This is good to remember:

DESPITE COUNTLESS five-year retrospectives on the 9/11 attacks, we seem to have forgotten at least one act of courage — Rep. Barbara Lee's fearless dissent from a congressional rush to judgment. We should remember the Oakland Democrat's speech. It was both principled and prophetic, and we can learn from it today.

The carnage of Sept. 11, 2001 was a defining moment in the American experience. We were stunned, deeply hurt by the loss of so many. Then we were angry. We wanted those responsible brought to justice or summarily killed. Amidst the rubble in New York, President Bush promised to use all necessary means to punish those responsible.

Five years ago today, on Sept. 14, 2001, Congress passed a joint resolution authorizing the president to use military force against those "he determines" were responsible for the attacks.

Only one member of Congress, Barbara Lee, voted against the resolution. She counseled against a rush to judgment, warned that an angry use of force could inflame our growing prejudice against Arab Americans, Muslims, Southeast Asians or others.

She told us "not to embark on an open-ended war with neither an exit-strategy nor a focused target." And, in her most prophetic moment, she said, "As we act, let us not become the evil we deplore."

Have we not begun that slow descent?

We have long claimed to be against torture and imprisonment without criminal charges, but our actions at Abu Ghraib and Haditha and the detentions at Guantanamo Bay and secret CIA prisons around the world suggest otherwise.

We have enshrined in our Bill of Rights the right to counsel and to a fair trial, but our long denial of counsel to Jose Padilla and our plan to try so-called "enemy combatants" in military tribunals instead of civil courts make our professions of piety empty and meaningless.

We profess the virtues of a democracy, commitment to open deliberation and debate but stood silently by while the administration presented speculative evidence as fact, limited press access to crucial information, and circumvented even the minimal justifications required by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Perhaps most importantly, we pay homage to a government "of laws and not men," whose leaders swear to uphold the Constitution.

In no area of policy is the Constitution more important than in the decision to wage war. Lee knew this. She warned us not to "repeat past mistakes," and reminded us of one of our worst.

In 1964, Congress gave similar powers to President Lyndon Johnson for two alleged attacks against U.S. Navy ships in the Gulf of Tonkin. The resolution became the legal basis for the Vietnam War, one that lasted years, divided the nation, cost billions of dollars and took 58,000 American lives. In so doing, Lee insisted, "This House abandoned its own constitutional responsibilities and launched our country into years of undeclared war in Vietnam."

Under our Constitution, only Congress has the power to declare war. It is Congress' most sacred duty and responsibility. The separation of powers doctrine is at the very heart of our system of liberty and government by executive decree represents a kind of authoritarianism we have always fought against.

Either we demand that Congress reassert its obligations and function as a check on the executive branch or we are merely playing out some script of a democracy, affirming only the freedom of our crimes. Either we uphold our system of law and our civic principles or we become something different.

We become, as Barbara Lee feared we might, the evil we deplore.