(FinalCall.com) - On the floor of the House of Representatives, the voices were shrill and some harsh words were spoken May 20 as Republicans blasted calls for full disclosure of what President George W. Bush knew prior to the Sept. 11 tragedy.

The lawmakers railed against so-called partisan politics and accused Democrats of trying to politically bushwhack a president in a time of war. The Democratic leadership�s calls for full disclosure and creation of a possible special commission to probe the intelligence failures of Sept. 11 play into the hands of the enemy, many Republicans said. Allegations that the president knew something would happen and didn�t act detract from national unity and insult the commander in chief, they added.

For the all the Republican rancor and banter, and regardless of any political motives on the Democratic side, the White House must come clean with exactly what if knew and didn�t know and what it did and didn�t do before Sept. 11. It is also time for a full investigation into why the intelligence services of the world�s only superpower couldn�t connect the dots of information about potential assaults against the United States.

Since that fateful day last fall, the White House had maintained that nothing was known, nothing was said, nobody ever thought about anything that might resemble such an attack. But it now appears that a scenario for flying planes into national symbols, whether the World Trade Center or the Eiffel Tower, go back several years.

In 1995, the FBI was told that Osama Bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda network were considering hijacking commercial airliners and flying them into the Pentagon and other U.S. targets, possibly in New York and San Francisco. Last July, an FBI agent wrote a memo saying the number of Arab students at flight schools needed to the checked out. Zacarias Moussaoui, arrested last August and now charged as the 20th hijacker for the Sept. 11 flights, might have tried to fly "something" into the World Trade Center, an FBI agent wrote in notes about the case in early September. Then there�s that long CIA commissioned report done by Library of Congress researchers that said Al-Qaeda could try to retaliate against U.S. bombings of its camps in 1998 by flying a plane packed with explosives into the Pentagon.

The White House also needs to explain why it took eight months to admit that there was a briefing, however incomplete, where the president was told of potential plane hijackings by terrorists.

The focus isn�t allegations that President Bush intentionally didn�t act�allegations that few people, if anyone, have made publicly�there is a need to know what happened that allowed the deaths of thousands of civilians on American soil, sent the economy into a tailspin, cost the lives of U.S. servicemen, put America at war and back into deficit spending, ushered in a new vigor for and widespread acceptance of racial profiling and opened the door for historic civil liberties restrictions.

Already the Congress is putting more and more money into the intelligence agencies, money that won�t go to help the homeless, the sick or the poor. For fiscal year 2003, the CIA and other spy agencies will receive see their public budgets increase to $35 billion. What will the American people get for their dollars and how will past problems be remedied?

The need to know the truth can�t be hidden under the flag of patriotism and calls for support of the war on terrorism. In a democracy, the people have a right to know and the right to decide what was done right and wrong on their behalf.