Would you want President Bush to pardon you for a crime that you had not said you had committed? One of the few decisions that Bush has left to make in his last six weeks in office is whom to pardon, ending or cutting short their criminal sentences.

Speculation has grown that Bush may use this constitutional power to issue a blanket pardon to CIA officials who may have ordered torture or carried it out. Not that they have admitted it. Or that Barack Obama, with his choice of conservative Democrats and Republicans in his first appointments, has looked like prosecuting them. He has given only a cool response to the clamour from the Left for a legal assault on the principles and practice of Bush’s War on Terror.

Others argue, too, that the Military Commissions Act, which authorises the trials at the Guantánamo prison camp, already gives CIA officials considerable protection. But all the same, Bush may want to protect those who carried out the policies that, after the Iraq invasion, caused the greatest controversies of his term.

There aren’t many things that Bush can still do. Military action is unthinkable, given that Obama is all but running the country. Bush has tried to obstruct a bailout for Detroit carmakers, but time, the Democratic majority and the ubiquity of Obama’s distinguished economic team are against him. He can commute or uphold sentences of Guantánamo prisoners, as this week’s drama has highlighted. And he can pardon convicts, up to his last minute.

The Constitution gives the president complete discretion over clemency. Some uses of that power have been seen as powerfully cathartic at times of social upheaval, such as Jimmy Carter’s pardon of those who resisted the Vietnam draft.

But the power has invited abuse. Bill Clinton marred an already messy exit by pardoning Mark Rich, a fugitive financier, whose former wife had helped to finance his presidential library. He had already shown himself fond of the technique, pardoning 396 people (compared with 171 pardoned by Bush, as of last week). After “Monica Lewinsky”, the words “Mark Rich” are the most efficient shorthand for the sleaze with which Clinton dashed his supporters’ hopes.

None of Bush’s pardons so far have been eye-catching. Mainly, they have been for minor financial and tax offences. The one for the farmer who accidentally poisoned three bald eagles has got much support.

But now? There have been campaigns for a pardon of John Walker Lindh, the young Californian caught with the Taleban, who had obviously stumbled, out of hazy ideals, into the wrong place at the worst time, just after September 11, 2001. But there is no sign that this resonates in the Bush White House. Meanwhile, the question of the CIA pardons rumbles on.

If Bush did go down that route, it would be hugely controversial, because it would seem to indemnify illegal actions carried out for the President’s political reasons. Would they accept it? Surely yes. Some might feel it implied guilt, but the alternative would be endless vulnerability to lawsuits in this most feverishly political area.

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