"And just like that, history's most expansive, expensive and exasperating manhunt was over. The inert frame of Osama bin Laden, America's enemy No. 1, was placed in a helicopter for burial at sea, never to be seen or feared again. A nation that spent a decade tormented by its failure to catch the man responsible for nearly 3,000 fiery deaths in New York, outside Washington and Pennsylvania on Sept. 11, 2001, at long last had its sense of finality, at least in this one difficult chapter."
This was a "news" story, something that we're told should at least aim for objectivity and be about cold facts and information. This was more poetics than inverted pyramid. "America's enemy No. 1 ... never to be seen or feared again. ... A nation ... at long last had its sense of finality." It was written in a language of holiness more appropriate for a national poet laureate than the nation's paper of record. It was the killing of bin Laden as a mythic national event.
As mainstream news outlets were cheerleading the raid, they were discarding their professional skepticism and parroting the lines of people like John Brennan, the White House counter-terrorism adviser who fabricated false narrative facts in a blatant manner reminiscent of the Jessica Lynch incident. Many may recall during the run-up to the Iraq War, The Times was caught using fabricated facts fed directly to them from the Bush administration. You might have thought The Times had learned something, but, again, out of the gate, given the choice between truth and feel-good national myth, they went with the latter.
Everything Brennan said built a first-impression image of fierce armed opposition, when in reality, as The Times did report later, the Seal Team met little resistance and gunned down people like bin Laden's 19-year-old son as he came down the stairs unarmed and no doubt terrified at all the noise.
It's understandable that members of the Seal Team were pumped to the gills on adrenaline as they entered the compound. So questioning the shooting of bin Laden in the head is an exercise in futility. No matter what the Pentagon may say, given the volatility of politics in America and in the world, bringing Osama bin Laden back to the US alive was not going to happen.
Tossing his corpse into the Arabian Sea served two purposes. One, it gets him out of the way, and two, it exhibits the US military's power by being an insult to anyone who questions what they have done. Deciding to censor the photos emphasizes the same thing. It separates those with power from those without it, as it turns information and knowledge those in power have into a crime for those without power. It's exactly the fertile soil out of which WikiLeaks grew. In that spirit, we can only hope someone will have the courage to leak the photos for the cause of the freedom of information. It's not about being morbid.
President Obama and His Trophy Raid
On the evening after the killing, Obama told a bi-partisan group of congress members he wanted to "harness" the killing of bin Laden for its power to unite America. A couple days later when he decided to censor the real-life, gritty photo of the killing he was so ready to "harness" for political purposes, he said, "That's not who we are. We don't trot out this stuff as trophies." So, while he may not gloat over trophies, he is not above mining them for symbolic gold. President Obama's poll numbers have reportedly risen nearly 10 points since the raid went down.
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