In the days after September 11th the buzz in the left-fringe alternative press and websites was that the President had prior notice of the impending attack and chose not to intervene so as to obtain justification for his military foray into Afghanistan. The benighted few who see conspiracies in every sunrise and conspirators in every shadow took that hook and swallowed it along with the line and the sinker. The rest of us rolled our eyes to heaven and said, "There they go again! Look out for the black helicopters!" Now, with a steady drip, information leaks from the not quite hermitically sealed vault that holds the Bush Administration's secrets.

Plink! On July 10, 2001 the Phoenix Field office sends a memo to FBI headquarters in Washington. The field office warns that middle-eastern men are attending flight schools across the United States and links the flight students to Osama Bin Laden.

Plink! On August 1, 2001 Moussaoui is arrested in Minneapolis after a flight school tip to the FBI that he is seeking training in flying a 747 but not in either taking off or landing. An FBI agent writes in the margin of the arrest report that Moussaoui is the kind of person who could fly a 747 into the World Trade Center.

Plink! On August 6, 2001 the President is vacationing at his ranch in Crawford, Texas. He receives an intelligence briefing that contains a warning of an Al Queda plot to highjack American aircraft. The contents of the briefing have not been released to the public - or even to the Congress.

Plink! In her attempt to spin the revelation that the President had received the warning Condelissa Rice in her May 16th press conference told reporters that the Administration was studying what its reaction should be to such an attack.

Plink! According to Rice the Administration issued a generalized warning to the Transportation Department to be vigilant for an attempted hijacking.

Plink! On August 17th 2001 the Minneapolis field office sends a memo to FBI headquarters in Washington describing the Moussaoui case and its concerns that he is part of an Al Queda plot.

Splat! As early as 1996 the intelligence agencies had information that Ramsey Youseff, the mastermind behind the 1993 WTC bombing was hatching a plan to highjack a jumbo jet and crash it into the twin towers.

The Administration spin is that no one connected the dots. No one in the Administration had all of the information. All the information that made its way to the highest level was so general in nature and vague so as to fail to alert the players to the nature of the game.

Ms. Rice, in what is perhaps the most disingenuous comment yet, told reporters that she had asked her staff to discover whether she had received any of the memos. The idea that she would not recall whether or not she saw those memos seconds after having heard of the first crash is ludicrous. The only reason to check with her staff is to discover whether evidence that she did see them is around.

There is nothing so murky as the water stirred up when a bunch of bureaucrats play CYA. The problem is that when it clears, the truth wells up and can't be hidden forever. I still think that Black Helicopters and the New World Order are fantasies. But I am beginning to ask, "What did the Administration know and when did they know it?" Those are questions to which the American people deserve answers. We know that immediately following the event the Administration blamed Bin Laden and his gang. The leaks may go a long way to explain how the Administration was able to reach that conclusion so quickly.