President Bush tells a journalist that getting Osama bin Laden is a low priority compared to getting intelligence to stop new attacks. Fred Barnes, executive director of the Weekly Standard, and some other journalists met with Bush on September 12, 2006. Asked the next day on Fox News if Bush thinks catching bin Laden is “priority number one,” Barnes replies, “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.” [Fox News, 9/13/2006]
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