Gordon Carrera

That's wild, isn't it?

And the pictures of it are astounding because he emerges from this hole.

I mean, he looks terrible.

His hair is a mess.

He's got this long, straggly beard.

He looks like a man who's been hiding in a spider hole for six months.

And he comes out and he says, I am Saddam Hussein, the duly elected president of Iraq.

I am willing to negotiate.

He tells the soldiers, which has a kind of weird, tells you something about his psychology.

And actually, one of the ways they identify him, because I've got to be sure it's him, is a scar that he had from being shot in that 1959 assassination attempt we talked about right at the start.

But of course, Saddam is then put on trial and he's handed over to the new Iraqi government that takes over and it doesn't end well for him.

It is because it's filmed on a kind of grainy mobile phone footage almost, isn't it?

And they're shouting abuse at him as he's hung, the people who are doing it.

It's really weird, isn't it?

No, go on.

That is wild.

I think that's really important because that sense in which he's detached from reality, which I think we've got through talking about him, explains some of the weird decisions he takes, some of the weird statements he makes.

It's so interesting because there's a

he gets debriefed by both CIA and FBI.

And you can read accounts of this as a book, Debriefing the President by John Nixon, where John Nixon, who'd been a CIA leadership analyst studying Saddam, gets to go meet him and debrief him over his time in captivity.