Ex-CIA officers accuse Obama of leaking details of Osama raid

A group of former special operations and CIA officers have accused US President Barack Obama of "recklessly" leaking information about the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan to gain political advantage.

In a 22-minute video called "Dishonorable Disclosures" the the group of former special operations and CIA officers have made the accusations against the President saying that Obama takes too much credit for the killing of the al-Qaeda leader and has recklessly leaked information about the raid.

The group, called the Special Operations Opsec Education Fund, using shorthand for "operational security", describes itself as non-partisan, but some of its leaders have been involved in Republican campaigns and Tea Party groups, the New York Times reported.

The Obama campaign immediately compared the effort to the "Swift Boat" advertisements against Senator John Kerry in the 2004 presidential campaign.

Like that effort, which attacked Kerry's military record in Vietnam, the Opsec site goes after Obama's strong points on national security, specifically his role in overseeing the military-Central Intelligence Agency raid that killed bin Laden, the founder of al-Qaeda, in the Pakistani garrison town of Abbottabad, in May 2011.

In the series of interviews in the video posted on the group's website, the former military and intelligence officers accuse Obama of seeking political gain by disclosing successful secret operations.

"As a citizen, it is my civic duty to tell the president to stop leaking information to the enemy," Benjamin Smith, identified in the video as a former Navy SEAL said."It will get Americans killed," he added.

Another former Navy SEAL in the video, Scott Taylor, said of the bin Laden raid: "If you disclose how we got there, how we took down the building, what we did, how many people were there, that it's going to hinder future operations, and certainly hurt the success of those future operations."

Smith also criticises the president for taking too much credit for the SEALs' raid. "Mr President, you did not kill Osama bin Laden. America did," he said. "We have become a political weapon. We are not."

Smith said the ad campaign pays no heed to political affiliation. But the organisation shares an office with two Republican political consulting firms in Alexandria, Virginia.The group's spokesman Chad Kolton worked for the Bush administration as a spokesman for the Director of National Intelligence.

Taylor has run for the Republican nomination for Congress in Virginia; Smith said he is a registered Republican but votes independently.