President Obama really can’t catch a break from Rick Santorum on terrorism, who condemned the White House for announcing its raid on Osama Bin Laden.
In a speech before the Republican Jewish Coalition in Washington, the presidential candidate slammed the White House on Wednesday for its handling of the Bin Laden operation, suggesting that the president revealed news that the mastermind behind 9/11 died at American hands too soon.
The context was this: like many candidates, Santorum was dinging Obama for not presiding over covert operations against Iran’s nuclear program (despite abundant evidence that he actually is). Speaking of a recent mysterious explosion at an Iranian missile site, Santorum said:
“I would like to think that we had something to do that with that missile site but given the president’s record on — with Osama Bin Laden and not being able to keep a secret of everything good that he did for an even more than 24 hours, I suspect we’d know if we had anything to do with that explosion.”
Santorum was asked by reporters to elaborate after his speech.
“When Osama Bin Laden was killed a lot of the intelligence community was hoping that the President would keep that close so they could exploit the information that they gained from the computer files they picked up at that residence,” he said. “But the president just couldn’t help himself, he just had to go out and take credit for it and I think as a result of that we didn’t maximize the cache of information that we gained during that mission.”
Asked by TPM whether the news would have reached the terrorists anyway given the high-profile raid in a Pakistani residential area and Al Qaeda’s internal communications, Santorum said he believed there might have been enough time to make productive gains.
“We weren’t [aware] until the president announced it,” he said. “There’s not perfect information flow in the world, as we all know, and certainly not perfect information flow out of Pakistan.”
Ari Fleischer, who served as President Bush’s press secretary, told TPM that while he believe the White House revealed too many “granular” details in its immediate account of the raid, some of which had to be retracted later, revealing the basic news that Bin Laden had died was clearly the right move.
“We should all be proud of it and you can’t hide it,” Fleischer said.
Santorum’s critique raises the question: what does Obama have to do to win Santorum’s praise on national security? Kill Osama Bin Laden?
Oh.
