SADDAM'S THIRD SON?

The rumors are everywhere...but then, so are the rumors that the GIs sunglasses can see through clothes.

In a country where the regime obsessively controlled information for 35 years and contact with the outside world was tightly limited, rumor flourished as a popular, if dangerous, pastime. When the regime collapsed and at last people could pass on rumors without fear of being arrested or killed, the pastime blossomed into a full-scale national sport.

Every day absurd stories pass from mouth to ear and appear in the dozens of unreliable new newspapers: The Jews are buying up Baghdad; the American soldiers are all foreign mercenaries; a leading pro-American Iraqi politician blew up the Jordanian Embassy this month. But amid the nonsense, the Ali rumor lingers with a tenacity that is both uncommon and potentially destabilizing.

Even in the West, Ali's existence has been widely reported as fact.

Now Hussein's "hopes rest on Ali, the precocious son of Samira Shahbandar, his second wife," Britain's Sunday Telegraph declared after the killing of Uday and Qusay. The two were from Hussein's first marriage.

Ali "is believed to be in Switzerland," The Washington Post reported late last month in a story that also appeared in Newsday.

"And by the way, Saddam has another son with Samira, a young man by the name of Ali, who again, is out there, and nobody knows where he is, either," respected Iraq commentator Kenneth Pollack said on CNN on Aug. 1.

The Associated Press, Britain's Sunday Times and several authoritative books on Iraq and Hussein have reported Ali's existence as fact.

Other news organizations, some highly reputed, some less so, have offered varied details. One said Hussein's remaining son was called Seif and was 20, not 16. Others had Ali in training to run his father's security services or managing a sports club. Several recent stories have him hiding out with his father in Iraq as the American forces search for the former president.

All, or none, may be true. Time magazine, for example, recently reported that a former valet and a former secretary of Hussein both deny that Ali exists.

On the streets and in the homes and offices of Baghdad, there is only confusion and contradiction.