Not to ruin your weekend with ugly pics or anything, but John Rosenthal is onto something troublesome regarding those bin Laden death pics, which we, the people, are not allowed to see, while our representatives, it seems, are now able to view if they truck themselves over to CIA headquarters. Why CIA HQ, and not, say, Congress itself, or the National Archives or anywhere else a little less associated with hush-hush tradecraft and black ops?

Anyway, as John reported a couple of days ago at Big Peace, last weekend, the Pentagon released soundless video "outtakes" purportedly of  bin Laden that administration sources say were scooped up in the recent raid in Abbotabad and which they date to 2010 at the earliest, but which John has matched to a 2007 video "widely dismissed as fake."

Strange.

One of the red flags the old video sent up a few years ago was the black beard. If the image on the left (above) is bin Laden and it is supposed to be of more recent vintage than the pre Tora Bora image  on the right, he would have to have dyed his beard black -- something Mohammed specifically forbade, John notes. Henna is the  Islamically correct option, and indeed, in the pre-Tora Bora image below, bin Laden sports the read beard of jihad. The administration, however, is boosting Blackbeard bin Laden as the real article, pushing a specifically haram, or Islamically forbidden, form of "vanity" as the Super Jihadist's driver.

Are these two images even the same person?

Now, John Rosenthal reports, also at Big Peace, on perplexing comments by Sen. John Inhofe (R-OK), who has been to the CIA to view the death pics. He writes:

While describing some of the photos as “gruesome,” Inhofe insisted that Bin Laden is recognizable in them. “It was him,” the Senator remarked. To help members of congress identify the dead man, Inhofe explained that the agency also included three pictures of Bin Laden when he was alive or, as Inhofe put it, “when he had the black beard.” “The beard is a moving target,” Inhofe explained further, “because he dyes it all the time.”

In claiming that Bin Laden dyed his beard, the Senator was presumably just repeating what he was told in the CIA briefing. But if the CIA is in fact showing members of Congress “live” pictures of Bin Laden with a dyed black beard, then we have a problem. ...

Ditto if dead bin Laden has a black beard, too. The list of unanswered questions keeps growing.

Note to GOP presidential candidates: The Obama administration's authoritarian and just plain odd treatment of evidence of bin Laden's death is also a Big Deal.