Pardon Bush And Cheney?

It seems counter-intuitive in the wake of the release of the torture report, but no less than the executive director of the ACLU suggests it.

I have come to think that President Obama should issue pardons, after all — because it may be the only way to establish, once and for all, that torture is illegal. . .

An explicit pardon would lay down a marker, signaling to those considering torture in the future that they could be prosecuted.

Mr. Obama could pardon George J. Tenet for authorizing torture at the C.I.A.’s black sites overseas, Donald H. Rumsfeld for authorizing the use of torture at the Guantánamo Bay prison, David S. Addington, John C. Yoo and Jay S. Bybee for crafting the legal cover for torture, and George W. Bush and Dick Cheney for overseeing it all.

The basic idea is that if we are not going to prosecute these folks, pardoning them is the best way to establish that what they did is illegal.

By: Stuart Shapiro

Stuart is a professor and the Director of the Public Policy
program at the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers
University. He teaches economics and cost-benefit analysis and studies
regulation in the United States at both the federal and state levels.
Prior to coming to Rutgers, Stuart worked for five years at the Office
of Management and Budget in Washington under Presidents Clinton and
George W. Bush.