In case it matters to you, I did not watch the video of Saddam’s execution — nor do I intend to. But after mulling the situation over for the past couple of days, I’ve come to a contrarian conclusion: it was probably a good thing, and we should encourage more examples of it.

I realize that this opinion is not only likely to be unpopular, but is also likely to make a number of decent people incredibly angry. But consider this: with or without the surreptitious camera-phone, the rest of the Saddam execution “procedure” (what else to call it? a “ritual”? a “ceremony”?) would have occurred in exactly the same way. I haven’t heard the slightest suggestion that the guards and other attendees in the room were “acting” for the benefit of a worldwide movie audience. They were who they were, and they behaved as they behaved. The only difference between this execution, and the many others that have taken place in post-Saddam Iraq — not to mention the thousands (if not tens of thousands) of executions that took place during Saddam’s reign — is that the whole world (excepting me, and President Bush, who presumably had his own reasons) could actually see what a travesty it was.

Would we have been better off if the execution had taken place with all of the taunting and cursing, followed by some kind of official government statement assuring the public that Saddam’s final moments took place in an atmosphere of dignity and decorum? It’s hard to believe that we would have received anything but such a pabulum announcement; can anyone seriously believe that without the video recording, the official statement would have said something like, “Well, we intended to carry out the execution properly, but things got out of control, and several of the invited guests behaved badly, not to mention some of the guards.”?

We now hear that several of the executions that took place during Saddam’s reign were equally barbaric; but given his overall behavior over a period of decades, that should not come as a surprise. But doesn’t this video recording make you wonder just how properly the Iraqi government has conducted all of the trials and executions since Saddam was overthrown? According to CNN (see “Iraq executions first since Saddam“), the new Iraqi government began executing people by hanging in 2005 — not just insurgents and terrorists, but also people convicted of other crimes; the 2005 incident reported by CNN involved three people convicted of murder and rape. Try googling “iraq executions” and see how many stories you pull up; and then ask yourself: in a country funded, subsidized, and supported by the U.S. government, just how proper have the government’s capital-punishment trials and executions really been?

Well, I don’t know … and given my limited attention span, I must admit that I don’t care very much. I care much more about things going on in my own back yard. Well, maybe a little further away than my back yard in New York City: how about my national “back yard” that includes the detention facilities in Guantanamo Bay? According to the Wikipedia article on the Guantanamo Bay detainment camp,

“Most of the detainees still at Guantanamo are not scheduled for trial. As of November 2006, according to MSNBC.com, out of 775 detainees who have been brought to Guantanamo, approximately 340 have been released, leaving 435 detainees. Of those 435, 110 have been labeled as ready for release. Of the other 325, only “more than 70″ will face trial, the Pentagon says. That leaves about 250 who may be held indefinitely.”

From what I understand, those 70 Guantanamo detainees — along with “enemy combatants” and accused terrorists being held in other undisclosed government locations around the world — who do eventually receive a “trial” may find that they are not properly represented by legal counsel; or that they are not fully informed of the charges being brought against them; or that they are not allowed to see the evidence being presented against them; or that they may face other legal obstacles and impediments that would never be tolerated in an open U.S. court of law.

Whether this is true or not, I simply don’t know. But considering the dishonesty, misrepresentation, and extreme secrecy that has accompanied much of the “war on terror” during the past five years, I have a hard time believing almost any government statement about the manner in which it carries out justice. I’d hate to think that it was as savage and brutal as the circumstances surrounding Saddam’s execution, but it may turn out that the best way to put the questions to rest would be a whole bunch of unofficial, hidden camera phones. (Updated to add: Along these lines, it was disturbing to see an article in today’s Washington Post entitled “FBI Reports Duct-Taping, ‘Baptizing’ at Guantanamo,” describing “allegations of religiously oriented tactics used against Muslim prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.)

By the way, if you think this whole discussion is ridiculous, take yourself back to 2004 and ask yourself this: how did the information about the abuse and torture of prisoners in the Abu Ghraib prison come to public attention? It surely wasn’t the result of a public relations announcement from Donald Rumsfeld and his friends at the Defense Department! (Updated to add: arguably, the photos taken by a U.S. soldier within the prison would never have gotten any attention had they not been picked up and publicized by Seymour Hersh, and an April 28, 2004 60 Minutes II news report. But Hersh already had the credentials and reputation to get the story into the mainstream press; today’s “citizen journalists” have to rely on blogs and YouTube. And keep in mind that YouTube didn’t exist when the Abu Ghraib story broke.)

(Updated to add: For those who feel that Guantanamo, and imprisonment of alleged terrorists, is something remote and unrelated to their own lives, perhaps we should be focusing our attention on sneaking cellphone cameras into the courtrooms of small towns, where, as a recent New York Times article observed, “over the decades justices have illegally jailed people, threatened their enemies, protected their friends and made grievous legal errors, with little supervision or penalty. The law often counts for little, because three-quarters of the justices are not lawyers.” (See “Small-Town Judge’s Personal Justice Stirs Concerns.”) The New York Times, the other large mainstream newspapers and television channels, and even the local newspapers don’t have the resources to report on these problems as they occur; but concerned citizens, armed with pocket cameraphones, and access to YouTube, might be able to expose such miscarriages of justice.)

Ultimately, my opinion about all of this doesn’t matter: I’m not in charge of government policy, I’m not in charge of any prisons, I’m not a politician running for President (or even for dog-catcher!), and I’m not a TV commentator. The guards — or whoever they were — in Saddam’s execution chamber didn’t ask me for permission to turn on their camera phone, and they didn’t ask you, and I doubt very much they asked Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki. They — or he or she, if it turns out to have been just one person — just did it.

And it occurs to me that unless he/she/they were extremely naive, or completely bereft of their senses because of the emotion of the moment, it must have occurred to them that they would be identified sooner or later. And it probably would have occurred to them that they would be arrested; indeed, the ultimate irony is that they, too, could be hung for their misdeeds. And yet … and yet … they did it. Whether you agree with their actions or not, it does say something about the strength of their conviction — just as you have to acknowledge the strength of convictions on the part of the individual(s) who sent photographs and videos of the Abu Ghraib abuses to reporters when they felt their complaints were being covered up.

I don’t know if anyone will be able to sneak camera phones into the Guantanamo Bay trial proceedings, if there ever are any; but I sure hope it happens. And I hope it happens with every other closed, secret hearing, trial, and government proceeding taking place around the world. Any such events will cause controversy, angry debate, and probably severe punishment for the individuals shedding light upon the dark secrecy. But in the end, I think we’ll all be better for it.

(Updated to add: keep in mind that none of this would have been practicable, perhaps not even possible, as recently as five years ago: we didn’t have freely available Internet services like YouTube, and we didn’t have pocket-size cell phones with built-in video recording mechanisms. A bulky, old-fashioned video camera would have been spotted, and probably confiscated in Saddam’s execution chamber; and if someone had tried to upload a video to commercial online services like AOL or CompuServe, they probably would have been rejected, or quickly deleted. It makes you wonder what things will be like five years from now: perhaps we’ll have tiny recording devices, embedded in our eyeglasses; and the video recording technology will presumably be much more like the HDTV we see on our televisions today. And who knows what YouTube and its competitors will have morphed into?

To some extent, though, the technology is only a small part of what’s happening; it’s an enabler, but it’s not the main story. When I think about all of these recent events, I’m reminded of a 1968 movie, Medium Cool, about the television and media coverage of the Vietnam War protests, especially those associated with the 1968 Democratic National Convention. One of the lines in that movie, which was chanted over and over again by protesting crowds, was “The whole world is watching. The whole world is watching.”

And indeed, now that we have the technology of camera phones, and the distribution services of YouTube and blogs, the whole world is watching. And as I suggested in my original draft of this article, in the end, I think we’ll all be better for it.)