Trump under fire for bin Laden comment

President Trump has ignited a firestorm of criti- cism and charges that he is politicizing the military by faulting a war hero for not capturing al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden sooner.

Trump took shots at retired Adm. William McRaven in a Fox News interview Sunday in which he also asserted that the for- mer Navy SEAL and former commander of U.S. Special Operations Command was a “backer” of Trump’s 2016 rival, Hillary Clinton, and supporter of former Presi- dent Barack Obama.

“Disgusting,” the George W. Bush administration’s White House counterterrorism adviser, Fran Townsend, wrote on Twitter.

Leon Panetta, who was CIA director during the bin Laden raid and later served as secretary of defense, said Trump owed an apology to McRaven.

The controversy follows a pattern of concerns raised by former senior military officers about Trump’s grasp of the military’s role, including those who assert that his decision to send thousands of active-duty troops to the U.S.-Mexico border shortly before the Nov. 6 midterm elections was a political stunt.

Asked whether military leaders were not due credit for having killed the al-Qaeda leader, Trump said, “They took him down but — look, look, there’s news right there, he lived in Pakistan, we’re supporting Pakistan, we’re giving them $1.3 billion a year, which we don’t give them anymore, by the way, I ended it because they don’t do anything for us, they don’t do a damn thing for us.”