There are a lot of puzzled
expressions on people's faces when it comes to the subject of Osama Bin Laden
and why the White House has not authorized the release of any pictures of his
body.
Photographs and video were
released of Saddam Hussein's hanging, as were post-mortem pictures of his
criminal sons, Uday and Qusay, after Delta Force took them out.
Why not release a few pictures of
Public Enemy No. 1 to prove that he is dead and show the world what happens
when you take on the US?
Matt Bissonnette, one of the SEAL Team Six operators on the raid, partially outs the
reason in his book, "No Easy Day."
The book reads, "In his death throes, he was still twitching and
convulsing."
"Another assaulter and I
trained our lasers on his chest and fired several rounds," Bissonnette
wrote. "The bullets tore into him, slamming his body into the floor until
he was motionless." An aerial view shows the compound that Osama bin Laden
was killed in, in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
But this is perhaps the most
measured and polite description that one could give of how operator after operator
took turns dumping magazines' worth of ammunition into bin Laden's body, two
confidential sources within the community have told us. When all was said and
done, UBL had over a hundred bullets in him, by the most conservative estimate.
But was it illegal? Under the
Laws of Land Warfare, a soldier is fully authorized to put a few insurance
rounds into his target after he goes down. Provided the enemy is not
surrendering, it is morally, legally, and ethically appropriate to shoot the
body a few times to ensure that he is really dead and no longer a threat. What
happened on the bin Laden raid, however, is beyond excessive. The level of
excess shown was not about making sure that bin Laden was no longer a threat.
The excess was pure self-indulgence.
You may not care whether bin
Laden got some extra holes punched in him — few of us do, but what should
concern you is a trend within certain special-operations units to engage in
this type of self-indulgent, and ultimately criminal, behavior. Gone unchecked,
these actions get worse over time.
The real
issue is not that bin Laden was turned into Swiss cheese, but rather that this
type of behavior has become a Standard Operating Procedure in this unit. Of
course, these attitudes and behaviors do not come out of nowhere. Endless back-to-back combat
deployments, PTSD,
broken families, and war itself all play into it.
Now you know the real reason that
the Obama administration has not released pictures of Osama Bin Laden's corpse.
To do so would show the world a body filled with a ridiculous number of gunshot
wounds.
The picture itself would most
likely cause an international scandal, and investigations would be conducted
that could uncover other operations, activities that many will do anything to
keep buried.
Comments
Post a Comment