A Poor Excuse for an Executive Decision
Citing an upcoming interview on CBS’ Sixty Minutes, the White House announced today that Pres. Obama has decided not to make public the gruesome death photos of Osama Bin Laden. He and the National Security team decided releasing the photos would be too risky and would inflame passions against the United States, that they would become “icons to rally” our enemies.
Very true.
He said that Obama was not “a trophy” to be displayed. Isn’t he? Obama's already gearing up for his next presidential campaign, running on the "I Got Osama" ticket. “That’s not the way we do things here in America.” No, it certainly isn’t and probably shouldn’t be. Still, Americans remember all too well the Black Hawk Down incident, when the body of at least one American soldier was dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, during the Clinton Administration.
Say, rather, that we’ve seen enough of Bin Laden to last a lifetime. He’s gone and we’ll all be glad that we will never see or hear from him again. My former boss, whose good friend died in one of the Twin Towers on 9/11, doesn’t want to see the death pictures. In fact, he doesn’t want to see any pictures of Bin Laden at all. He gave me the headlined newspaper from Monday.
“Take it away!” he exclaimed. “I don’t even want to look at him!”
Frankly, I don’t care whether it would inflame people in the Middle East. In fact, that would be the best reason in the world to run the photos, if it would make them angry, let them see how it feels. Get a taste of their own medicine.
Pres. Obama observed that that’s not the kind of people we are,” and in any case, some of us don’t want to see him. The sight “of OBL frankly gave me a terrible feeling in the pit of my stomach and made my skin crawl – and that was alive and whole. Every time I looked at his photos, I got that same creepy feeling. But now that he’s dead, I don’t get that feeling anymore.
Personally, I don’t need to see his morgue photos. I don’t need to see the bloodbath. I trust the government and the military when it says it got him. I don’t need to see pictures of him in life. I hope once the news dies down, that we’ll never see his picture again. I hope Wikileaks doesn’t produce any new and astonishing photos of him, either.
However, at last count, a Fox News poll found that 55 percent of Americans want to see the photos. As Rush Limbaugh observed, the Muslims want to see the photos. He says the Administration is stringing us along because some very bad economic news is coming up and Obama wants to distract us. The question is: which will turn your stomach more? The mess Seal Team Six made of Osama? Or the mess Team Obama has made of our economy?
They’ve changed the story of the raid several times now, which only makes the claim of Bin Laden’s death all the more dubious. If people didn’t care before, with all these different versions coming out, people are going to demand to see these pictures. Remember: Obama was once adamant about many things: closing Gitmo, holding the 9/11 trial in New York City. He flipped on all of them. Or someone holding the strings of the Soros Surrogate flipped him.
In my profession, when someone says “I don’t want my picture taken” and they refuse to sign the photo release, we can’t publish the picture. I don’t think Osama had time to sign or decline any photo releases. At any rate, he was a public figure, so anyone can publish a photo of him if they want to. The government happens to own these pictures. They can declare it a matter of national security. But the politicizing has already begun. Obama is going to take his first bows at Ground Zero tomorrow for ordering Seal Team Six to capture or kill him.
It’s hard to say how the Muslims will take this, if and when they get photographic confirmation. They may decide to nuke the Statue of Liberty, or blow up one or all of the bridges into Manhattan. They might try to blow up the Capitol. Or perhaps they have in mind a West Coast target.
Or they might decide to make it “personal.” The Muslims are the “eye-for-an-eye” type. If they view this as an assassination, whoever takes the bow for the deed is going to be wearing a big, red target. Maybe that’s why the president is reluctant to release the photos. I would be.
To release or not to release; that is the question. Whether ‘tis nobler to suffer the slings and arrows of conspiracy theorists, both American and Muslim, who will forever believe that Bin Laden, like Elvis, is still alive because they haven’t seen proof enough to satisfy them.
Or risk further retaliation by the hot-headed Islamic radicals and the deaths of innocent people. Incidentally, I wonder if anyone has told the bad news to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed?
Very true.
He said that Obama was not “a trophy” to be displayed. Isn’t he? Obama's already gearing up for his next presidential campaign, running on the "I Got Osama" ticket. “That’s not the way we do things here in America.” No, it certainly isn’t and probably shouldn’t be. Still, Americans remember all too well the Black Hawk Down incident, when the body of at least one American soldier was dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, during the Clinton Administration.
Say, rather, that we’ve seen enough of Bin Laden to last a lifetime. He’s gone and we’ll all be glad that we will never see or hear from him again. My former boss, whose good friend died in one of the Twin Towers on 9/11, doesn’t want to see the death pictures. In fact, he doesn’t want to see any pictures of Bin Laden at all. He gave me the headlined newspaper from Monday.
“Take it away!” he exclaimed. “I don’t even want to look at him!”
Frankly, I don’t care whether it would inflame people in the Middle East. In fact, that would be the best reason in the world to run the photos, if it would make them angry, let them see how it feels. Get a taste of their own medicine.
Pres. Obama observed that that’s not the kind of people we are,” and in any case, some of us don’t want to see him. The sight “of OBL frankly gave me a terrible feeling in the pit of my stomach and made my skin crawl – and that was alive and whole. Every time I looked at his photos, I got that same creepy feeling. But now that he’s dead, I don’t get that feeling anymore.
Personally, I don’t need to see his morgue photos. I don’t need to see the bloodbath. I trust the government and the military when it says it got him. I don’t need to see pictures of him in life. I hope once the news dies down, that we’ll never see his picture again. I hope Wikileaks doesn’t produce any new and astonishing photos of him, either.
However, at last count, a Fox News poll found that 55 percent of Americans want to see the photos. As Rush Limbaugh observed, the Muslims want to see the photos. He says the Administration is stringing us along because some very bad economic news is coming up and Obama wants to distract us. The question is: which will turn your stomach more? The mess Seal Team Six made of Osama? Or the mess Team Obama has made of our economy?
They’ve changed the story of the raid several times now, which only makes the claim of Bin Laden’s death all the more dubious. If people didn’t care before, with all these different versions coming out, people are going to demand to see these pictures. Remember: Obama was once adamant about many things: closing Gitmo, holding the 9/11 trial in New York City. He flipped on all of them. Or someone holding the strings of the Soros Surrogate flipped him.
In my profession, when someone says “I don’t want my picture taken” and they refuse to sign the photo release, we can’t publish the picture. I don’t think Osama had time to sign or decline any photo releases. At any rate, he was a public figure, so anyone can publish a photo of him if they want to. The government happens to own these pictures. They can declare it a matter of national security. But the politicizing has already begun. Obama is going to take his first bows at Ground Zero tomorrow for ordering Seal Team Six to capture or kill him.
It’s hard to say how the Muslims will take this, if and when they get photographic confirmation. They may decide to nuke the Statue of Liberty, or blow up one or all of the bridges into Manhattan. They might try to blow up the Capitol. Or perhaps they have in mind a West Coast target.
Or they might decide to make it “personal.” The Muslims are the “eye-for-an-eye” type. If they view this as an assassination, whoever takes the bow for the deed is going to be wearing a big, red target. Maybe that’s why the president is reluctant to release the photos. I would be.
To release or not to release; that is the question. Whether ‘tis nobler to suffer the slings and arrows of conspiracy theorists, both American and Muslim, who will forever believe that Bin Laden, like Elvis, is still alive because they haven’t seen proof enough to satisfy them.
Or risk further retaliation by the hot-headed Islamic radicals and the deaths of innocent people. Incidentally, I wonder if anyone has told the bad news to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed?
posted by Belle | 11:12 PM
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