FORT WORTH, Texas — If Gordon England was still in the inner circle of top defense officials, as he was for the entire George We. Bush administration, he’s pretty sure what advice he’d give when the subject turned to whether to release photos of Osama bin Laden’s body.He said it wouldn’t be yes.”I don’t think it serves any purpose,” the former deputy defense secretary said Tuesday morning. “I hope they don’t release them. I don’t see many benefits of showing his body with a bullet in his eye, but I can see several downsides.”That debate will, of course, go on without England, who left Washington, D.C., in early 2009 and returned to his adopted hometown of Fort Worth.A former top executive with the General Dynamics and Lockheed Martin aeronautics plant in Fort Worth, England served as long as anyone in the Bush administration, beginning in May 2001 as Secretary of the Navy and ending as the No. 2 executive in the Department of Defense.On Tuesday, he spoke to a gathering of Colonial Country Club Friends, covering a wide range of topics from the dysfunctional defense acquisitions process, the polar opposite personalities of Donald Rumsfeld and Robert Gates, the turmoil in the wider Middle East and bin Laden’s death. He also spoke to the Star-Telegram afterward.Having been in Washington during the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, England said the killing of bin Laden ranks as an “extraordinarily positive” message to terrorists, regardless of how much damage it does to al-Qaida long-term.”Part of the message to people like him is that we were persistent, determined and committed for 10 years,” he said.England also was the point person within the Defense Department for the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, where hundreds of men have been held for years for having suspected ties to terrorism.Bin Laden will be replaced at the top of the terrorist organization, he said, but it still is “disheartening for al-Qaida.””This is a psychological blow more than a military blow,” England said. “But the psychology of warfare is important too.”Giving the green light to the raid, reportedly carried out by an elite group of Navy SEALs, was a politically risky and courageous decision by President Barack Obama, England said.”Think of the consequences if this had not worked,” he said. “The intelligence was apparently only a 60-80 percent chance that he was there. If a helicopter had been shot down or SEALs had been killed and bin Laden wasn’t there, the fallout would have been enormous, particularly because they were in Pakistan.”The Bush administration team and top intelligence officials over the last 10 years deserve much credit as well, he said, since the effort to track and find bin Laden took years.England said that while killing bin Laden “provides a political rationale” for bringing home the U.S. troops in Afghanistan — he was the reason the U.S. invaded Afghanistan to begin with — England doesn’t support a wholesale withdrawal.He believes the U.S. needs to maintain a long-term presence in the country to prevent a re-establishment of terrorist training camps.”You can’t protect and defend America from inside America,” he said. “You do have to take the fight to the enemy. If you are only on defense, you will ultimately lose. The president just has to make a case to the American people for why it’s important to be there.”

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