Osama off the hook?

Fox reports, you decide.

Via Think Progress, an interview with Fox talking head Fred Barnes:

HOST: Alright Fred, you and a few other journalists were in the Oval Office with the President, right? And he says catching Osama bin Laden is not job number one?

BARNES: Well, he said, look, you can send 100,000 special forces, that’s the figure he used, to the mountains of Pakistan and Afghanistan and hunt him down, but he just said that’s not a top priority use of American resources. His vision of a war on terror is one that involves intelligence to find out from people, to get tips, to follow them up and break up plots to kill Americans before they occur. That’s what happened recently in that case of the planes that were to be blown up by terrorists, we think coming from England, and that’s the top priority. He says, you know, getting Osama bin Laden is a low priority compared to that.

Watch the video; this is not a verbatim transcript, but the quotes accurately reflect what Barnes said about Bush.

And remember, Barnes is the guy granted "insider" access to Bush to publish a puff-piece book on the President.

Isn't it interesting that President Bush's top priority seems to be postitively,...what's the right word...Clintonian?

Here's what Vice President Dick Cheney said about this kind of anti-terror approach on March 17, 2004:

In his view, opposing terrorism is far less of a military operation and far more of an intelligence-gathering, law enforcement operation. As we have seen, however, that approach was tried before, and proved entirely inadequate to protecting the American people from the terrorists

Cheney was talking about John Kerry and Bill Clinton, not his boss.

Addendum: "War on terror" ally Pakistan has made peace with the Taliban.


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