POLITICO, May 4, 2011--The White House will not release the photos of Osama bin Laden taken after he was killed, President Barack Obama said Wednesday.
“It is important for us to make sure that very graphic photos of somebody who was shot in the head are not floating around as an incitement to additional violence or as a propaganda tool,” Obama said in an interview he taped with CBS’s “60 Minutes.”
“That’s not who we are,” the president said, according to quotes White House Press Secretary Jay Carney relayed at the daily news briefing Wednesday. “We don’t trot out this stuff as trophies.”
“We don’t need to spike the football, and I think that given the graphic nature of these photos it would create some national security risk.”
Obama told “60 Minutes” that releasing the photos would not dissuade conspiracy theorists and might lead to violence.
“We don’t think that a photograph in and of itself is going to make any difference. There are going to be some folks who deny it,” Obama said. “The fact of the matter is you are not going to see Bin Laden walking on this Earth again.”
The president said there is no need to release the photo because bin Laden’s death is beyond reasonable dispute.
“We are absolutely certain that this was him. We’ve done DNA sampling and testing, and so there is no doubt that we killed Osama bin Laden,” the president told CBS. “Certainly there is … no doubt among Al Qaeda members that he is dead.”
CNN is reporting that there are three sets of photos of bin Laden’s corpse: from the raid, from a hangar in Afghanistan and from the USS Carl Vinson, before he was wrapped in a shroud and buried at sea. The shot from the hangar is close up on his face, with a visible head wound across both eyes, and is said to be the goriest.
Carney said the president’s decision was due in part to concerns that the photos could be used to glorify bin Laden or his cause.
“There is a long history of images like that being used to rally opinion to [portray] people depicted in those photographs as heroes. We’re not interested in doing that,” Carney said.
Posted By: Richard Kigel
Wednesday, May 4th 2011 at 4:23PM
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