On This Week with George Stephanopoulos, Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson surprised the host when he maintained that if the Bush Administration in 2001 had threatened energy independence and was serious about it, the Middle East nations would have placed their economic interests ahead of their loyalty to Osama bin Laden, and would have been able to hunt down and turn him over to the United States within two weeks.

Does Carson really think they could have done that? Stephanopoulos persisted: they didn’t even know where bin Laden was. “Oh, I think they did,” Carson retorted.

Notably, Carson is the only major Republican presidential candidate who opposed the war in Afghanistan following 9/11, as he contends that his approach would have been far better.