You Can Execute Your Enemies, but You Can’t Control Their Images

The Americans didn’t document Osama bin Laden’s violent death and they threw the body into the ocean immediately. As three previous cases of execution have proven, that was a smart idea, strategically speaking.

On October 10th 1967, Che Guevara’s body lay in the La Higuera schoolhouse in the Bolivian jungle. His torso was bare, but he still wore trousers. He lay on something that resembled a stretcher. His head appeared uninjured, his eyes were still partly open and his face framed by his dark hair and beard.

In Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu’s case, blood was visible. At 3 p.m. on Dec. 25, 1989, it trickled from beneath their bodies in front of a pale yellow wall in the rear courtyard of a military barracks. One of his executioners roughly pulled the dictator’s head up to be photographed. Then, both bodies were covered by army blankets.

The Dec. 30, 2006, was Saddam Hussein’s last day before his appointment with the noose. Iraq’s dictator stood erect, emaciated and with a neatly trimmed beard before the hangman. He rejected the black hood he was offered and a cloth was placed around his neck, followed by the noose. He offered no resistance.

The executioners wanted to document all three executions and they did so with still photos and video. They insisted upon documenting the execution because first of all, they were proud of what they were doing and wanted to be historically remembered. Secondly, they wanted to avoid all doubt about the identity of those executed, and finally they hoped to show that those once powerful being executed were fearful and cowering at the end, thus robbing them of any possible transcendental spark of greatness. The more casual, banal and puny their final moments would be remembered, the better.

But in all three cases, we saw that it isn’t so easy to control those final images. On the videos of the Ceausescu executions, you can hear how both angrily and impatiently shouted at their executioners as if they were dumb, ill-mannered school kids. Not a trace of respect, understanding or fear. They remained the bosses right to the very end.

There are two videos of Saddam Hussein’s execution. The official video has no sound track and spares viewers the moment his neck snaps because the authorities wanted the hanging to appear as well-ordered as possible. But the unofficial version recorded on a mobile telephone revealed everything, and with sound: flurries of activity, curses, insults, and slogans. The disgusting video was an instant commercial success in the markets of Baghdad.

In Bolivia, everyone wanted to be photographed next to Che Guevara’s corpse. Like a big game hunter, some posed him with a gun, others put sunglasses on him. At the end, his body was taken to a secret burial place and his hands cut off to prevent later identification. But it was all in vain.

It wasn’t the images of the victors that were burned into peoples’ memories; it was the image of the dead man on the stretcher, looking remarkably like Jesus Christ. That’s the image that went into the eternal romantic myth of the revolutionary.

The U.S. commandos ensured Osama bin Laden’s body disappeared quickly and forever: Into the ocean, buried “in accordance with Islamic ritual,” as they say. The Americans know precisely why.