The same week Mitt Romney pooh-poohed the importance of capturing Osama Bin Laden, he announced that former top counterterrorism official Cofer Black was joining his campaign as an advisor. It's nothing if not a unique pairing of a square-jawed Mormon who fibbed about his hunting exploits to appear rugged and a pudgy-faced bad-ass super spy who caught Carlos the Jackal and vowed to President Bush after 9/11 that Al Qaeda members would have "flies crawling across their eyeballs."

Even more interesting is the apparent daylight between their views on Bin Laden. In an interview, Romney said capturing Bin Laden would achieve only "a very insignificant increase in safety" and that it was "not worth moving heaven and earth spending billions of dollars just trying to catch one person."

Made the same week that the Taliban said Bin Laden personally planned the recent assassination attempt on Vice President Cheney in Afghanistan, Romney's statement would seem out of step with a guy like Black, who was trying to kill Bin Laden long before it was cool. Black himself was targeted for assassination by the mass murderer while he was heading up CIA operations in Sudan and, after the 9/11 attacks, told his operatives in Afghanistan to bring him Bin Laden's head in a box of dry ice.

It's highly unlikely that Romney will be able to get through this Thursday's Republican debate without having to address his Bin Laden brush-off. And what guidance might he be getting from his new advisor who, when discussing the failure to capture Bin Laden, summed up his views simply: "He deserves to die." And according to a new poll, most Americans agree.

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