Okay, everybody knew that Saddam was a tyrant who had ruled through fear and killed with impunity. In fact, for the last 15 or so years, since the US revoked his status as friend and declared him a foe, he was the Butcher of Baghdad. Whatever fate awaited him, he was undeserving of our sympathy.

But to die in that manner, with witnesses taunting him on the precipice of hell, the last seconds before his judicial killing drained of dignity, all that was truly shocking to a civilised people like us. Wasn't it?

Who but the brutal or brutalised would relegate a legal execution to the status of mob revenge killing? Who would strip of all solemnity the occasion of a state invoking the most terrible violence on one of its citizens?

Those people, with their cameras secretly filming the pornography of violent death, know not what it is to be imbued with our Christian Judaic values. Do they?

The reaction to the filming and taunting of Saddam on the gallows has been loaded with hypocrisy. It's as if all that went before in his journey from toppled despot to convicted mass murder was perfectly legitimate.

The trial that sent him to the gallows was of the kangaroo variety. He wasn't allowed to question any witnesses. He wasn't allowed to speak in his defence. The presiding judge had access to a button under his table which switched off Saddam's microphone if he began talking out of turn or spraying allegations. (In a similar, if more civilised scene, Liam Lawlor was once subjected to the same fate at the Mahon tribunal, when the chairman switched off his microphone to stop him banging on about something or other. ) Any secrets about US or broader western complicity in the early years of his rule were out of bounds. The whole purpose of the trial was to give some official shape to his hanging. That was also the reason why he was not tried in the International Criminal Court, where despots are usually dispatched to receive justice. If he had been referred there, he would not be killed, and may have revealed uncomfortable secrets.

As for the spectre of a state facilitating a revenge killing, what else is the death penalty? Many states in the US use the death penalty frequently, yet it has had no impact on the level of serious crime. Any notion that killing convicts will act as a deterrent to others has long been discredited.

Nobody knows this more than George Bush, who signed in excess of 150 death warrants when he was governor of Texas.

Retribution is only motivation for invoking state killing. In that context, the goading of Saddam on the gallows by officials who may have experienced his terror, hardly plumbs much lower depths than the apparent dignified executions stateside.

In the aftermath of the spectacle, much was made of the person who had the temerity to film the hanging.

An official investigation was launched and one man reportedly arrested, as if his crime was truly shocking.

Was it? What about the filming of violent scenes of torture by US and British soldiers in Iraq? Is the action of recording that not equally shocking? What of the so called happy slapping phenomenon taking hold in the West, where the only purpose of perpetrating violence is to record it?

Nothing that transpired in that dank chamber on 30 December was out of kilter with the behaviour of plenty of us in the West. Any notions that the brutalised people of Iraq are less civilised than us . . . we, who are co-conspirators of the US through our government's stony silence . . . is pure hokum.

At the apex of our Western values stands the leader of the free world. Apparently, he was tucked up in bed at the time of the killing with instructions not to be woken.

The execution took place at 3am Irish time, or 9pm Texas time. What time does the lil' ol' leader go to bed? Is he merely sleepwalking his way through the horror he has unleashed in Iraq?