“We don’t spike the football.”
— President Obama Sunday night on 60 Minutes, explaining why his administration did not want to release grisly photos of the late Osama bin Laden.
You would think President Obama would be wise to the way the world works. Creative people with too much time on their hands have been hounding him for years that his birth certificate has been falsified and there has been a vast conspiracy to hide the fact that he was born off of American soil. If so much energy has been expended over something as minor as his birthplace shouldn’t he consider that his word might not be good enough when it comes to the death of America’s greatest villain since the fall of the Soviet Union?
Osama Bin Laden was killed by American forces on Sunday, May 2. President Obama told the country, “after a firefight, they killed Osama Bin Laden and took custody of his body.” But instead of bringing the body to America they had a burial at sea for Bin Laden. A burial with no pictures coupled with no pictures of Bin Laden’s corpse.
Government officials say the reason they won’t distribute the pictures is they don’t wish to offend people. Yes, the Moslems are one group whose feelings we have been very sensitive toward. We only torture them if they have valuable information. We only bomb them if they are in our way. We only strip search them if they enter an airport. Showing them a photograph of a dead man will be the last straw.
I can kind of see the government’s point of view in that if there are large groups of people who think President Obama’s birth certificate was forged, wouldn’t those same people think Bid Laden’s corpse photograph was Photoshopped? Probably, but it seems even more naive to tell people to just take the government on their word that Bin Laden is dead. The same government that lied about the Tonkin Gulf Resolution to increase the American military presence in Vietnam? Or the government that lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq so they could oust Saddam Hussein?
The government also has to figure that if photographs of Bin Laden’s corpse do exist in this age of Wikileaks and information superhighways someone will hijack the photos and post them on-line. The cynical part in me thinks the government is waiting for this to happen to extend the news coverage of this story which is a major victory for the current regime.
The Hollywood screenwriter in me has a more outlandish explanation for this entire brouhaha. Osama Bin Laden never existed. Has anyone ever seen this guy? The government needed a boogey man to place the blame on 9/11 and they created a scary, bearded one named Osama Bin Laden. Any time Bush needed a push in the polls they would hire an actor to go out to the Mojave desert to curse America’s evil empire. The actor playing Bin Laden was tired of this role and so his government handlers created an epic death scene for him.
Ridiculous? I guess, but no more so than the idea that a photograph is too offensive for today’s society.
Starring Pablo Chiste 
Sounds like shades of 1984 to me! Orwell would be proud of your outlandish hypothesis about Osama, because honestly, I thought the government had already killed this man 2 previous times. Am I wrong???
Bush for Vendetta certainly pushed the envelope for Orwellian conspiracy craziness with everything from Osama, to weather control, to acts of God, to Hussein in the Membrane, to oil gouging, to the fact people actually voted him into the White House. My first thought, still to this day, was that Bush and Company had something to do with 9/11, meaning the US government still to this day and many beyond as well as many before are nothing but war mongering skulls that want to rule the entire planet, not just the United States. That goes without saying, who doesn’t when you have power, right?
Darth Obama, Darth George’s protege as it seems, has just continued the voyage he had begun, and I full well expect the next prez will do the very same because the only true enemy that is left in this world….IS THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA! I mean, once Gaddafi is gone, who is left???? The Venezuelans? Pakistanis? Chinese? Indians? K-Pax? Who is the next greatest threat to the United States???
I once had a US History professor say that all of the major powers that have ever existed since the dawn of human history, if you traced it back, they each had 3 strikes go against them that ultimately lead to their demise (and he compared it to baseball because he was a bigger baseball nut than I am). After having a major victory, twice, in both World War I and World War II, the United States became a world power. But almost immediately we began shooting ourselves in the foot and flailing away at the plate because of our own egos. The first strike for the United States was The Korean Conflict, it ended in a draw. The second strike was The Vietnam Conflict, because we outright lost. So, according to him, the United States has been one strike away from falling hard for at least the last 50 years or more. Could that mentality be in the government that we cannot fail or face the same demise as that of the Egyptians, Romans, Spanish, British, Nazi Germany? We’ve had a few foul balls since then, but I do believe someone is loading up a pitch we can’t handle and I’m afraid our temper after the fact will be worse than Might Casey’s when he struck out…