ABSTRACT

On 2 May 2011, President Barack Obama officially announced that Osama bin Laden had been killed by US special forces, concluding his speech by saying, ‘on nights like this one, we can say to those families who have lost loved ones to Al-Qaeda’s terror, justice has been done’ (Obama 2011). Earlier that day, a photo purporting to show a dead Bin Laden, his face smeared with blood, had circulated through the internet and news outlets. This image, however, was a digital collage. In an interview, President Obama said his administration would not publish a photo of the dead body. He argued that the image embargo was to prevent pictures from being presented as trophies or seen as offensive to Muslims, and that the burial of Bin Laden’s body at sea would avoid the memorial opportunity of a gravesite. This denial of a documentary picture – an iconoclastic act by the US government – was supplemented by the later release of a series of documentary videos from Bin Laden’s hideaway in Pakistan showing him as an old man watching TV and some photos from the mission, his house and the ‘crime scene’. Beside the release of these images, which were arguably official ‘stand-ins’ for the missing documentary photo of the dead body, Time magazine found its own iconic substitute for the events: the front cover of a special issue published on 20 May 2011 featured a painted portrait of Bin Laden crossed out with a dripping red X (Time 2011a). With this image, Bin Laden was included in a series of Time covers featuring America’s most wanted enemies all crossed out with a large X: Abu Muzad az-Zarqawi (19 June 2006), Saddam Hussein (21 April 2003), the Japanese flag (20 August 1945) and Adolf Hitler (7 May 1945) (Time 2011b). Despite the fact that the actual killing of Bin Laden remained invisible, this cover image symbolized more than his bodily death; it restored a state of security and collective identity for the US society and marked a crucial victory in the ‘war on terror’.