The petition will be delivered to the president and Congress in March. In its first day of official launch, the petition signed up 3000 new people. Total signatures have grown to just over 22,000.

Notices asking receivers to send the message on to ten friends were sent by mass e-mail February 3, following the President's State of the Union address.

“We will continue to send invitations out to other lists and ask partner organizations to do the same,” states Tony Heriza, AFSC associate director of Communications. “We are hoping for a ‘viral’ effect, where friends telling friends greatly expands our reach. So far we have been pretty impressed with the willingness of people to ‘tell a friend.’ ”

On Thursday alone, about 3500 messages were passed on via the form at the end of the movie. The film will also be screened at AFSC’s Eyes Wide Open, a traveling memorial exhibit for U.S. soldiers and Iraqi civilians killed in the Iraq war. Eyes Wide Open is currently traveling across the South and West – to Austin, Houston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle and other cities.

A video version of the flash movie is being discussed. Currently it exists only in the more compressed online format. The movie can be viewed at the AFSC website: http://www.afsc.org/wagepeace/

Backed by an 87-year history working for peace, justice and reconciliation in trouble areas of the world, the American Friends Service Committee is a faith-based organization grounded in Quaker beliefs respecting the dignity and worth of every person. The search for regional peace has been a major focus of the Service Committee’s highly regarded international affairs work. In 1919 AFSC launched massive programs to feed millions of starving children in post-war Germany at the request of President Herbert Hoover, when he was director of the American Relief Administration. During World War II, AFSC provided temporary aid, housing and other assistance to Japanese-Americans in efforts to get them out of internment camps.