Buried at Sea?

OK–it’s easy to figure the reasons someone decided it was a good idea to ditch Osama bin Laden’s corpse at sea. First, there’s the putative sensitity to Muslim tradition: the body of the departed must be put to rest with in a day. Second, you want to avoid a lurid body-viewing spectacle that could inflame opinion, Muslim and non-Muslim alike. Third, you want to avoid creating a mecca for would-be jihadis to visit.

But if the reaction of my mild-mannered and not rabidly political spouse is any indication, getting rid of the body without first providing some very public and very convincing show of proof that the official account of bin Laden’s demise is accurate is a serious mistake. “They just said he was buried at sea,” my not-rabid partner said. “Why would they do that? I want to see some evidence that he’s really dead.”

We don’t live in a world where anyone’s going to be willing to just take the government’s word for something this big and let it go at that. Without a body, someone in the White House better be ready to offer a complete narrative of how this all happened complete with the gory show and tell they want to avoid.

6 Replies to “Buried at Sea?”

  1. I kinda wondered initially but it sounds like they did DNA testing *and* have some 8 x 10 glossies in their back pockets if push comes to shove. Of course even those won’t satisfy some folks.

  2. I’ll be really suprised if there’s no “Osama lives” BS in the days to come. I’m not talking about rational objections, but challenges from those who have a stake in perpertuating such a myth on one hand and on the other those who have adopted a “you can’t trust Obama” stance toward anything and everything his administration says and does.
    Me: I’d like to see a fully documented account, with whatever photos and other evidence is in the government’s hands. The sooner the better.
    In the meantime, there’s this: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/02/osama-bin-laden-photo-fake

  3. The Guardian pic is quite “the gruesome”…Most people accept that the sheik is dead and I am on of them. I don’t need to see the pics. One good indication of the truth of OBL’s departure is whether his followers accept it to be true. As for me, I think he got what he deserved, although a life stint in the super-max prison would have been okay too. I confess to a having visceral hatred of the guy, not just for his handy-work here in NY but for his willingness to let young boys and men go to their deaths as suicide bombers, killing many innocent people along with themselves…something he never would have dirtied his hands doing. My own (un-educated) guess is that Bin Laden was a sociopath. He could not empathize with the people whose suffering he caused. Well, now he is gone and we’ll have to wait for the dangling Mussolini pics. Oh well maybe Aymen al-Zaharawi (speaking of sociopaths) will get the super-max position…

  4. I think you’re right about bin Laden and his character. But I wonder how different he was from the guys who decided to go into Iraq never mind the human catastrophe that might follow. I don’t picture Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld et al. spending a lot of sleepless nights over the human toll among Iraqis of their handiwork, and I never got much of a feeling of empathy from them for the innocents who have become collateral damage of our endless war.
    As far as the bin Laden evidence: I think it needs to be public. Our tax dollars at work and all that.

  5. Of course…the whole endeavor, (9/11, Iraq, Afghanistan the GWoT) stinks to high heaven. And it has broken our bank doing it, as we are, on credit. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld et al…..an odious lot indeed. I keep saying this but maybe we should go walkabout.

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