This administration governs exceptionally poorly. It does, however, campaign 24/7, and is generally effective at it. It is hopeless at managing weather or political crises, or even reading its own routine intelligence reports. But it has mastered the art of hiding bad news in plain view, posting it when the press and public are least likely to pay attention to it. It ties together unrelated events, and distances related ones from each other. We should expect, then, that pardons — which may well keep the administration’s top players out of jail and allow them to seek exceptionally gainful employment — will be publicized with all the art and lack of candor of which this administration is capable.

Stringing pardons out, starting before the election, would be part of such a scheme. So would posting them the day before or the day after the election, the Friday after Thanksgiving, on Christmas and New Year’s Eve, etc. I wouldn’t expect to find Cheney’s pardon near Addington’s or Libby’s, or Yoo’s near Gonzales’. I would expect to find pardons posted before and after unrelated, but attention getting news. Finding Waldo could be child’s play in comparison.

I assume that precedents and normal pardon procedures will be ignored. Pardon language is likely to be exceptionally full and general, and as nearly identical as possible from one pardonee to another. I expect to see attempts to classify the relevant backgrounds for each pardon, to make it hard for a new administration to match the actor, the bad behavior, and the pardon.

The president’s de facto gutting of the Presidential Records Act and other federal records retention and disclosure requirements is well-known. Cheney’s massive shredding program included. We should expect a series of additional flagrant violations at the end of Bush’s term. And lest anyone doubt how quickly we’ll see the papers of the Bush II era, last I heard, Shrub had put Karl Rove in charge of his libawee. Congress continues to avoid acknowledging or addressing the problem, so we may find Iraqi WMD, the remains of Ms. Earhart, and the lost kings of Egypt before we learn more about Dick and George’s dirty little secrets.

Anybody? It seems a juicy discussion could occur if someone would have it for my voyeuristic pleasure.

The warmongers who are responsible for these crimes are wading through buckets of Iraqi and American blood, broken bones, burned bodies and lost souls. If there is no accountability for these crimes any effort to move forward will be hollow and useless. The whole world is watching and this will confirm that our nation is morally and spiritually bankrupt.

Lady Justice has been endlessly raped by Bush administration officials the last eight years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Justice

Why do any of the big boys and girls wonder why there is such deep disrespect for our Justice system amongst the regular folks.

The Constitution expressly prohibits Attainder. I really think they need to approach this from an Attainder perspective and at least try the argument that if the Constitution both prohibits Attainder, but allows the President to arrange for attainder and issue pardons for those who carry it out, the President is being give the unchecked power to nullify a portion of the Constitution and that the only way to read the pardon power and the attainder provisions as both having meaning is interpret the pardon power as being limited so as to not allow the President to provide pardons for those who mete out extrajudicial pains and penalties on the President’s orders.

But there just isn’t all that much that’s been litigated on the pardons front and standing likely becomes an issue. The most questionable pardon that could have been litigated was Ford’s preemptive, blanket pardon of a President involved in “possible” criminal acts. No one litigated it.

But on the pocket pardons front, there’s been speculation from time to time during, for example, the cold war era, of pocket pardons for covert actions. Who knows whether they have been tried yet or not – bc if they were tried successfully they’d probably still be secrets.

But more importantly, who is to say that this particular administration, with the truly abhorrent AGs, DAGs, OLC crews, CrimPros, etc. – wouldn’t ante up with classification of the pardons? Think about what was done to Khalid el-Masri and the fact that his case went up through and including an request for cert that was denied – on the grounds that his kidnapping and torture and use for human experimentation could be “classified” and such “classification” trumped our torture victims act and other laws.

Now think about how a pocket pardon ever even gets forced into the open? Who gets access to info on the classified crimes to start with? And once they have access to files with that kind of info, the classified pardon might well be a part of that record and at that point, no one had to “forestall” prosecution – you have a double (or triple) edged whammy of the crime itself involving “classification as cover up” and a pardon, which is also classified, and with prosecution that might reveal the identity of operatives to boot. Now add on the possiblity that there is an OLC opinion from some point contemporaneous that opines on the legality of secret pardons for classified crimes.

Something like the booting of the el-Masri case has to make you pretty much think there’s not much on the crime front that the courts won’t allow to remain concealed as “classified” The ONLY pushback at all has been from JAG. DOJ has not only acquiesced in the classification of crime, they have used it to insulate their members who have particpated. It’s not a pretty thought – issuing secret pardons for Presidential level crimes and getting by with it, but it’s not like it would be the most shocking thing done by the torture/human experimentation crew.

IIRC, we right this minute have an administration that, after looking at a Congressional requirement for a report to be given to them without censorship or revision by the WH, has said that it will censor and revise the report b4 Congress gets it. And everyone in a happy fervor over electing Dems this year needs to breathe deep and realize that it is bc of the Dems in Congresss that we are at this point – where a WH says they will not follow the law and then hoists and foists an OLC opinion and goes on, confident that there will not be any reprucussions.

I take that back – the reprucussion will be that maybe a Dem will be elected Pres and he will … give de jure amnesty to telecoms and de facto amnesty to all WH criminals. Ah, that lovely “political price” of criminals taking their public pensions and going off to lobbyland and speaking engagements. What a cruel, harsh consequence to face.

In any event – I guess we just see what happens. I’m not expecting to see the names and crimes of the agents who “interrogated to death” or experimented with “enhanced methods” on humans until they died and the details of the deaths of their victims in any publicized pardon, but I also have to think there is something more than a pathetic olc opinion out there for them. Why would Bush think he couldn’t get away with having a raft of secret pardons – maybe even involving the killings of Americans. There literally has been NOTHING – up to and including torture killings of innocent people on his policies and orders and creation of the worst refugee crisis in the world and all that attends it – NOTHING for which he has been held to account by anyone.

Even as the Arar case was having hundreds of pages of investigation into US kidnap/proxy torture released in Canada, Harry Reid insured the passage of the MCA and all its pro-torture and amnesty provisions. Those things were taking place at almost the same time and the Democrats made sure they didn’t make an issue of Arar and didn’t derail the passage. I still remember Sherrod Brown earnestly saying that the legislation had to be all right – after all, John McCain was the expert on these things and HE was for it, so the Dems should be too.

Hell, Bush may well decide not to go for pardons at all. The only way anyone will ever get in trouble if he walks away from it all is if they implicate themselves and manage to stab themselves with a pen while they sign their affidavit. The DOJ we have left and the Congress we are supposed to be looking forward to – they are meaningless, immoral institutions riddled with corruption and cronyism and now “framed out” by a series of opinions and actions over the last 8 years that have fundamentally changed their internal chemistry.

At this point, they couldn’t begin to function properly without going through such serious DTs that they might not survive them. So they just continue on their path, like an alcoholic would, and wait out the destruction from within in a haze.