Rep. Peter King told the Daily News that he felt "intense satisfaction" after seeing photos of Osama Bin Laden's corpse taken by Navy SEALs after their raid on bin Laden's Abottabad safehouse. After repeating Senator James Inhofe's description of the brains spilling out of bin Laden's eye socket, King said that the photos themselves were put together "like a wedding album." No word on whether the CIA used those special little scissors to breathe some well-needed whimsy into photographic evidence of the dead terrorist leader.
Next to the corpse photos, King said that there were photos of "a more vibrant Bin Laden, from the same angle, so viewers could compare jaw line, nose, and facial features." Besides the weird terrorist Glamour Shot before-and-afters, there was also a photo of the terrorist leader before his sea burial, "wrapped in a shroud, laid out on a plank." When we kill Kim Jong Il, can Martha Stewart preserve the memories?
Politico details the Obama administration's fight to keep the photos out of the public purview and exempted from the many FOIA requests that have been filed; one FOIA expert is quoted as saying "there's a much better than 50-50 chance that the government will not prevail" in keeping them under wraps. Obama has said that “We don’t need to spike the football," and "given the graphic nature of these photos, it would create some national security risk.” The killing of 12 UN workers after a pastor burned the Koran last month would seem to lend credence to this argument, but the experts aren't buying it: that "disclosure would somehow ‘damage national security'...seems far-fetched” a classification specialist says.
Other concerns cited by the administration to prevent the photos' release include the fear that they would be "Photoshopped" in a way that could be inflammatory, but we don't see how they could be more inflammatory than this.
