Should Obama have kept bin Laden's death a secret?

U.S. intelligence analysts are still combing through the electronic and paper documents retrieved in the raid on Osama bin Laden's compound — including the 9/11 ringleader's personal diary. Scooping up that treasure trove of intelligence was, it seems, almost as important as killing bin Laden. If so, some argue, shouldn't President Obama have given intelligence analysts a few days to sift through clues to other al Qaeda members' locations before triumphantly spilling the news of bin Laden's death? Did the U.S. miss a golden opportunity to nab even more terrorists?

Obama blew it by spiking the football: Obama's big "hurry to gloat" about bin Laden's death will surely undermine the value of the intelligence, says Jonah Goldberg in the Los Angeles Times. If not for political "triumphalism," Obama would have given "the CIA a week, a day, even a few more hours" to pinpoint terrorists before he tipped them off. You don't race "to the microphones to announce you've stolen the other team's playbook" before you win the big game.

"Why the hurry to gloat about Bin Laden?"

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There's no way this would have stayed under wraps: You'd have to be delusional to think Obama could keep an explosive raid in a heavily populated Pakistani suburb a secret for more than 10 minutes, says Mark Howard in News Corpse. And if he had, Goldberg would have been first in line "to complain that Obama was running a clandestine regime that ruled by keeping people in the dark and lying about its actions." Goldberg's rant is nothing more than a desperate "hit piece."

"Jonah Goldberg: In a hurry to prove he's an idiot"

Everyone is just exploiting Osama's death: It's not just U.S. politicians who use bin Laden's death in self-serving ways, says Joel Brinkley in The St. Augustine Record. It's "proving to be a Rorschach test for the entire world." Cuba sees an assassination, Pakistan calls it a violation of its sovereignty, China sees an opportunity to one-up the U.S. But remember: It only took two days for the U.S. to make "public its initial analysis of the data seized in bin Laden's home." That's transparency we can believe in.

"Bin Laden's death a Rorschach test for the world"