never behave in such a repugnant manner," says an Iraqi spokesman. "This is CIA propaganda."

But rumors that Saddam appeared in gay porn films in his younger days have dogged him for decades and almost torpedoed his political career when he was a rising star in the ruling Baath Socialist party.

"He was able to squelch the rumors in the past, but now it looks like the Kuwaitis have found the smoking gun," says a State Department source.

Al-Sabah claims that Saddam, then a struggling law student, acted in porn to make ends meet -- and because he was addicted to gay sex.

In the newly uncovered 86-minute prison flick, Saddam, then just 34, plays a naive young peasant who is wrongly convicted and sent to jail. He is initiated into homosexuality by a series of older and more experienced cons.

"Saddam's acting in the picture is actually quite good," al-Sabah notes. "One scene, in which he buries his face in a pillow and cries, is so touching you almost can forget you're watching a low-budget sexploitation film."