The argument for releasing photos of Osama bin Laden to confirm his death has merit, but I suspect bloodlust against the man who generated fear in American society for the last decade also fuels the desire for proof positive that “you will not see bin Laden walking on this earth again.”
President Obama’s decision to withhold the images of Osama and his sea burial also has merit. He didn’t want others using them for propaganda and incitement for retaliation. Obama also told CBS’ 60 Minutes: “That’s not who we are. You know, we don’t trot out this stuff as trophies.”
FBI's Most Wanted flyer image
Displaying images of corpses provokes strong arguments on all sides but for administration officials it is never a matter of just taste or civility but a moment of cold political calculation for both foreign policy and domestic politics.
There are times when the decision is to expose the reality of violent death.
Soon after the Iraq invasion in 2003, President George W. Bush okayed the release of death photos of the Saddam Hussein’s two grown sons, Uday and Qusay. Their father had not yet been captured and Bush didn’t want Iraqis thinking there might be a stalemate or doubting the war spelled the end of Saddam.
“Now, more than ever,” Bush said after the sons were killed and as they were photographed in the morgue, “all Iraqis can know that the former regime is gone and will not be coming back.”
A striking image of death can be used to address a complex political equation.
Following the attack on Pearl Harbor and well into the war in the Pacific, the American public had never seen a photo of a dead U.S. soldier, sailor or Marine.
There was a tacit pact between the media (mostly newspapers and magazines) and the Roosevelt administration to avoid images they thought might demoralize the citizenry and hurt the war effort.
In 1943, however, the war had been going on for nearly 18 months and thousands of soldiers had died fighting in the South Pacific and elsewhere.
In September of that year, with the blessing of the White House, Life magazine published a full-page photo—a sad, lonesome image really—of three dead American soldiers in the sand of Buna Beach, Papua New Guinea, a half-submerged landing craft in the background.
The battle had occurred seven months earlier but the White House was concerned about complacency and a rise in public grumbling over shortages and food rationing at home. Roosevelt gave Life the go-ahead because he wanted to show civilians that other Americans were making far greater sacrifices.
The Internet, of course, has made that kind of control almost impossible. Just a day after the raid on Bin Laden’s Pakistan hideaway, Reuters put up photos of two men and Bin Laden’s son who also were killed in the house.
Bogus images of Bin Laden also emerged. Some were crude Photoshop manipulations of screen grabs from movies and from other photos. They were quickly dismissed.
Often a president has no say in whether the world sees an image of a dead American.
The photo of a nearly naked dead U.S. soldier being dragged through the dusty streets of Mogadishu created outrage among the American public and prompted the Clinton administration to withdraw from that bedeviled and failed nation.
Releasing images of dead enemy bodies has been common throughout American wars of the 20th century, but is never as fraught as showing American soldiers dead or at the moment of death.
From World War II through the invasion of Panama, Americans saw the return of thousands of American soldiers in flag-draped caskets to Dover Air Base in Delaware. In the lead-up to the first Gulf War, however, then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney forbade photographers from recording the arrival of the caskets. The ban lasted 18 years until Obama reversed the decision and personally attended the return of several soldiers and set out new rules for the families to decide whether they wanted media coverage.
One of the more recent controversies about using graphic images came in September 2009 when the Associated Press published a photo and story about a fatally wounded soldier in Afghanistan. The family objected to showing the soldier slumped on a hillside just after a rocket-propelled grenade struck him.
