When President Barack Obama announced this week that he would not release postmortem pictures of Osama bin Laden, people around the world immediately questioned his decision.
The debate today echoes a similar controversy involving John Wilkes Booth, the man who assassinated President Abraham Lincoln.
On April 26, 1865—12 days after he shot Lincoln at Ford's Theater in Washington, D.C.—Booth himself was cornered and shot in a Virginia barn. He died from his wound that day. His body was taken back to Washington and then aboard the USS Montauk for an autopsy.
The administration, led by Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, ordered that a single photograph be taken of Booth's corpse, says Bob Zeller, president of the Center for Civil War Photography. On April 27, 1865, many experts agree, famed Civil War photographer Alexander Gardner and his assistant Timothy O'Sullivan took the picture.
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