torture as cancer

I believe that the Constitution of the United States has cancer.
My understanding of cancer is that it usually takes decades of exposure to toxins before cells become cancerous.

Today we are faced with a cancer of the Constitution.
It may have started with two cancer cells, Cheney and Rumsfeld
Did they get their start in the Nixon administration? I think so. I think they believed, and still believe, that Nixon was right and that he was above the law while he was president and that a unitary executive branch is best for this country.

They first appear in public, and with power under Gerald Ford. Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon. The cancer Nixon started was not thoroughly killed by irradiation of the bright light of public scrutiny. Cheney and Rumsfeld and crew were allowed to continue to silently grow and infect others around them. The tumor was regrowing.

The cancer grows, quietly and becomes more powerful
Through Reagan and Bush, 41. Through Iran-Contra where the United States hired people like Eugene Hassenfus to run cocaine into black neighborhoods and to sell weapons to Iran to raise money to fund an extra-constitutional war.
A temporary seeming remission during Clinton. But the military continued to privatize their support services. Now, instead of having Army cooks, we subcontract the jobs out to Halliburton and pay Blackwater (I mean Xi) to guard the civilians. If we had that arrangement during the Battle of the Bulge, the Germans would have won their Argonne offensive because then e had an army that could fight in depth. We had cooks who were soldiers first.

Then the full symptomatic eruption happened during Bush 43. Just the right mix of carcinogens and precancerous cells got mixed together. The body of this nation was subjected to a terrible shock. We all (most of us) bought the big lie. We could not see that giving George Bush – and, by extension, the people who had their hand up his butt like a sock puppet – Giving George Bush war powers was no different from giving any other redneck an ax handle, a six pack and a pick-up truck.

Our Constitution has been exposed to eight years of rapid and unimpeded growth of Constitutional Cancer. The tumor has not yet killed the Constitution.

Smoking causes cancer, right? Stopping smoking is a preventative method of avoiding the disease.
But once cancer is present, it continues to grow even if the victim stops smoking.

Now, by pardoning torturers and justifiers of torture, and orderers of torture and promising to just not ever do it again, the country is trying to cure cancer by just stopping smoking. We pretend that the the concept of the Unitary Executive is behind us. We say that we will no longer torture. We do not repudiate unwarranted invasions into the private lives of our citizens. We seek to protect some of the people, the CIA civilians, who tortured in the name of The United States of America. Yet we do not pardon the military people who, acting under the very same legal determinations, followed their orders in military prisons and were scapegoated and themselves sent to military prisons.

Once the disease starts, appeasment and promising to change do not rid the body of the Constitution of the cancer. If those things worked then Gerald Ford’s pardon would have worked – and it didn’t.

The patient may get a few more years of life if surgeons cut out the big, easy to get pieces But the patient will still die of the cancer because it is still there and will grow back.

It may even metastasize and spread to other parts of the body.

Sometimes a person with lung cancer dies because the cancer spreads to the liver or the brain and those tumors kill the person first.

Is this what we want of our Constitution? Is this what we want for our country?
I for one do not.

Therefore – I am sending this to my president, my senators, my representative and several various public media outlets.

I am imploring those with the power, I’m begging, I’m asking nice, I’m saying Please

“Please, If we are truly a nation of law (and we are a nation of law because we legitimize our government through the set of law we refer to as the Constitution) independently and publicly investigate every abuse of power, real or imagined, that makes up the legacy of the Bush Cheney Administration.

This will not be so hard to do. PBS has already a half dozen programs outlining abuse. Even the Comedy channel has researched and developed numerous “news” stories.

Surely Congress, and the Justice Department can do as well, if not better.

My pledge. Just as Gerald Ford’s putting the past behind us by pardoning Richard Nixon cost him my vote in 1976, not investigating torture and other abuses of power and office between the years of 2000 and 2008 will cost President Obama my vote in 2012.