More often than not, the Clinton administration routinely ignored that common-sense adage in handling its scandals - withholding information and parsing the English language until Bill Clinton's credibility was in shreds.

More recently, Rep. Gary Condit (D-Calif.) made the same strategic error, managing to seem guilty even when cops said they had nothing on him in the disappearance of Washington intern Chandra Levy.

Bush had been briefed about potential hijackings prior to 9/11. Now the control freaks of the Bush administration, which always has thumped its collective chest over its tight discipline and abhorrence of leaks, have belatedly been caught stonewalling what it knew and when it knew it about the Sept. 11 hijackings.

Ever since that miserable day, the Bush White House has been content to let politicians and reporters think Bush's predecessors were asleep at the wheel fighting the terrorist threat.

Now it turns out, eight months after the fact, the Bush government knew more about the danger than it had let on, until press secretary Ari Fleischer's terse statement last night.

How much more, and how culpable that makes a President whose conduct of the anti-terrorist war has drawn widespread public approval, is certain to be the subject of intense political debate in the weeks ahead.

The fact that Fleischer confirmed details of the President's intelligence briefing - something he and previous government spokesmen never do - suggested the White House clearly is concerned about the appearance of a coverup.

But a Bush political source predicted the Democrats were unlikely to try to capitalize on "a national tragedy."

"It all depends on whether people conclude we did everything we could and failed," he said. "Or whether we had a warning and blew it. I tend to think we will get the benefit of the doubt.

"I don't think the Democrats can play around with such an explosive issue."

The revelation that Bush had been briefed about potential hijackings marks a shift in the official version of events surrounding the Sept. 11 attacks.

Bush and other administration officials have generally characterized the terrorist hijackings as a sneak attack that could not have been foreseen.

"It's hard to envision a plot so devious as the one that they pulled off on 9/11," Bush said in a January interview with NBC's Tom Brokaw. "Never did we realize that the enemy was so well-organized."

The new information suggests there may have been less of an intelligence failure before Sept. 11 than some lawmakers have alleged - though it also raises new questions of whether more could have been done to halt the terror attacks.