Fox News' Bill Sammon catches Joe Biden not saying something he never said

Sammon, who helped gin up phony stories about Al Gore during the 2000 campaign, raises doubts about a story Biden has told in the past about a fact-finding visit to Afghanistan he made last winter, and how the helicopter he was traveling in was forced down in the mountains there.

Sammon includes the Biden anecdote in his article at Fox News online because he's trying to support a larger narrative that Biden has been making up, or exaggerating, stories about his military-based travels overseas. And that Biden has “raised eyebrows” with his Afghanistan story.

Here's Sammon quoting Biden:

“If you want to know where Al Qaeda lives, you want to know where Bin Laden is, come back to Afghanistan with me,” Biden bragged to the National Guard Association. “Come back to the area where my helicopter was forced down, with a three-star general and three senators at 10,500 feet in the middle of those mountains. I can tell you where they are.”

Having set the trap, Sammon then pounced: "But it turns out that inclement weather, not terrorists, prompted the chopper to land in an open field during Biden's visit to Afghanistan in February. [Emphasis added.]

Why the “but” at the beginning of the sentence, though? Go back and read Biden's description and see if he ever said he was forced down because of terrorists. Clearly he never made that claim. Even Sammon conceded, “Biden never explicitly claimed his chopper had been forced down by terrorists.”

So what, exactly, was Sammon's point? The point seemed to be that Sammon caught Biden not saying something he never said.

We think.