There were a lot of reasons why presidential clemency was appropriate. The first is that the CIA-leak investigation was a fundamentally political exercise from Day One.

Even before the appointment of special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald in December 2003, Justice Department investigators knew that it was former State Department official Richard Armitage, not Libby, who originally leaked the identity of CIA employee Valerie Plame Wilson.

The Justice Department also knew enough to conclude that Libby had not violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, the law at issue in the case.

Lacking proof that an underlying crime took place, and knowing the source of the leak, the Justice Department should have shut down the investigation then and there.

And this snippet of hypocrisy in the media by Phoenix Woman at FDL was interesting:

An official of the Florida Bar proposed late last week that controversial Miami attorney Jack Thompson submit to psychological testing and accept a 91-day suspension of his law license, according to an e-mail GamePolitics received from Thompson himself.

IS THE UNITED STATES KILLING 10,000 IRAQIS EVERY MONTH? OR IS IT MORE?

How, then, is the US accomplishing this carnage, and why is it not newsworthy? The answer lies in another amazing statistic: this one released by the U.S. military and reported by the highly respectable Brookings Institution: for the past four years, the American military sends out something over 1000 patrols each day into hostile neighborhoods, looking to capture or kill insurgents and terrorists. (Since February, the number has increased to nearly 5,000 patrols a day, if we include the Iraqi troops participating in the American surge.)
...
...the Americans usually `come at night, sometimes by day, always protected by helicopters.' They "sometimes bomb houses, sometimes arrest people, sometimes throw missiles'"

If they encounter no resistance, these patrols can track down 30 or so suspects, or inspect several dozen homes, in a days work. That is, our 1000 or so patrols can invade 30,000 homes in a single day. But if an IED explodes under their Humvee or a sniper shoots at them from nearby, then their job is transformed into finding, capturing, or killing the perpetrator of the attack. Iraqi insurgents often set off IEDs and invite these firefights, in order to stall the patrols prevent the soldiers from forcibly entering 30 or so homes, violently accosting their residents, and perhaps beating, arresting, or simply humiliating the residents.

The battles triggered by IEDs and sniper attacks almost always involve the buildings surrounding the incident, since that is where the insurgents take cover to avoid the American counter-attack. Americans, therefore, regular shoot into these buildings where the perpetrators are suspected of hiding, with all the attendant dangers of killing other people. The rules of engagement for American soldiers include efforts to avoid killing civilians, and there are many accounts of restraint because civilians are visibly in the line of fire. But if they are in hot pursuit of a perpetrator, their rules of engagement make it clear that capturing or killing the insurgent takes precedent over civilian safety.

This sounds pretty tame, and not capable of generating the statistics that the Lancet study documented. But the sheer quantity of American patrols--1000 each day--and the sheer quantity of the confrontations inside people's homes, the responses to sniper and IED attacks, and the ensuring firefights add up to mass slaughter.