From 20 feet away on an observer 's bench , seated beside the late Peter Jennings of ABC News and Christiane Amanpour of CNN , I caught my first glimpse of the man who had become in my years of visiting Iraq under his rule , a figure of mythic brutality , a man so feared that the mention of his name would set the hard , unsmiling men assigned to visiting reporters as '' minders '' to shaking with fear , and on one occasion , in my experience , to abject weeping .