Apart.”] By the late 1990s, the Clinton administration recognized Osama bin Laden and his new al-Qaeda organization as a major terrorist threat to the United States. However, once in the White House, President George W. Bush let down the nation’s guard. When the CIA warned him on Aug. 6, 2001, that bin-Laden was determined “to strike inside the U.S.,” Bush brushed off the warning and went fishing. Rather than rallying the government to examine available clues and tighten security, he continued a month-long vacation. A little more than a month after the CIA warning, on the morning of Sept. 11, George H.W. Bush and members of the bin Laden family were participating in a Carlyle Group investment meeting in Washington. It was disrupted by the machinations of anotherbranch of the bin Laden family, when Osama’s al-Qaeda operatives hijacked planes and crashed them into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. According to one source, a bin Laden family member at the Carlyle meeting immediately sensed who was behind the terror attacks and removed his name tag. In the following days, as the Justice Department was jailing hundreds of Arab cab drivers and other “usual suspects,” George W. Bush cleared the bin Ladens to fly out of the United States, after only cursory interrogations by the FBI, by letting them board some of the first planes that were allowed back into U.S. air space. [For details, see Craig Unger’s House of Bush, House of Saud.] Going After Osama It was not until George W. Bush finally was