From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

And I'm Bob Garfield. For almost two weeks now in press conferences and on talk shows,

the White House has made its case that whatever information it had before September 11th

does not mean that the terrorism of that day could possibly have been foreseen or countered.

Dots to be connected is the most popular way to look at these bits of information.

A Phoenix Flight School, a memo to the president while he was in Crawford, Texas.

A 1999 report titled The Sociology and Psychology of Terrorism, Who Becomes a Terrorist and Why?

The last dot was a document that had been in the public record for two years at the time of the terrorist attacks.

The National Intelligence Council in the Library of Congress prepared the report, and it was never a classified document, but that doesn't mean it was widely known before this week.

John Solomon of the Associated Press was the first to report on the existence of this paper.

He joins us now. John, welcome to OTIM.

Well, thank you very much.

This document was posted online, kind of hidden in plain view.

Nobody knew about it, or at least no members of the administration, or of the press knew about it. How did you find it?

Around just in the days before this story, the Bush administration began to say no one in

government ever envisioned a suicide jetliner attack, like the ones that occurred on September 11th.

And so we went to take a look and see how much people in government knew about the idea that an

al-Qaeda operative had 95 to dive bomb an airplane into the CIA or another government building.

And in the course of that, we came across this very open source public document written for the National Intelligence Council.

When you say you came upon it, I mean, was it like Hillary Clinton in the Rose Law Firm records?

Do you just find them in a file folder on your desk?

I did a lot of interviews with experts in the terrorism field asking, you know, how much is the government debated this possibility?

...