The United States of America is more than a physical place, it is an ideal of democracy, freedom and opportunity. When we engage in torture, when we spy on our own citizens, when we violate the high standards we have set for ourselves, we undermine our very reason for being. To lead the world and to participate in the growth of free societies, we must hold ourselves out as an example. When we send people to places where we know they will be tortured, when we violate our own constitution to listen to the conversations of our citizens when we in short engage in the techniques of fascism, we hand the terrorists a victory that they could not accomplish on their own, we become more like them.
The goal of fundamentalist Muslim terrorists is destroy the secular society we have created based on the rule of law created by man. While terrorism has been used to destroy symbols of our democracy, it cannot destroy the methods of our democracy. Only we can do that. By sacrificing our liberties to gain security, to paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, we deserve neither. This does not mean we should not pursue threats to our nation to the fullest extent of our abilities, however it does mean that in this pursuit, we must obey our own laws and those of the international community that we have agreed to. We must also be sure that those we are pursuing are those that have attacked us by basing our policy on hard intelligence, not wishful thinking.
When we were attacked on September 11th, we lost a great many citizens and an iconic building, but we did not loose our status as a world leader. It is only since then by the misguided way we have responded that we have, of our own accord, shaken our standing in the world. Our nation has engaged in acts that we as it's citizens are not proud of. We have done things both to foreigners and to our own citizens that have violated the principles that this country was founded on. To regain our status and our pride and to assert our liberty we must stop these behaviors now and begin to restore our reputation as a beacon of freedom, democracy and the rule of law. (this is the speech that someone, Democrat or Republican needs to give)