FNC’s Greg Palkot, who is covering the trial of Saddam Hussein, turns in a Reporter’s Notebook…

I ran into the judge a few weeks ago at a hotel in Baghdad. He is a soft spoken pleasant man and I complimented him on taking on one of the most difficult jobs in Iraq right now. Then he posed a slightly unnerving question. He asked me how I thought he was doing. I was on the spot. I could either express my building concerns about Saddam’s grandstanding overshadowing the whole proceeding, or I could tell him I thought he was trying to strike a difficult balance between soft and hard. I chose the diplomatic latter.

Now I wish I had leveled with him.

Sitting through this week’s performance by the ex-dictator, sitting for the first time in the press box just a few feet from the fellow who had dominated the lives of Iraqis for decades (and my own reporting for years), I was struck by the growing craziness of the man, and the process. It was similar to listening to an aging hippie having an LSD flashback about the Summer of Love in San Francisco. Except it happened in the middle of one of the most important legal affairs on the planet right now.