(
)
WASHINGTON — Former al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden will be dead for a year on Wednesday — but he’s still causing a stir in the presidential race.
White House officials yesterday defended the release of a controversial campaign ad questioning whether Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney would have aggressively pursued and killed bin Laden.
In the Web ad, released Friday, former Commander-in-Chief Bill Clinton praises President Obama for his decision to take out the world’s most infamous terrorist.
The ad also ridicules Romney, isolating a past quote that “it’s not worth moving heaven and earth spending billions of dollars just trying to catch one person.”
The quote is taken from a 2007 interview with The Associated Press in which Romney said bin Laden was not the only threat in the war on terrorism.
“He’s by no means the only leader,” Romney said. “It’s a very diverse group — Hamas, Hezbollah, al Qaeda, Muslim Brotherhood and, of course, different names throughout the world.”
The Obama administration didn’t back away from the ad yesterday.
“Osama bin Laden no longer walks this planet today because of that brave decision and the brave actions by our men and women in the military — and, quite frankly, Mitt Romney said it was a foolish thing to do a few years ago,” Obama strategist Robert Gibbs said yesterday on “Meet The Press.”
But Romney adviser Ed Gillespie argued that any president would have made the same call based on the intelligence that Obama had at the time.
“I can’t envision, having served in the White House, any president having been told, ‘We have him, he’s here, you know, should we go in?’ saying, ‘No, we shouldn’t,’ ” said Gillespie, a former adviser to George W. Bush.
In the ad, Clinton praises Obama for the risky Navy SEAL raid on bin Laden’s Pakistan compound.
“He took the harder and more honorable path and one that produced, in my opinion, the best results,” Clinton says.
Gillespie accused Obama of “spiking the ball” — showing that he is the most divisive president in US history by taking an incident of national pride and turning it into a “divisive, partisan political attack.”
“It’s a bridge too far, and I think the American people will see through it,” Gillespie said.
Meanwhile, Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, said yesterday that the push to defeat al Qaeda isn’t finished.
The focus is now on Yemen, where past attempts at terrorism — such as the 2009 underwear bomber — were hatched.