Obama refuses to release bin Laden photos

President Barack Obama decided Wednesday not to release photos of Osama bin Laden’s corpse, citing national security risks and saying the United States should not brandish “trophies” of its victory.

Obama’s war cabinet had been debating whether to publish gruesome post-mortem photos of the Al-Qaeda terror chief, who was gunned down by US special forces in a covert raid inside Pakistan on Sunday.

Barack Obama

Osama bin Laden

“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, as a propaganda tool,” Obama told CBS news’s 60 Minutes. “That’s not who we are. You know, we don’t trot out this stuff as trophies,” Obama said, arguing that DNA and facial recognition testing had proved beyond doubt that the mastermind of the September 11 attacks was dead.

The “very graphic” nature of the scene described by Obama appeared to be shown in photographs obtained by the Reuters news agency of three unidentified dead men in the house none of whom resembled bin Laden.

AFP could not independently verify the photos. Reuters said it had bought them from a Pakistani security official who entered the bin Laden compound shortly after the raid occurred in the early hours of Monday local time.

The dead men were lying in large pools of blood. One, dressed in a t-shirt, had blood streaming from his right ear.

According to its time stamp, that photo was taken at 2:30 am, about 50 minutes after US officials said the raid had concluded.

The two others were wearing traditional Pakistani gowns. One had blood spilling from his mouth and chin, and there was a computer cable and what appeared to be a child’s water pistol at his right shoulder.

The third man had blood collecting from his nose and there was also a thick band of blood around the middle of his white shalwar kameez. Other pictures taken in early daylight showed the trash-strewn grounds of the compound and the tail of a wrecked helicopter believed to be part of a top secret stealth helicopter program.

Reuters said all the photos were the same pixel size, indicating that they had not been manipulated, and that data in the digital files matched the time and date stamp imprinted on the photos from 2:30 am to 6:43 am.

One of bin Laden’s children, now in custody along with a Yemeni wife of the Saudi-born Al-Qaeda leader, saw her father shot dead, a Pakistani intelligence official said.

The girl, reported to be 12 years old, “was the one who confirmed to us that Osama was dead and shot and taken away,” said the Pakistani official. Obama’s top security aides had debated whether to publish a photo of bin Laden to prove he had been killed, but feared a backlash in the Muslim world that may lead to attacks on US troops or interests. Some senior lawmakers said they had seen the pictures and described them as graphic, but later reports suggested the images circulating on Capitol Hill were not authentic.

Three US senators retracted their claims of having seen a gory photograph of Osama bin Laden’s corpse, apparently having been misled by a fake picture.

Three days after an elite team of US Navy SEALS avenged the 2001 attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 people, national security experts combed through a haul of evidence from the Pakistani mansion that served as bin Laden’s lair. The trove, including about five computers, 10 hard drives and 100 storage devices, represents a dramatic intelligence breakthrough for the United States in its fight against Al-Qaeda, experts said.

“I’ll be very surprised if this isn’t a gold mine for us,” said John McLaughlin, a former CIA deputy director. Obama was to lay a wreath in memory of the victims and meet relatives of those who perished during a visit Thursday to Ground Zero, where the World Trade Center towers were turned into an inferno nearly 10 years ago and toppled by airliners hijacked by Al-Qaeda operatives.

New opinion polls showed Obama is enjoying a boost in popularity after hunting down America’s public enemy number one.

His approval rating surged 11 points to 57 percent in a CBS/New York Times poll, while 72 percent approved of his handling of terrorism. (AFP)