Presidential Pardon and Blanket Pardons

President George W. Bush is on his way out the door. So his final pardon is coming. Bush has just spared the national Thanksgiving turkey on Wednesday, honoring a tradition that dates to Harry Truman's presidency.

A pardon is the forgiveness of a crime and the penalty associated with it. It is granted by a sovereign power, such as a monarch or chief of state or a competent church authority.

In the United States, the pardon power for Federal crimes is granted to the President by the United States Constitution, Article II, Section 2, which states that the President:

shall have power to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, except in cases of impeachment.

Pardons are supposed to be offered to persons who, it is claimed, have been wrongfully convicted.

As Kathleen Dean Moore, who teaches philosophy at Oregon State University, puts it "Pardon is justified in retributive justice as a way to bring an offender's liability in line with moral desert, to make sure that the offender gets 'just deserts,' no more and no less.''

Nonetheless, it seems to me that many pardons are not about a wrongfully conviction but clearing some one for political or even personal reasons. Just look at the famous Lewis "Scooter" Libby case, a former chief aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, who had received a prison sentence last August after he was convicted in connection with leaking the name of CIA operative Valerie Plame. He was pardoned by President Bush although Libby had never applied through the formal Justice Department process. Wasn’t that a political act?

Now the question remains, is President Bush going to use his power to issue blanket pardons which cover groups of unnamed? This blanket pardons were suggested by one of the country's best known conservative legal scholars, Steven G. Calabresi for "all officials involved in making decisions bearing on the war on terror."

If President Bush would issue blanket pardons, wouldn’t he not only mark the presidential pardon power but also give the idiocy of terrorist groups more fuel for their recruitment? How would such presidential pardon further blemish the moral standing of the United States of America?