Officially, Osama bin Laden’s bullet-ridden corpse was ritualistically cleaned and covered in a white shroud, placed in a weighted bag, and eased into an undisclosed location in the ocean, where it was then pecked to oblivion by all manner of sea life. But in a series of e-mails released by Wikileaks, Fred Burton, the vice president for intelligence at “global intelligence” company Stratfor, begs to differ. According to a Huffington Post summary:
But a leaked email from Stratfor vice president for intelligence Fred Burton, sent on 2 May 2011, at 5.26am states: “Reportedly, we took the body with us. Thank goodness.”
A subsequent email on the same day at 5.51am states: “Body bound for Dover, DE on CIA plane. Than (sic) onward to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Bethesda.” ….
At 6.26am Burton wrote: “If body dumped at sea, which I doubt, the touch is very Adolph Eichman like. The Tribe did the same thing with the Nazi’s ashes. We would want to photograph, DNA, fingerprint, etc. His body is a crime scene and I don’t see the FBI nor DOJ letting that happen.” …
By 1.36pm Burton writes again: “Body is Dover bound, should be here by now.”
As the vice president for intelligence at Daily Intel, we don’t find Burton’s theory very credible (the than/then confusion is always a red flag). Bin Laden was photographed and quickly identified by facial-recognition technology, DNA, and his own wife. We know exactly how he died, because we fired the bullets. What other important information would we need to glean from his dead body back in the United States? Whether he was smoking any of that weed growing outside his compound?
