Why else Yoo's cockamamie assertions of presidential authority to violate all laws and ignore all treaties? Why else the fantastic secrecy and bureaucratic end-runs? Why else the cover-ups - like actual destruction of critical evidence of torture like the waterboarding tapes? Why else the ludicrous euphemisms?

And Cheney, to his credit, I suppose, proudly declared his intent to go where no previous administration had ever gone. On the Sunday after the attacks he blurted out the following immortal words:

"We'll have to work sort of the dark side, if you will. We've got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done will have to be done quietly, wihout any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies - if we are going to be successful. That's the world these folks operate in. And, uh, so it's vital for us to use any means at our disposal basically to achieve our objectives."

Cheney all but told us, if we had only been able to hear him at the time, that he was going off the legal grid, off any zone of public accountability, able to deploy "any means at our disposal" to do what he believed had to be done. Now, you may want to defend this act of radical executive power as a necessary, temporary breach in the aftermath of 9/11, but you cannot, I think, credibly argue that Cheney was unaware of what he was doing. Or that he insisted on retaining this kind of illegality and torture long after the immediate crisis passed. As late as 2005, Cheney was getting Bybee to write legal memos for any combination of any number of torture techniques, long categorically recognized as such by everyone in the field. From a former CIA official in Mayer's book: "They were torturing people. No question. They did disgusting things to people. Their attitude was, 'Laws? like who the fuck cares?'"

When you have the highest officials in a constitutional democracy with that view of the world, and with the appalling human rights record of these people, the case for war crime prosecutions is overwhelming - if we are to uphold the basic rule of law. Remember that?

We impeached a president for perjury in a civil lawsuit. We're going to proactively pardon a president who authorized torture?

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