As I noted yesterday, some sort of investigation or prosecution by the Obama administration is looking more and more likely, given that Attorney General-nominee Eric Holder testified that waterboarding is torture, Dick Cheney unapologetically admitted he authorized it, and even Bush Pentagon official Susan Crawford, who oversees military commissions at Guantanamo Bay, acknowledged that the so-called “20th hijacker” was tortured and therefore can’t be prosecuted. Those are some pretty serious admissions of war crimes — ratcheting up the pressure on the next administration to prosecute them.

Still, there was President Bush today, getting ready to skip town without even pardoning Cheney’s former chief of staff Scooter Libby, who was convicted in 2007 of obstruction of justice in the Valerie Plame/CIA leak investigation.

The only people Bush did decide to pardon today, according to Politico, were two former Border Patrol agents, Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean, who were serving lengthy prison terms for shooting a fleeing Mexican drug suspect in 2005. Bush commuted their sentences.

White House officials are saying they don’t expect any pardons or other acts of clemency by the president before he checks out of office Tuesday at noon.

Cheney last week even admitted he personally approved waterboarding — i.e., torture — setting the stage for President Bush to issue a pardon, insisting that in the process he’d saved American lives.

Cheney must know that claim rings hollow: even the recent bipartisan Senate Armed Services Committee Report found just the opposite, concluding that the administration’s interrogation techniques “damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies, and compromised our moral authority.”

Still, it was a convenient public excuse offered up to give Bush cover for issuing a pardon, not only to Cheney but to everyone involved in approving torture and other illegal interrogation methods.

Some Democrats, at least, are trying to prevent that.

On November 20, Rep. Jerrold Nadler introduced H.R. 1531 to urge Bush not to pardon himself or his co-conspirators in war crimes. The bill now has 9 co-sponsors.

Democrats.com is collecting signatures to support the bill, and circulating a petition to support another bill, sponsored by Rep. Jerrold Nadler, Sen. Carl Levin, and VP-elect Joe Biden – urging Eric Holder, as the future Attorney General, to open an investigation.

Running the last names of each of the 16 along with their home state through the Center for Responsive Politics’ donor database at OpenSecrets, yielded no long-time or generous donors.

The New York Times and others reported today that no big names appeared on the list. Convicted celebrities like Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham, of the cash-for-earmarks variety in San Diego, and John Walker Lindh, an American who pleaded guilty to serving with the Taliban have both asked for clemency, but so far, at least, have not received it.

A few people have asked me if I think Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), convicted of seven counts of failing to disclose gifts worth $250,000 on his Senate disclosure forms, will be pardoned. I have no idea. But, Stevens, who still maintains his innocence, has said he doesn’t want one. Even as he wrapped up his final speech on the Senate floor, Stevens said he hoped for vindication.