Why Osama bin Laden Was Buried at Sea

Osama bin Laden is dead.

The Al Qaeda leader had been the public enemy #1 of the United States and much of the world since he had masterminded a series of terror attacks against the US - culminating in the 9/11 attacks. He had avoided capture for ten years, moving from safe house to safe house, but Seal Team 6 had tracked him down and gunned him down. The terror mastermind was no more, and his corpse had been conclusively identified. Now there was only one thing left to do - deal with his body.

But how do you lay a terrorist leader to eternal rest? The United States chose an unusual option - one informed by religion and history. The most efficient choice for dealing with Bin Laden’s body would have been cremation. The burning process would leave no trace of him, and it would ensure there was no burial place for him to be memorialized. But cremation is illegal in Islam, and Bin Laden was a devout Muslim.

Despite his being an enemy of the United States, they wanted to respect his faith. This would avoid angering his supporters and potentially causing more retaliation. While the practice of desecrating the bodies of one’s enemies was common in ancient times, it was something that was highly frowned upon and beneath the US today. So why not bury him? There were a lot of issues with that as well. For one thing, a country would need to claim its body. Bin Laden had died in Pakistan - but the Pakistani government denied all knowledge of his activities and certainly wasn’t going to claim his body. He spent most of the last ten years in Afghanistan - but the government there was US-aligned now and actively fighting Bin Laden’s supporters. To bring his body there for burial would rile up those terrorists and make the government’s job harder. And then there was Bin Laden’s country of origin, Saudi Arabia.

While his initial motivation for becoming a terrorist was to avenge what he thought was the desecration of Saudi Arabia by the presence of US troops, the Saudis disagreed - they had invited those soldiers during the Gulf War, and viewed Bin Laden as a traitor and terrorist. So clearly, no one wanted to take him - and burying a monster is always a tricky thing. Throughout history, those laying villains to rest have always had to play a tricky balancing act. When it comes to death row inmates, it’s usually up to the family - they can claim the remains and bury them in a family plot, but family members of the victim might come and disrupt their mourning. When Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh was executed, people realized the mad veteran might be allowed to be buried in Arlington - until Congress passed a law banning anyone convicted of a capital crime from a military funeral. McVeigh’s body was cremated, and many either meet the same end or are buried in prison cemeteries - but some notorious killers including Ed Gein and Bonnie Parker do have graves around the United States. But Bin Laden wasn’t just a killer.

When a historic villain has a movement behind them - or even a nation - what happens to their body can be a matter of national security. When Abraham Lincoln’s assassin John Wilkes Booth was gunned down, his body was initially taken into federal custody and held there for identification for an extended period. No doubt the government would have preferred to keep it there - but the Booth family was a powerful acting clan with influence, and eventually, they were able to collect the body and take it home to the family plot in Baltimore. There he was buried alongside a small ceremony full of loyalists - while Maryland stayed in the Union, there were a lot of Confederate sympathies there, and many no doubt saw Booth as a hero. While the Booth plot is still standing, John Wilkes Booth only has a small unmarked gravestone there. And he wasn’t the only infamous figure to get sent off in style. Francisco Franco was an outlier when it came to the fascist dictators of World War II - he had stayed out of the Axis alliance, and was able to stay leader of Spain for decades.

Even today, many survivors of his reign speak fondly of him - after all, they didn’t experience anything bad because they kept their heads down and didn’t criticize him. And those who were targeted by him…well, most of them aren’t around to talk about it. So when he died in 1975, he was given a state funeral and a prominent place in a mausoleum in the Valley of the Fallen - a massive monument built by Franco. This gave him a place of honour in the country and was a source of massive controversy until the government exhumed him in 2019, taking his remains to a smaller cemetery where his wife was buried. And he wasn’t the only World War II-era leader who continued causing chaos after his death.

How do you memorialize the man who killed millions? Well, if that man is Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union…you hold them up as a hero of the revolution and give them a massive state funeral. After Stalin’s death from illness in 1953, he was laid to rest in Lenin’s mausoleum and was memorialized by the top figures in the Soviet Union. A massive crowd gathered to pay their respects - and this caused a massive stampeding incident where hundreds of people died. Stalin’s body would eventually be moved to the Kremlin Wall Necropolis, the Soviet Union’s biggest memorial until his successor Nikita Krushchev eventually had him removed as part of his campaign of de-Stalinization. But in one case, the Soviets decided the best solution was…no solution.

Everyone knows Adolf Hitler met his end in a Berlin bunker before he could be arrested by the allies - but what happened next? No one knows conclusively. We do know that the Soviets swept in, took over the bunker, and then Hitler’s body was never seen again. The consensus is that the body was destroyed, but speculation over what happened persisted for decades - with even the Soviets commissioning reports on whether he could have survived. The ambiguity led to many problems, including false reports of Hitler sightings - but everyone agreed it was probably better than burying the Nazi dictator and letting neo-nazis have a memorial site to rally to. And in one case, the controversy over a dictator’s burial place spiralled completely out of control. The monarchy in England was all but absolute in the 1600s - until Oliver Cromwell came along. The powerful English general staged a successful coup against King Charles I, leading to the king’s execution, after which he ruled as Lord Protector until his death. Under his tenure, he waged an aggressive foreign policy and persecuted Roman Catholics. His death led to a power vacuum, which eventually led to the Royalists returning to power - and the son of King Cromwell returned to the throne. One of his first acts was to order Cromwell’s body removed from his tomb.

He held a mock execution, beheaded the corpse, and the head of Cromwell was displayed on a pike and passed around for hundreds of years. So it’s no wonder that the United States wanted to be very careful about how to handle Bin Laden’s body. Cremation was out, and so was a proper burial. An anonymous, unmarked burial was likely discussed - but if word got out it would cause chaos. So the decision was made to bury him at sea - with enough precautions to make sure no one could ever find or recover his body. Burial at sea is common, but it was usually a matter of utility - soldiers, sailors, and pirates who died at sea couldn’t be safely transported for the extended voyage of the ship, so the best the captain could do was pay them tribute and consign them to the sea.

But this wouldn’t be any normal sea burial. Islamic tradition requires a body to be buried within twenty-four hours of death, so the US moved quickly as soon as his body was identified. They took pictures to conclusively identify him and then transferred the body aboard the USS Carl Vinson. They then conducted Islamic burial rites - washing his body, wrapping him in a white cloth, and even bringing in an Arabic translator to provide religious rites. But they weren’t going to be taking any chances. After Bin Laden’s body was fully shrouded and all the religious rites were over, it was draped in hundreds of pounds of iron chains, and then loaded onto a wooden board. The board was pushed forward to the edge of the boat, tilted forward - and the terror leader’s body slipped into the water, never to be seen again. Not only did this ensure Osama Bin Laden would not have a grave that could become a shrine for extremists, but it guaranteed that no one would ever be able to recover his body.

So this was probably a satisfactory solution for everyone…right? Not so much. Burial at sea isn’t considered an appropriate Islamic rite if other options are available - and whether other options were available depends on your perspective. Some said the US should have let Bin Laden be buried in one of his many home bases, while others felt he didn’t even deserve the respect he was given with a burial at sea. Along with the controversy over how he was eliminated by the Navy SEALS, this would linger for years - but no one would be able to do anything about it, because Osama Bin Laden’s body was miles below the ocean surface.