Crawford

... right? Anyway, Osama bin Laden was determined to strike inside the United States.

Bush was on vacation at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, days into a break that ran the better part of August because after six months of hard work, he deserved a little treat.

The roughly 1,600-acre Prairie Chapel Ranch in unincorporated McLennan County had originally been a hog farm, never a working ranch, but it did look like a ranch, and that's perfect for George W. Bush, a man who is from Connecticut and was never a cowboy, but did his best to look like a cowboy.

Mark Knoller of CBS tracked Bush's trips to the ranch during his presidency and counted 77 trips spanning 490 total days.

Ugh.

W was enjoying another month of letting his four brain cells flutter around his skull like butterflies in the carefree meadows of a Texas play ranch.

On Sunday, August 28th, the president sat in front of a video screen in Crawford while the director of the National Hurricane Center warned that an approaching storm could top the New Orleans levees.

His FEMA director echoed these warnings.

And

let's not forget that the CIA sent a guy all the way down to Crawford, Texas, on August 6th of 2001, to give George W. Bush a briefing titled, Bin Laden Determined to Strike Inside the U.S. And after that, that's when Bush decided to extend his vacation all the way out to September.

So, yeah, I get it, Ron.

I'm willing to go along with some of these conspiracy theories because they make sense.

But with the surge against the opposition of, you know, Condoleezza Rice's national security advisor was she was really not a fan of, as I described in the book of this idea.

She said to Bush at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, you know, she said, this is your last card.

This is your last card.

And if you play it, it can't just be the same.

[beeping] Hey there, American History Hotliners.

Bob Crawford here, thrilled to be joining you again for another episode of American History Hotline.

It's the show where you ask the questions, and the best way to get us a question is to visit our website at americanhistoryhotline.com and leave us a voice memo or film yourself asking the question, and we will get some great expert on to answer the question for you.

Okay, today's question comes from Daphne in California.

We've been doing it for about seven years.

Anyway, one of the fifteen-year-olds says, right when we started, he says, uh, "Mr.

Crawford, what do you know about the USS Cole?"

None.

And they really didn't...

They were totally surprised by the Al-Qaeda attacks, even though they shouldn't have been because they were receiving a set of pretty strident warnings in the spring and summer of 2001 by the CIA that Al-Qaeda was planning something, most famously the presidential daily brief on August 6th, 2001, that was briefed to George W. Bush at his vacation ranch in Crawford, Texas, which was entitled, "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the US." And I'd already mentioned, you know, the groups of these guys had tried to bring down the Trade Center in '93.

There had been other, uh, relatively serious efforts, uh, to blow up Los Angeles Airport by f- folks trained in Afghanistan in 1999.

So it wasn't sort of an abstract concern.

And they got the bulk of the attention for month after month after month.

In August of that year, President Bush went back to his ranch in Crawford, Texas, and We were waiting for a decision on stem cell research, and it was a big deal for the White House.

And we were told that at the end of his August break, he would have a decision on how the U.S. would proceed with adult stem cell research.

I have concluded that we should allow federal funds to be used for research on these existing stem cell lines, where the life and death decision has already been made.