Barack Obama’s top adviser on terrorism brushed aside criticism by the president’s political opponents that he has exploited this week’s one-year anniversary of Osama bin Laden’s killing for political gain.
Brennan noted that Obama took the decision to go forward with the raid against the advice of some of his most senior advisers who had reservations about the operation, which was fraught with peril for the Navy Seals sent into Pakistan to carry it out in the dead of night.
Obama’s campaign last week released a video to mark the anniversary and suggested that Osama bin Laden might be alive today had Republicans’ soon-to-be presidential nominee Mitt Romney been in the White House.
US Senator John McCain, who lost to Obama in the 2008 presidential election and who remains one of the president’s most dogged critics, said last week that the advertisement politicized an issue that ought become fodder for November’s presidential campaign.
In the upcoming presidential campaign, Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, is seeking to unseat the Democratic incumbent Obama, mostly for what he says has been faulty stewardship of the economy. But like McCain he also criticizes the president’s handling of military and security matters.
Obama campaign adviser Robert Gibbs meanwhile told NBC television that the success campaign to hunt down and kill bin Laden was “fair game” on the campaign trail.
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