Dan Coats Can See Dead Bin Laden Photos But We Can't

Sen. Dan Coats is part of the privileged elite who has spent his entire adult life living and working inside the Washington beltway. He decided he had the right to view the alleged photos of the now-deceased Osama bin Laden but the American people have no right to view them because to share them with the public would only incite more Muslim terrorist attacks:

Sen. Dan Coats, who on today viewed the photos taken of Osama bin Laden after he was killed by Navy SEALs, said President Barack Obama was right not to release the photos publicly.


“They’re graphic,” said Coats, a member of the Senate intelligence committee. “And because of the graphic nature of them, I can see better now why the president decided not to release those photos for fear that it would incite groups in the Middle East as well as elsewhere.”

Obama told CBS’s “60 Minutes’ earlier this month that releasing the photos would create ”some national security risk“ and that he didn’t want them used as a propaganda tool or an incitement to additional violence.

”Americans and people around the world are glad that he’s gone,“ Obama said of bin Laden. ”But we don’t need to spike the football.“

Coats said he had been concerned that not releasing the photos would give fodder to conspiracy theorists who would insist bin Laden was still alive. But the Indiana Republican said that has not happened and that keeping the photos private was the right decision.

”They’re there, and that along with the cumulative body of evidence that we’ve been given over the past couple of weeks adds the last box to be checked in terms of verification on his death,“ Coats said.

Sure, we can watch Americans falling to their death live on TV from the burning World Trade Centers, see the videos of the massacres at Mumbai, Spain and London or the beheading of Daniel Pearl at the hands of Muslim terrorists, but it's expecting too much to allow the American people the opportunity to view the proof for themselves that the man we spent more than $1 trillion dollars fighting the past decade, bankrupting our country in the process, is truly dead. Yeah, I'm sure Coats saw photos of a dead bin Laden. I'm just not convinced they aren't photos that are nearly a decade old.  Dr Steve Pieczenik, a counter-terrorism expert under three Secretaries of State and four U.S. presidents who worked on psy-op projects, says U.S. intelligence knew bin Laden died within a year following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and withheld the evidence from the American people to gain support for a two-front war on terrorism in Afghanistan and Iraq. The CIA has a long history of fabricating evidence to suit its ends. The American people have every reason to be skeptical. I'm certainly not going to take the word of a career beltway insider like Dan Coats on something like this. The more story-telling I hear from our government explaining how the capture and execution of bin Laden went down, the more convinced I am that we're not being told the entire truth. I'll take Pieczenik's word until I'm convinced otherwise.