As elated crowds celebrated the death of Osama bin Laden after Navy SEALs killed the al Qaeda chief in a weekend raid in Pakistan, some are asking, "Where's the proof?"Photos depicting a bloodied and bruised face appearing to be that of bin Laden began appearing on Twitter and Facebook Sunday night soon after news of his death spread across the Internet. But that image was later proved to be fake. Now, people are asking to see the evidence proving bin Laden is dead.
"We have released a tremendous amount of information to date," Obama's top counterterrorism adviser John Brennan said. "At the same time we don't want to do anything that is going to compromise our ability to be as successful the next time one of these guys needs to be taken off the battlefield."
As for releasing photographs of a dead bin Laden, Brennan said that is "something to be determined." But he added they're going to do everything they can to prevent denials of bin Laden's death.
In the president's speech Sunday night, he avoided any mention of DNA or photographic evidence. But on Monday, officials in the Obama administration told ABC News "There's no doubt it's him."
Officials said Monday they are "99.9 percent" certain that bin Laden was shot dead in Pakistan. They also cited CIA photo analysis matching physical features, such as bin Laden's well above-average height.
Any pictures of bin Laden would undoubtedly be gruesome, one of the reasons why the White House hasn't made them public. But the photos might be released in modified form, just as they were in July 2003 when the U.S. government released photographs of Saddam Hussein's dead sons Uday and Qusay Hussein, but only after they had been touched up by a mortician.
A U.S. intelligence official also told ABC News that bin Laden's DNA was compared with DNA from several of his relatives.
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