Philip Gourevitch makes a strong case in The New Yorker online against early release of photos of Osama bin Laden’s corpse:
If it’s released, this is the image that will instantly supplant every other account of Sunday’s raid as the iconic representation of America’s moment of triumph over its most wanted enemy. Is that what we want—the official equivalent of the Saddam hanging video? Did we learn nothing from the past decade about the overwhelming power of crude images of violence to define and polarize our historical moment? The Abu Ghraib photographs were unofficial documents of an official policy that was supposed to be kept secret, but if nothing else, they should have taught us that a photograph of the violence you inflict is always, in very large measure, a self-portrait. In getting rid of bin Laden, Obama has made the greatest step yet toward being able to put that era behind us. Do we want a photo of bin Laden’s bullet-punctured skull to eclipse this moment?
I think he’s dead on with the Saddam Hussein precedent but misses the mark with his Abu Ghraib analogy. As he well knows, having written about them, the Abu Ghraib photos were hardly a deliberate government release. Some civic-minded soul was warning Americans about what was being done in their name. The Abu Ghraib photos not only told the world that the U. S. was conducting itself barbarously, but told Americans, who had the proverbial need to know. The motive mattered. So, obviously, did guilt. The exhibited Abu Ghraib prisoners were maybe guilty of something and maybe not. Bin Laden was guilty, period.
It may be something of a milestone in the history of iconography that there’s a public debate at all about releasing the photo (or photos)—as well as a debate in the White House, according to ABC’s Jake Tapper, who was told that the headshot is “bloody and gruesome, with a bullet wound to his head above his left eye.” Such are questions of statecraft in the age of photography. The new semi-transparency—the blow-by-blow accounts of the raid in Abbottabad, complete with changes of story—is an acknowledgment of how strong these images can be. It should be obvious by now that they backfire. As Gourevitch adds elsewhere: “Are we a nation that needs to parade the heads of our enemies around on stakes? That is what our terrorist enemies do—and we should resist the temptation.”
The main argument for releasing a bin Laden photo is that it constitutes proof that the dead man was, in fact, bin Laden; but I think Gourevitch is probably right that release won’t still the crackpot theories or martyrdom fantasies. White House release of the photo would constitute an act of state, and lend itself very easily to gloating, though President Obama was at pains to avoid it when he revealed the news of the successful raid. One may easily rejoice that bin Laden is dead without any photograph—as demonstrated by the fact that Americans in large numbers have been doing so night and day.
In 1967, after Che Guevara was killed in Bolivia, John Berger noted the uncanny resemblance of the exhibit-photo of his corpse to Rembrandt’s “Anatomy Lesson,” with the gloating Bolivians cast in the roles of 17th century doctors demonstrating the superiority of their knowledge face-to-face with the lifeless human body. The proof that Che Guevara was dead was meant to be a talisman of American might. Of course, it turned out to be nothing of the sort. Che T-shirts are still on sale everywhere, I daresay even in Bolivia.
The most seemly thing for the White House now would be to maintain its sobriety. From a president who embraces civility, such discretion would be a virtue.
