Last year, Congress authorized the creation of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States to investigate the events that led to and occurred on Sept. 11, 2001. Given the Bush administration's reaction to the bipartisan commission's repeated requests for information, one can reasonably surmise that the executive branch has something to hide.

Nobody knows why, but stinginess with information has been this administration's modus operandi from the beginning. President Bush presides over the most information-averse White House in recent memory, which is a virtue only if you believe government should not be accountable.

Perhaps the crisis that engulfed the president and his advisers on Sept. 11 confirmed a dangerous notion that the White House harbored even before the attack: Information is too precious a commodity to share with the governed unless it has been thoroughly sanitized.

The Bush White House has consistently cited executive privilege and national security in refusing requests for copies of the president's daily CIA briefings in the weeks leading up to Sept. 11, turning its phobia about leaks into a mantra that defies both logic and the public that the commission represents.

The commission's Republican chairman, former New Jersey Gov. Thomas H. Kean, has threatened the White House with a subpoena if it doesn't cooperate. It is a threat the administration would be foolish to ignore.

The last thing this nation needs is the spectacle of its president defying a blue-ribbon panel dedicated to unearthing the truth about one of the most tragic days in American history.

Because of its track record of favoring secrecy over disclosure, the administration is running a deficit on trust. On a myriad of issues, from homeland security to the clandestine committee that advised Vice President Dick Cheney about energy policy, this administration has been hostile to the citizens' right to know about a wide range of information. With 2004 an election year, there's no reason to assume that the administration's intentions are benign rather than political.

Yet, after the horror and devastation of Sept. 11, the public deserves to know if that day could have been avoided and what our elected representatives did to counter the threat as they understood it.

If the Bush administration has nothing to hide, it will share what it knew with the Kean Commission. Otherwise, it is taking a risk with its own fortunes and with the trust of the American people.