Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum is attacking President Obama, turning the killing of Osama Bin Laden into a national security failure.
At a forum sponsored by the Republican Jewish Coalition on Wednesday, Santorum said that Obama announced the news of Bin Laden's death too soon, and if he knew anything about Iran's nuclear ambitions or an explosion at an Iranian missile base last month, he wouldn't be able to keep it to himself.
"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," he said, according to TPM.
"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 elaborated later. "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."
Santorum went on to criticize Obama for being soft on Islamic extremism.
"This president, for every thug and hooligan, for every radical Islamist, he has had nothing but appeasement," he said. "Ladies and gentlemen, learn from history."
Last month Santorum made another foreign policy attack on the Obama administration, warning that Iran will get a nuclear weapon.
"The public is going to be stunned when all hell breaks loose," he told the Washington Post. "They're going to ask, 'Why didn't we know?'"
It has been a banner week for Santorum, who has sparred with voters in Iowa over gay marriage, health care and gay people having children.
All of the major GOP candidates except Ron Paul are participating in the forum on Wednesday. Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney and Rick Perry are expected to address previous comments they made about cutting foreign aid and how that would impact Israel.
CORRECTION: A previous version of this story identified Santorum as a former Pennsylvania governor. He is a former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania.