BAGHDAD, Iraq — The wild gray beard was gone, and he sat on a metal Army cot, just awake from a nap, in socks and black slippers. He was not handcuffed. He did not recognize all of his visitors, but they recognized him. That was the purpose of the visit: to help confirm that this was, in fact, Saddam Hussein.

What came next was, according to people in the room, an extraordinary 30 minutes in the Sunday afternoon meeting, in which four new leaders of Iraq pointedly questioned the nation's deposed and now captured leader about his crimes. Saddam, they said, was defiant and unrepentant but very much defeated.

"The world is crazy," said Mowaffak al-Rubaie, a Governing Council member in the room on Sunday after Saddam was captured in his hometown, Tikrit. "I was in his torture chamber in 1979, and now he was sitting there powerless in front of me without anybody stopping me from doing anything to him. Just imagine. We were arguing, and he was using very foul language."

Ahmad Chalabi, a council member and head of the Iraqi National Congress, who was also in the room, said: "He was quite lucid. He had command of his faculties. He would not apologize to the Iraqi people. He did not deny any of the crimes he was confronted with having done. He tried to justify them."

Following Saddam's capture — in an 8-foot hole that one council member said was filled with "rats and mice" — the four leaders were taken by helicopter on Sunday afternoon to a military base, at a site they would not disclose. Two others, in addition to Rubaie and Chalabi, were aboard: Adnan Pachachi, a council member who was the foreign minister before Saddam came to power, and Adel Abdel Mahdi, who represents the Shiites, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq.