No rush to judgment.

Byline: The Register-Guard

Whether it's a terrorist attack or a volcanic eruption, it's the rare cataclysmic event that isn't preceded by a trail of warning signs and followed by a round of second guessing.

The White House has revealed that the Bush administration knew prior to Sept. 11 that Osama bin Laden was seeking to hijack aircraft. That, in turn, is prompting calls from Congress for an investigation into why U.S. intelligence agencies failed to put together this and other pieces of information, and take action that might have prevented the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

Lawmakers are certainly justified in calling for probes of how the president, the CIA and FBI reacted - or failed to react - to these warnings. But perspective and caution are in order. It's always easy to connect the dots in hindsight; it's quite another thing to do so before the unknown becomes horrific reality.

Yet the clues that steadily mounted over the weeks, months and years before Sept. 11 should be carefully scrutinized, if for no other reason than they could prove critical in making changes necessary to prevent future terrorist attacks.

White House officials say Bush began receiving warnings from U.S. intelligence agencies of heightened terrorist threats as early as last May. Those threats, however, dealt with the possibility of terrorist attacks overseas.

In early August, Bush was told of bin Laden's desire to hijack airplanes in the United States. But, again, the warnings reportedly were general in nature and did not include the possibility that the hijackers would turn the planes into guided missiles. The White House says it issued a general warning to the Department of Transportation, the Federal Aviation Administration and airports around the country.

In retrospect, a substantial amount of information was available to the federal government. But these warnings must be considered in the context of the flood of intelligence and warnings that the government sorts through on a routine basis.

Certainly there is much to be learned from a thorough congressional review. The president already has made clear his dissatisfaction with the failure of the CIA and FBI to share and jointly analyze intelligence information. Whether that failure prevented the government from taking action to prevent the Sept. 11 attacks remains to be seen.

With both Republicans and Democrats calling for investigations, it seems certain that Congress will soon begin its review of what warnings were received by the government and how they were handled. When that happens - and it should happen quickly - the Bush administration should abandon its standard knee-jerk insistence on secrecy and provide all information, including oral and written intelligence briefings presented to the president before Sept. 11.

Until those investigations are completed, it's important for lawmakers and the American public to avoid overreacting to incomplete information, or allowing partisan fingerpointing to interfere with what should be a careful, dispassionate analysis of the facts.