We’ve entered the last few hours of the Bush administration, where requests for clemency and pardon could happen at any moment between now and noon when President-elect Barack Obama takes office. Although we have no indications as to which pardons or commutations may be granted, we know they’ll be relatively few since President Bush has only granted them a total of 182 times in eight years. By comparison, President Reagan exercised his pardon and clemency powers 406 times during his two terms in office, and President Clinton used his 459 times in the same length of time.
 
Bush commuted the sentences Tuesday of two former Border Patrol agents, Jose Compean and Ignacio Ramos, who’d each been convicted of multiple charges stemming from the shooting of an unarmed Mexican citizen at the Texas-Mexico border in 2005. The commutation does not remove the criminal record, only abbreviates the sentence the convicted parties received after conviction.

We’re noting that up until now, no pardon has been issued for Lewis “Scooter” Libby, convicted on charges related to the outing of intelligence operative, Valerie Plame. Libby’s sentence was commuted by President Bush shortly after his conviction, serving only a few weeks of his 30-month sentence, but no pardon appears to be forthcoming. The lack of a pardon could impact Libby’s ability to practice law in the future, depending on where he may practice, but the lack of a pardon also ensures that Libby has not admitted responsibility for his crimes and therefore retains Fifth Amendment rights if he should be questioned by a jury or Congress in the future regarding his actions related to Valerie Plame’s outing.

We’ve also seen no signs of a blanket or any other kind of pardon for those who were in any way associated with torture of detainees — a war crime under Geneva Conventions. One has to wonder if the folks who were in any way responsible directly or indirectly for the abuses during renditions, at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and multiple other sites including black sites, no longer have the same interest in traveling overseas since foreign governments may not be as willing to ignore the now-revealed crimes.

And while we haven’t see much pardon action, we have however seen a number of absurd cases made for the grants of pardons to current and former administration officials. Multiple media outlets contained pleas over the last week for Scooter Libby’s pardon, from the Wall Street Journal to CBS. But one of the most egregious pleas came from Detroit Free Press columnist Brian Dickerson who suggested legal immunization for Vice President Dick Cheney, former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and other White House officials.

Hasn’t Dickerson ever heard of Iran Contra? Here’s the prosecutor’s bottom line after the investigations and prosecutions into that sad chapter of American history:

The underlying facts of Iran/contra are that, regardless of criminality, President Reagan, the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, and the director of central intelligence and their necessary assistants committed themselves, however reluctantly, to two programs contrary to congressional policy and contrary to national policy. They skirted the law, some of them broke the law, and almost all of them tried to cover up the President’s willful activities.

What protection do the people of the United States have against such a concerted action by such powerful officers? The Constitution provides for congressional oversight and congressional control of appropriations, but if false information is given to Congress, these checks and balances are of lessened value. Further, in the give and take of the political community, congressional oversight is often overtaken and subordinated by the need to keep Government functioning, by the need to anticipate the future, and by the ever-present requirement of maintaining consensus among the elected officials who are the Government.

The disrespect for Congress by a popular and powerful President and his appointees was obscured when Congress accepted the tendered concept of a runaway conspiracy of subordinate officers and avoided the unpleasant confrontation with a powerful President and his Cabinet. In haste to display and conclude its investigation of this unwelcome issue, Congress destroyed the most effective lines of inquiry by giving immunity to Oliver L. North and John M. Poindexter so that they could exculpate and eliminate the need for the testimony of President Reagan and Vice President Bush.

Immunity is ordinarily given by a prosecutor to a witness who will incriminate someone more important than himself. Congress gave immunity to North and Poindexter, who incriminated only themselves and who largely exculpated those responsible for the initiation, supervision and support of their activities. This delayed and infinitely complicated the effort to prosecute North and Poindexter, and it largely destroyed the likelihood that their prompt conviction and appropriate sentence would induce meaningful cooperation.

In short, indiscriminately offered immunity obstructed justice. Had all the participants with criminal liability received some punishment in the wake of Iran Contra, we might not have seen the return of some of those individuals to the White House during Bush’s two terms in office.

Pardon watch continues…less than three hours remain. Stay tuned!