Ms. Thomas speaks for many millions and their children.

We will not be complicit.

"There are those in our own country too who today speak of the 'protection of country' — of 'survival.' A decision must be made in the life of every nation at the very moment when the grasp of the enemy is at its throat. Then, it seems that the only way to survive is to use the means of the enemy, to rest survival upon what is expedient — to look the other way. Well, the answer to that is 'survival as what?' A country isn't a rock. It's not an extension of one's self. It's what it stands for. It's what it stands for when standing for something is the most difficult!

Before the people of the world let it now be noted that here, in our decision, this is what we stand for: justice, truth, and the value of a single human being."

The web site http://www.americanrhetoric.com/MovieSpeeches contains:

"… [T]he film … finishes by cutting to the core of the issue: how could this happen in a civilized country? The answer in essence is that 'all that is required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.'

This lesson is encapsulated in the character of Ernst Janning (Burt Lancaster) a man of considerable intelligence who was not a 'good German who knew how to take orders, who sent men before him to be sterilized like so many digits' nor a 'decayed, corrupt bigot, obsessed by the evil within himself.' No, Ernst Janning (a fictional character who is actually a collage of several actual defendants) was 'worse than any of them because he knew what they were, and he went along with them. Ernst Jannings: Who made his life excrement, because he walked with them.'

Maximilian Schell plays a young German lawyer who argues that men cannot be found guilty for merely being loyal to their government; Lancaster plays one of the accused who argues for his own condemnation: 'I made my life excrement, because I walked with them'.

Defendant Ernst Janning, (played by Burt Lancaster) struggles with his inner demons and begins to rise from the abyss, gaining a modicum of moral respite as he forcibly rebukes Schell, changes his plea to "Guilty," and testifies as to the soul-destructive nature of 'a passing phase which became a way of life.' Lancaster's Janning is truly tragic, more so because he so clearly understands that 'he made his life excrement when he walked with [the Nazis].'"

Can we do nothing to keep our country and ourselves from also becoming "excrement" by permitting us even to be remotely associated with the "evil doers" in the Bush administration? I believe we can. Here are three suggestions:

• Let us speak out. Otherwise, by our silence we shout that we condone crimes against humanity in the form of torture, which now cannot be denied. See: http://www.democracynow.org/2008/4/10/headlines#1, http://media.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/pdfs/OLCMemo1-19.pdf and http://nuremberg.law.harvard.edu/php/docs_swi.php?DI=1&text=who_was_who

• Unless and until our country wipes the "excrement" of the Bush administration from itself, let us send whatever financial support we can to non-profit organizations whose mission is to preserve our Constitution and the civil liberties of everyone, everywhere.

• Let us petition the next administration to extradite to the World Court in The Hague, all those in the any administration who conspired to commit crimes against humanity. How else can we demonstrate to the world that none of us is above the law and that "our lives have not also been made excrement because we walked with them"?