USA govt weighs pros and cons of releasing photos of Osama bin Laden

In 2003 when pictures of the bodies of Saddam Hussein's dead sons were released by the U.S  military, it was to prove that they were dead and to stem attacks on U.S soldiers in Iraq.

However releasing photos of Osama bin Laden's body is a much more difficult proposition.

On Tuesday the Obama administration was still debating whether to release the gruesome images of bin Laden's corpse. They would like to demonstrate to the world that he is dead but there is a risk that the images could provoke further anti-U.S. sentiment.

In an interview with NBC Nightly News on Tuesday, the CIA Director Leon Panetta said that a photograph would ultimately be released but the government has been talking about how best to do this.

Some doctored images purporting to be bin Laden already have surfaced on the Internet.
The FBI also warned Tuesday to use caution upon receipt of e-mails that purport to show photos or videos of bin Laden's death because some are being used to spread viruses.

National security law experts had mixed opinions, expressing many of the same concerns as the Obama administration.

A senior U.S official told CNN that the picture in which bin Laden is most recognizable, taken on the hangar is also the grisliest, so it couldn't be published on the front page of a newspaper.

Steven Aftergood, a leading open government advocate who runs the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, told The Lookout that despite his default belief in transparency, he's not eager to see the photos make public. He argues that this would not change sceptics' minds but would lead to some distasteful merchandise celebrating the killing.

Among lawmakers on Capitol Hill, there appears to be a growing sentiment that the pros of releasing the photos outweigh the cons.

"It may be necessary to release the pictures, as gruesome as they undoubtedly will be, because he's been shot in the head, to quell any doubts that this somehow is a ruse that the American government has carried out," Sen. Joe Lieberman, a Connecticut Indepedendent who chairs the Homeland Security Committee, said yesterday.

The top Republican on that committee, Sen. Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, agreed: "I recognize that there will be those who will try to generate this myth that he's alive, and that we missed him somehow, and in order to put that to rest it may be necessary to release some of the pictures, or video, or the DNA test," she said.

A spokesman for the Taliban has said there's no proof that the killing happened. And some American conservatives have suggested that more evidence is needed to convince them.