Osama Dead Body Photo - Real?

If you haven't heard already, or haven't seen the image yet yourself, the official word from the U.S. government on the photo that supposedly shows Osama bin Laden dead, is in fact a fake. The photo was recirculated widely on the Internet and even broadcast on Pakistani television following President Barack Obama's announcement on Sunday that the al-Qaida leader had been killed.

The photo in question has actually been bouncing around the Internet for the last two years. It reportedly originated after a Middle East online newspaper published a photo of a battered corpse. The alleged death photo of bin Laden surfaced shortly thereafter. Experts quickly weighed in that the image had been heavily altered to look like the al-Qaida leader, using a program like Photoshop or a similar application to merge the features of the other dead man with bin Laden's.

The U.S. government, for its part, has said that it identified bin Laden's corpse using both DNA evidence and visual confirmation, as well as extensive photo analysis of the body. It is reporting that the DNA test came back with a 99.9 percent accuracy rate after cross-referencing the strands using samples from bin Laden's sister, who pre-deceased him.

The government now faces a conundrum, however. It has acknowledged that it does possess photos of Obama's corpse, used to identify him, but has yet to decide whether or not to release them to the public. Part of the concern is due to the potentially disturbingly graphic nature of the photos themselves. Bin Laden was reportedly killed by shots to the head, and information leaked to the press indicates the photos are pretty messy because of that.