(ThyBlackMan.com) A recent poll conducted by NBC found that the majority of Americans agree with President Obama’s decision not to release death photos of Osama bin Laden. According to the poll, 52 percent of Americans strongly agreed with the president’s decision, while only 24 percent strongly disagreed. Another 12 percent agreed with the president, just not as strongly. The conclusion is that most Americans are happy with what they’ve seen, which surely satisfies the White House.
In an interview with 60 Minutes this week, the president explained the reasoning for his decision. He argued that the photos would not do much to remove doubts of those who don’t believe that bin Laden was killed during 
the recent U.S. raid on the militant’s compound in Pakistan. The president confirmed that his team has done DNA sampling and that we “will not see bin Laden walking on this earth again.”
The president’s decision to withhold photos of bin Laden makes sense for at least a couple of reasons. First, I honestly don’t want to see pictures of a man with half his brain shot out of his skull. This would be especially uncomfortable to see at breakfast, lunch or dinner. Secondly, it shows little class of our nation to present such a heinous image on our media outlets. Third, the last thing President Obama needs to do is continue proving that he’s not a liar to those who refuse to believe him about anything. Releasing his birth certificate was bad enough; now the “deathers” are asking him to prove that he’s not lying about bin Laden. At some point, something has got to give.
On the other hand, the “deathers” have far more validity than the “birthers” ever had. It’s not as if our government hasn’t lied to us before. In fact, they lie to us nearly every single day and keep the American people on a need-to-know basis. In some cases, the lies are genuine efforts to protect national security. In others, they are designed to protect the power of the privileged few. In fact, it was a long list of government lies that got us into these two expensive wars in the first place (i.e. if the September 11 attackers were from Saudi Arabia, then why were we attacking Iraq and Afghanistan?).
One must also laugh at the peculiar irony of the U.S. government deciding to “respect” Muslim tradition by throwing bin Laden’s body into the ocean on their way home. This reminds me of the “dog ate my homework on the way to school” argument that a second grader might use with his teacher. ”We’ve just completed one of the greatest military feats in modern history, but the ocean ate our bin Laden,” a Senior White House official might say.
So, is there something fishy going on here? Probably, but that doesn’t mean that bin Laden wasn’t killed. What it means is that the government is almost always deceiving us about something, giving some degree of merit to conspiracy theorists’ efforts to figure out the truth. The problem is that most of us are too far in the dark to know exactly when the government is lying or what they are lying about, which makes most of these theories miss the bulls eye completely.
The bottom line is that President Obama pulled off the raid heard around the world and deserves political points for doing so. The rest of the details will always be fuzzy. It is not entirely inconceivable that bin Laden was kept alive for interrogation, but there is no proof that this happened. At the same time, there isn’t much more proof that he was actually killed, since the government hasn’t released any meaningful evidence. I wouldn’t be surprised if the government were lying to me, since they’ve done so quite often in the past. But if I am being deceived, it better be for a damn good reason.
Staff Writer; Dr. Boyce Watkins
Dr. Boyce Watkins is the founder of the Your Black World Coalition. For more information, please visit http://BoyceWatkins.com.
