RKMBs Forums .::Important::. Politics and Current Events Osama Dead

In an interview with Steve Kroft for this Sunday's "60 Minutes" conducted today, President Obama said he won't release post-mortem images of Osama bin Laden taken to prove his death.

"It is important to make sure that very graphic photos of somebody who was shot in the head are not floating around as an incitement to additional violence or as a propaganda tool," said the president.

"We don't trot out this stuff as trophies," Mr. Obama added. "The fact of the matter is, this is somebody who was deserving of the justice that he received."

The president said he had discussed the issue with his intelligence team, including Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and that they agree with the decision. White House press secretary Jay Carney said Wednesday that Mr. Obama made the decision today.

In explaining his choice not to release the photo, Mr. Obama said that "we don't need to spike the football." He said that "given the graphic nature of these photos it would create a national security risk."

President Barack Obama is to release up to 2,000 photographs of alleged abuse at American prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan in a move which will reignite the scandal surrounding Abu Ghraib prison in 2004.

The decision to make public the images sought in a legal action by the American Civil Liberties Union comes amid a political firestorm over alleged torture of detainees under President George W. Bush.

Some of the photographs, which will be released before May 28, are said to show American service personnel humiliating prisoners, according to officials.

The images relate to more than 400 separate cases involving alleged prisoner abuse between 2001 and 2005.

The Pentagon fears a backlash in the Middle East similar to the one provoked by pictures from Abu Ghraib prison, near Baghdad, in 2004 which became emblematic of American mistakes in Iraq.

WASHINGTON — In a reversal of an 18-year-old military policy that critics said was hiding the ultimate cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the news media will now be allowed to photograph the flag-draped coffins of America's war dead as their bodies are returned to the United States, but only if the families of the dead agree.

Gates, who said at the news conference that he was "never comfortable" with the ban, tried to have it overturned a year ago.

But he said he encountered resistance in the Pentagon, and so he "demurred."

But once President Barack Obama said this month that he was reviewing the ban, Gates again sounded out senior officials at the Pentagon.

"I'm very disappointed," said John Ellsworth, the president of Military Families United, whose son, Lance Corporal Justin Ellsworth, was killed in Iraq in 2004 at age 20. "There was nothing wrong with the way things were. I believe that the administration basically caved to the special interest groups, the antiwar groups, that are going to politicize our fallen."

"What is the need to show these caskets," Ellsworth added, "other than to try to inflame controversy?"