I know. You want to see the bloody bastard dead as much as I do. But, unfortunately, this terrible photo of a battered Osama Bin Laden is not the real thing. It’s just a terrible Photoshop job.
It’s obvious that the dead Osama image is based on the photo on the right. The bottom half is exactly the same, scaled and saved as a low quality JPEG several times in order to achieve the bad cameraphone look. The person who doctored the image then put it together with an anonymous corpse photo – which acts as the background – and made a bad job at clone stamping blood and bruises all over his face. The result is gross, but not convincing.
Keep this in mind: Whenever the US government releases a photo of Bin Laden, it will be crystal clear and probably come with his dental records too. Until then, I’m sure we will be seeing a lot more of these Photoshop jobs. Clearly, people need closure.