"The electrician has entered the execution chamber," says the observer "The hood is being placed on at this time The execution is now in progress. As the current entered his body he stiffened and I heard a pop as if one of the straps broke. He is still at this time sitting there with his fists clenched. There is no movement now from the condemned man."Yes, you can sit in front of your computer and hear a tinny little voice chronicle the last breath that leaves a man's body And again And again.

The whole phenomenon seems to be straight out of aDon DeLillo novel ­ except that it's not: it's for real. When people talked about the internet drawing people together and creating a global village, they probably didn't expect the neighbours to be crowded around the village gallows, pointing and commenting as the condemned man twitched in his death throes.The last public execution in the United States took place more than 60 years ago. But Americans are craning their necks again to see what is going on in their execution chambers. These new audio offerings were posted on the internet last week.

They were recorded over the last 20 years in Jackson, Georgia, by prison staff who observed each execution "as part of policy and procedure", and were tracked down just recently by a radio producer.On Wednesday next week, Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, will be killed in Indiana by lethal injection, and voices are being raised to demand that his execution be made public. Entertainment Network, which transmits live feeds from college dormitories and the like, has requested the right to put a webcam in the execution chamber to broadcast every detail to pay-per-view subscribers. Although an American court threw out their application, the Network is appealing, arguing that "the public has a right to know".For many commentators, this desire to open up the execution chamber is only to be condemned. Cardinal Theodore McCarrick said, "It is like going back to the Roman Colosseum". The authorities seem to agree, and although the Indiana town where McVeigh will be killed will be turned into a circus next week, with a thousand reporters crawling over the place to do their live feeds from outside the prison walls, there will not be a camera in the execution chamber.But for anyone looking at American society from the outside, this fierce debate over whether or not McVeigh's death should be broadcast is beside the point.

Isn't it pretty clear that the most revolting thing is not that people might see McVeigh's death, but that he is going to be killed at all? And not just that this one murderer is going to be killed, but that the United States, which sees itself as the beacon of world civilisation, has executed more than 700 people in the last 24 years? If something is too horrible to be broadcast, outsiders might ask, why is it happening at all?If the United States decided to make every execution public, by televising it, there would be people who watched out of pure voyeurism People who watched laughing, drinking beer, cheering. This would be horrible, but at least then the United States would be revealed in its true colours ­ not as the decent, humane society that it likes to sell itself as, but as the barbaric country that it is, a country that kills and kills again, in the face of all international condemnation.At the moment, the fact that executions are hidden away means that American people never confront the horror that is right at the heart of their criminal-justice system. They are able to congratulate themselves on being so civilised, while their barbarism goes on, day after day, week after week, year after year, behind closed doors.As for the idea that public executions would be a return to the Roman Colosseum ­ well, how far is our society from that already? Already, the American and British media turn murderers into celebrities. They have been riveted by Timothy McVeigh ever since he was arrested for exploding the fertiliser bomb that killed 168 people in Oklahoma City in 1995.His reaction to the media circus around him shows clearly that far from being a deterrent, the death penalty is a positive spur to a certain kind of deranged mind.

Instead of a boring, meaningless long life behind bars, McVeigh has achieved the kind of extreme celebrity and the platform for his crazy political views that he has always sought. He is, as his biographer has noted, wholly indifferent to his own death as well as to the deaths of others. And by handing out invitations to his execution to people like Gore Vidal, who has said that he found McVeigh "intelligent, well-read" and acting "out of a sense of justified grievance", McVeigh has found a way to exploit his execution. By setting up his death, the American state has entered into a weird complicity with this murderer.But it's a pity that the debate over broadcasting executions has blown up over McVeigh's execution rather than any other of the 700 people executed in the US over the last 20 years. It's understandable, however ­ because while the media love McVeigh, they just aren't interested in the other people who die by state injection.McVeigh is not like, say, Juan Soria, who was executed last year although he clearly did not even have the mental capacity to understand what an execution was, let alone the mental capacity to defend himself. In his final statement he said, "They say I'm going to have surgery, so I guess I will see everyone after the surgery is performed". He is not like Willie Fisher, also killed this year, even though he had been defended by a lawyer whose severe depression meant that he did not adequately prepare for the trial and who was later disbarred.These people, who were children, who were mentally handicapped, who did not have a fair trial, faced execution without any of the kerfuffle that surrounds McVeigh's, but they are the ones who show the American death penalty in its barbaric reality.If we look too hard at Timothy McVeigh, we run the risk of forgetting what the routine workings of Death Row are like.