After all of the heinous crimes of the Bush Administration, the endgame is clear: a blanket pre-emptive Presidential pardon for everyone in the Administration.

Newsweek's Stuart Taylor may be the first pundit to make the case for blanket pardons, but he will certainly not be the last.

The Truth About Torture

To get a full accounting of how U.S. interrogation methods were used, the president should give those accused of ‘war crimes’ a pass.

Dark deeds have been conducted in the name of the United States government in recent years: the gruesome, late-night circus at Abu Ghraib, the beating to death of captives in Afghanistan, and the officially sanctioned waterboarding and brutalization of high-value Qaeda prisoners. Now demands are growing for senior administration officials to be held accountable and punished. Congressional liberals, human-rights groups and other activists are urging a criminal investigation into high-level “war crimes,” including the Bush administration’s approval of interrogation methods considered by many to be torture.

It’s a bad idea. In fact, President George W. Bush ought to pardon any official from cabinet secretary on down who might plausibly face prosecution for interrogation methods approved by administration lawyers.

Brad at SadlyNo rips all of Taylor's reasons to shreds.

Question: why did we ever develop the Geneva Conventions in the first place? Why does the Constitution ban cruel and unusual punishment? Hell, for that matter, why did we ever sign the goddamn Magna Carta*? Because what Stuart Taylor, Jr. is telling us is that government officials should simply be able to break the fucking law. And not just the laws against lying about blowjobs under oath — we’re talking about laws against goddamn torture. We’re talking about laws that for years have prohibited the government from performing cruel and heinous acts on prisoners. This is important shit. But to Stuart Taylor? Pfffffft, yeah it’s bad, but so what? We’ll only learn the truth about this stuff if we just pardon everyone beforehand. Because fuck it, laws are only meant to be obeyed by the little people.

There's more - read it all. Rep. Jerrold Nadler addressed Taylor's argument more civilly on C-Span:

You'll never get a full and true accounting of what took place if everybody is pardoned. As Maj. Gen. Taguba recently wrote, "there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current Administration committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered use of torture will be held to account." Now you cannot get... restore a system of justice if you simple pardon everybody.

It's very interesting, at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, the question was raised, as to how can you give the President an unlimited pardon power - what if the President engages in a criminal conspiracy and pardons his co-conspirators? And the answer was given, "oh that could never happen. Any President who did that would be instantly impeached." So the impeachment power was seen as a limit on the pardon power.

What has happened is that because of the - unforseen by the Founders - rise of political parties, impeachment has become not an ordinary and usual event, but an almost impossible event. It's never been done successfully in history except once. And so it is not an effective limit on the exercise of power any more in most cases. And one of the things we have to do is figure out other things that can substitute for it because usually it's simply not going to happen.

But if the President were to pardon everybody on his way out the door, you would very much divide the country and a lot of people would think, "well the President and others engaged in crimes and they will never be held accountable because his last criminal act - not technically criminal but criminal morally - was to pardon all his co-criminals."

Nadler may oppose pardons, but he is certain to be undercut by the Democratic mis-leadership of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, who won't call for outright pardons, but rather the next best thing - a "Truth Commission" coverup.

As Glenn Greenwald writes, the Washington Establishment (a.k.a. "The Village") is absolutely corrupt.

This is what a country becomes when it decides that it will not live under the rule of law, when it communicates to its political leaders that they are free to do whatever they want -- including breaking our laws -- and there will be no consequences. There are two choices and only two choices for every country -- live under the rule of law or live under the rule of men. We've collectively decided that our most powerful political leaders are not bound by our laws -- that when they break the law, there will be no consequences. We've thus become a country which lives under the proverbial "rule of men" -- that is literally true, with no hyperbole needed -- and Mayer's revelations are nothing more than the inevitable by-product of that choice [...]

If the rule of law doesn't constrain the actions of government officials, then nothing will. Continuous revelations of serious government lawbreaking have led not to investigations or punishment but to retroactive immunity and concealment of the crimes. Judicial findings of illegal government behavior have led to Congressional action to protect the lawbreakers. The Detainee Treatment Act. The Military Commissions Act. The Protect America Act. The FISA Amendments Act. They're all rooted in the same premise: that our highest government leaders have the power to ignore our laws with impunity, and when they're caught, they should be immunized and protected, not punished.

Don't worry - we will fight them every step of the way until every war criminal is punished to the fullest extent of the law.