As a member of the U.S. House Armed Services committee, Colorado Republican Rep. Doug Lamborn was invited to view the photos of Osama bin Laden shot to death in the U.S. raid in Pakistan last week. According to the Denver Post, Lamborn was excited about the opportunity. He said he “absolutely” wanted to see the photos. Now he has seen them and the experience seems to have been sobering. “It’s a bloody mess,” Lamborn told Slate’s Dave Weigel. “His face is intact but his head is partly gone.”
Lamborn said he thinks the American public should see the photos, or at least that “he’d be fine with putting at least one photo out there,” as Weigel put it.
“There are some photos that are more graphic than others,” Lamborn said. “They could choose one that shows his face. It gave me some closure — when I saw it, it really hit me that he was dead.”
Fellow Republican Colorado Rep. Mike Coffman, also a member of the Armed Services Committee, declined to see the photos. Lamborn worked as an attorney before becoming a lawmaker. Coffman was a U.S. Marine.
“As a Marine Corps combat veteran, [Coffman] has no fascination with seeing gunshot wounds to a face,” a spokesman told the Post.
Coffman tweeted that quote the same day it appeared in the paper.
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