There's no stopping the footage anymore, whether it's the sex life of a celebrity or the death of a tyrant.

The voyeurism that passeth all understanding may have climaxed Saturday with the execution of Saddam Hussein at the end of a hangman's rope. Within hours of his death, video of Saddam's last moments and the death-chamber celebration that followed was posted on the Web and viewed by untold thousands, if not millions.

Thursday, it was the number one item on Technorati, the Internet search engine that indexes more than 55 million blogs.

Just as pornography has become a click away for one's secret pleasures, death is now at our disposal.

To click or not to click, that is the question.

Who hasn't been tempted? It's right there for any to see: the platform, the masked executioners, the noose, the trap door. That much we've all seen on TV without going to the full clip, which was captured on a cell phone by one of the witnesses.

There's something vaguely familiar about those grainy images. Where have we seen it before? The footage has the amateurish feel of ``The Blair Witch Project,'' the horror film that was made scarier somehow by its pseudo-documentary style. But that's not it.

Where we've seen it before was in the horror movies Islamist terrorists staged when they butchered hostages such as Nick Berg and Daniel Pearl, knowing that the world would watch.

The differences are obvious, of course. Berg and Pearl were innocents, and Saddam was a lawless monster indicted, tried and convicted under a civilized code of jurisprudence. If anyone deserved ultimate justice for crimes against humanity, Saddam did. In death, he joins that foul fraternity of other torturers and murderers for whom death was tardy.

Nevertheless, watching someone die -- especially at the hands of the state -- takes us several steps backward into a darker time when people gathered in the public square to watch a man swing at the end of a rope.

The history of human barbarity is long -- and not at all long ago. For reasons that bear examination, human beings have not needed much encouragement to swarm to the gallows. Or, as now, to click. Continued...