If you wish to repost this essay you can download a .txt file of the html here (right click and save). Permission granted.
Here's a comment that was sent to the petition that I liked:
About two years ago I found a quote by Abraham Joshua Heschel that has haunted me ever since:
When considering cruelties committed in the name of a free society, some may be guilty, but all are responsible.
As much as Gerald Ford might still be lauded by some for “sparing the country the long national nightmare” of whatever proceedings might have been the fate of Richard Nixon, what happened in the Nixon administration was an in-house problem. What has been done in the name of the United States by President Bush and Vice President Cheney has worldwide consequences to our reputation and our future credibility.
When we went to war in contravention of world opinion in 2003, we became the rogue nation that the UN was created (with our co-operation) to deal with. We all know the only reason no one has dealt with us is not because our cause was just or because we were proven right, but only because we're the biggest dog on the block with all the teeth. Who is left that could challenge us?
Now the only chance we have to regain that credibility is to use the freedoms as a citizenry to be honest about what our leaders have done in our name. In my opinion it will haunt us for generations to come how we were so proud of our form of democracy -particularly of our Constitution – that we felt we were the one country qualified (if not obligated in the minds of President Bush and Vice President Cheney) to use the largest military force ever assembled to force it on Iraq – whether they asked for it or not.
It therefore seems perversely tragic that there are plausible allegations that our Constitution – the one we were so proud of – was betrayed in the effort. more below…