Obama suggested Romney would have demurred if given the opportunity to kill Laden.
President Barack Obama has seized on the imminent first anniversary of Osama bin Laden's death to say that the al-Qaeda chief would probably still be alive if Mitt Romney had been president.
In the most strident attack so far on his Republican rival's credentials as a potential commander-in-chief, Obama suggested Romney would have demurred if given the opportunity to kill Laden.
A campaign advertisement released yesterday (Friday) highlighted Romney's 2007 comment that it was "not worth moving heaven and earth and spending billions of dollars" to find the mastermind of the September 11 attacks.
Former president Bill Clinton, who is emerging as a key Obama campaigner, is used to endorse the president's decisiveness. "The commander-in-chief gets one chance to make the right decision. Nobody can make that decision for you," he says.
The advertisement, backed with tense string music, strikes at the heart of Romney's main claim for the US presidency: that he is the ruthless chief executive America needs to lift the country out of its economic doldrums.
His biographers claim that he was in fact a risk-averse businessman, notorious for nervously playing with his tie when forced to make difficult decisions and agreeing to head a new private-equity arm of the Bain consultancy group only if he could return to his old job under a cover story if it failed.
Clinton said that by risking the lives of US Navy Seals - and his career - by ordering the raid on Laden's hideout in Abbottabad, Pakistan on May 2, Obama "took the harder and the more honourable path".
Vice-President Joe Biden also told a rally this week that Obama's campaign bumper sticker should read "Osama bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive", while the "reverse" might have been true under the leadership of Romney.
Romney, who has distanced himself from his 2007 remarks, said last year of Obama's decision to authorise the Laden raid: "Any president would have done that."
The row came as Obama was sharply criticised by a leading former CIA officer for banning "enhanced interrogation techniques" such as waterboarding used on terrorist suspects under the presidency of George W Bush.
Jose Rodriguez said more than 10 plots were stopped because of the techniques, which also included sleep deprivation and enforced nudity. "We made some al-Qaeda terrorists with American blood on their hands uncomfortable for a few days," he told CBS.
"I am very secure in what we did and very confident that what we did saved American lives."
Rodriguez defended the decision to waterboard Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the September 11 plotter, 183 times in one month.
He insisted that Mohammed, who will appear before a military court in Guantanamo next month, did not care about being waterboarded and would count with his fingers as interrogators poured water on him because he knew they would stop after 10 seconds.
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