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So conspiracy theories are already circulating about the death (or "death", I guess) of Osama bin Laden. Furthermore, Sens. Joseph Lieberman and Susan Collins, who run the Senate Homeland Security Committee, are already taking the "deather" theories seriously enough to request that President Obama release pictures of the body "to quell any doubts that this somehow is a ruse." The Senators obviously aren't "deathers" themselves, but, to adapt Adam's birther lexicon, they're certainly "deather curious."The whole affair's resemblance to the birther phenomenon is sickening enough. But what's really off-putting is right-wing blogger J. Michael Walker's belief that parading the bodies of defeated enemies around like war trophies is something the U.S. ought to do as a civic duty to the public:
Every American has a right to walk right up to bin Laden’s corpse and view it. We are entitled to know for a fact that the witch is dead. No shroud for dignity’s sake, please – bin Laden’s naked, bullet-riddled corpse should be put on display in lower Manhattan for all the world to see. The entire body should be digitally scanned, inside and out – and made available for everyone to take his or her own picture.It's hard to read that without thinking about the Abu Ghraib photos, or the Blackwater contractors who were hung from a bridge over the Euphrates River. Some of the most inhumane acts of this decade's worth of war have come out of the desire to have the public witness what's been done. But the "deather curious" aren't just motivated by bloodlust -- they're demanding more security theatre. Walker and Senator Lieberman don't seriously doubt that bin Laden is dead, so releasing the photos wouldn't have an impact on whether or not Americans actually are safe from him. But they feel that the government's obligation to make the public feel safe is a good enough reason by itself. Compared to the right to feel secure, other values -- like, say, privacy or propriety -- don't really rate much importance. Nor does it occur to them that not everyone around the world might react so well to images of a dead bin Laden as Americans would, or that this might have an adverse effect on security, because security itself isn't the point. The point is the feelings of (a particularly bloodthirsty or paranoid segment of) Americans.The line about "digitally scanning" the body is really what brought this home for me, because it's a ghoulish echo of the TSA's backscatter machines (which I don't like either).The justification for the backscatter machine is that the need for security theatre -- not to be safe, but to feel safe -- trumps the right to control who has access to your body. There's obviously a meaningful difference between the leader of al-Qaida and an anonymous airline passenger, but the abstract principle's the same: the body no longer belongs to the person who lives (or lived) in it, but to the public. To me, the principle that a lone body shouldn't be subject to the public's desires and demands seems pretty inviolable, and certainly important to uphold. In a vacuum, it may not seem like a huge concession to release photos of bin Laden, but it's a concession to the wrong thing; people shouldn't need access to someone else's body to feel safe.
