Viewing the Aerial Images of bin Laden's Compound

The aerial imagery of the bin Laden "secret" compound in Abbottabad seems generic enough. We've grown accustomed to this kind of documentation that accompanies any major news story--flooding in the Midwest, a police chase, a marketplace bombing, etc. We have become so accustomed to the verification of a site by an aerial shot that it has become normalized as a way of seeing. This view offers something important for television news in an era of 24 hour consumer demand--satellite images are plentiful and can fill time and space in a medium that needs more and more product. But aerial images offer more than just a way to convey geographical certainty ("this news happened here"). The history of aerial imagery suggests that people had to learn to read the view from above. Indeed, satellite images are hard to decipher. Vertical perspective makes everyday topographies and architectures look strange, flat. If the broad sweep of the aerial image provides the possibility of context, without an understanding of each component contained within the photograph there is no way to achieve the understanding that such comparison might bring about. For this reason, aerial images in the newspaper and on the televised news are usually labeled. The label pins it down. And so we believe the labels.

The British Newspaper, The Telegraph, published an aerial image titled "Osama bin Laden: the compound in Abbottabad where the al-Qaeda leader lived" that shows a remote image cropped to give us a relative understanding of the distance between the Pakistan military academy (so often referred to on newscasts as the equivalent of the US military academy, West Point) and the site where bin Laden, his family, and close associates were living. Captioned arrows point out exactly where the structures are positioned in the image. The distance is noted as approximately 500 yards.

On May 3, a site titled "the Sociable" published what they titled as "An updated aerial view of the suspected hideout of Al Qaeda's founder Osama bin Laden," an image linked to an advance preview of what Google Earth will allow to be viewed after their next update. This image was taken by satellite in May 2010.

Another view circulating in the week after the Navy Seal raid is a closeup cropped from the famous "Situation Room"--it shows aerial imagery of the compound peeking out from under other materials. Here is the entire photo:

 Here is a cropped version (from the Ogle Earth blog):

The same blog (which I recommend to digital map junkies and other fellow travelers) posted a closeup of an image released by GeoEye of the Abbottabad compound just after the raid, clearly showing the blackened results of the burned helicopter (see helpful red arrow):

Over the next few posts, I'd like to compare these images to notable aerial views from the "war on terror" as well as previous conflicts. Aerial images have played an important role in representing truth and accuracy for geopolitical as well as journalistic purposes. Yet, what is "true" during warfare is not always immediately transparent. The aerial image does a certain kind of work. Like all photographs, the construction of the image--its intensely mediated process--is almost never what we notice. Instead, we think we see the world below us in precise, if flattened, form. A kind of truth value in uncertain times, located and therefore seemingly known.