At UCLA this weekend, attendees at the Faces of Wrongful Conviction Conference, got to hear first hand from those whom the system in California failed.

One by one they ascended the stage and introduced themselves, each an embodiment of the legal system's fallibility in California. My name is Herman Atkins," a tall ponytailed man said. "The state of California stole 12 years of my life for a rape and robbery I did not commit in Riverside."

"Good morning, my name is Gloria Killian," a well-spoken middle-aged woman said. "The state stole 22 years of my life for a robbery and murder I did not commit in Sacramento." "Good morning. My name is Ken Marsh," a third speaker said. "The state took 21 years of my life for a murder I did not commit in San Diego in 1983."

Seventeen people in all reiterated the point to a packed ballroom at UCLA on Saturday: that although they now were free, countless other innocent people are imprisoned in the state. ...They took part in the event, called "The Faces of Wrongful Conviction," to dramatize the flaws in the state's criminal justice system.

Monday there will be another national round of pro-immigrant rallies. This time, it is expected that other ethnic groups will join in what up to now has mostly been Latinos.

Koreans said they will march in Philadelphia and Los Angeles, banging traditional protest drums. Chinese said they will parade out of Chinatowns in San Francisco, New York, Chicago and Philadelphia, led by marchers wearing colorful dragon costumes. Haitians said they will be heard in Miami and New York, and Africans said they will be among the tens of thousands who will gather at the Washington Monument.

While the majority of the undocumented in the U.S. are Latino, other groups have a vested interest in immigration reform.

For the Plameaholics out there, the mainstream media is staying on the story and connecting the dots in Fitzgerald's latest filing(pdf). In addition to the three I talk about below, Christy at Firedoglake has several more while Jane provides snappy analysis and Digby says it smells of Karl Rove.

New York Times: shorter version: Cheney told Libby to leak details of the NIE report to Judith Miller, knowing that it had been debunked.

...the new revelations suggest that long after [Colin Powell] had concluded the intelligence was faulty, Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney and Mr. Libby were still promoting it.

The Timesonline names the forgers of the documents claiming Saddam was trying to acquire uranium from Niger.

TWO employees of the Niger embassy in Rome were responsible for the forgery of a notorious set of documents used to help justify the Iraq war, an official investigation has allegedly found. According to Nato sources, the investigation has evidence that Niger's consul and its ambassador's personal assistant faked a contract to show Saddam Hussein had bought uranium ore from the impoverished west African country.

....According to the sources, an official investigation believes Adam Maiga Zakariaou, the consul, and Laura Montini, the ambassador's assistant, known as La Signora, forged the papers for money. They allegedly concocted their scheme as reports reached western intelligence agencies, including MI6, that Saddam Hussein had been trying to buy uranium ore, known as yellowcake, from Niger. The agencies had no evidence he had succeeded. The pair are alleged to have copied a real contract to look like an agreement with Iraq under which Niger would supply Saddam with 500 tons of yellowcake.

Josh Marshall is dubious.

Radley Balko has an excellent article up at Slate on SWAT, no-knocks, and the Hudson Supreme Court case that will be decided soon.

As the name indicates, a "no-knock" raid occurs when police forcibly enter a private residence without first knocking and announcing that they're the police. The tactic is appropriate in a few limited situations, such as when hostages or fugitives are involved, or where the suspect poses an immediate threat to community safety. But increasingly, this highly confrontational tactic is being used in less volatile situations, most commonly to serve routine search warrants for illegal drugs.

These raids are often launched on tips from notoriously unreliable confidential informants. Rubber-stamp judges, dicey informants, and aggressive policing have thus given rise to the countless examples of "wrong door" raids we read about in the news.

It's a really important topic and I recommend reading the whole article.

Seymour Hersh' new article in the New Yorker, The Iran Plans, is a must-read. It makes the case that Bush wants regime change in Iran and is making plans for a major air strike against the country.

There is a growing conviction among members of the United States military, and in the international community, that President Bush's ultimate goal in the nuclear confrontation with Iran is regime change.

The Washington Post interviewed William Jeffress, one of Lewis Libby's lawyers on the latest Fitz filing (pdf) that opposed Libby's request for additional documents and disclosed Libby's statements to the grand jury about Bush and Cheney's role in the declassification of the NIE document.

Jeffress argued that the information in Fitzgerald's filing is irrelevant to Libby's defense: that he forgot about those conversations as he dealt with crucial national security issues.

Jeffress said Fitzgerald's revelation about Libby's disclosure of information from a CIA National Intelligence Estimate "is a complete sidelight" to his accusation that Libby deliberately lied. "It's got nothing to do with Wilson's wife," Jeffress said in a brief interview, adding that Libby continues to expect to be exonerated at trial.

Fitz' filing certainly shifted national attention from Libby's alleged perjury and obstruction of justice to Bush and Cheney's role in declassifying documents about the NIE report and whether they authorized their disclosure to reporters. But let's take a step back and look at why Fitz filed this document in the first place.

Homeland Security Deputy Press Secretary Brian Doyle, charged last week in an Internet underage sex sting, has resigned. HSA Chief Michael Chertoff's reaction to Doyle's alleged crimes sounds like a shrug of the shoulders and "Sh*t happens."

"From time to time, there will be instances when misconduct occurs," Chertoff said,

And catch this. Chertoff says:

"We try to weed out those who pose a security risk," Chertoff said in a briefing with reporters. "I don't know ... that background checks with people hired will predict future behavior."

Yet, now it turns out this wasn't Doyle's first time getting caught:

Time Magazine has a cogent explanation for why Harry Reid scuttled the immigration compromise bill yesterday. He figured out he had walked into a trap, like the one I described here. From Time:

After initially signing on, Reid decided he might be walking into a trap. Some Republicans wanted to vote on amendments that Reid believed would have essentially picked apart the compromise plan; under one of them, for instance, the Department of Homeland Security would have had to certify that the border was secure before any illegal immigrants could be made legal.

What's more, even if he could defeat the amendments, any bill the Senate passed would have to go into a conference committee with the House -- which wants to build a wall along much of the U.S.-Mexico border, criminalize all illegal immigrants in the U.S., and dramatically increase the penalties against those who help them, from businesses to churches. Looking several moves ahead in a game of legislative chess, Reid feared that the conference would produce something that looked more like the House bill, which currently has no amnesty provisions for making current illegals citizens, than the Senate version.

Knights Ridder reporters say that Bush/Cheney's authorization to Scooter Libby to declassify and divulge classified information about Iraq "fits a pattern of selective leaks of secret intelligence to further the administration's political agenda."

Scott McClellan today tried to justify the Adminstration's actions:

Without specifically acknowledging Bush's actions in the Libby case, White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters: "There were irresponsible and unfounded accusations being made against the administration suggesting that we had manipulated or misused that intelligence. We felt it was very much in the public interest that what information could be declassified be declassified."

McClellan didn't address why administration officials often declassified information that supported their allegations about Iraq but not intelligence that undercut their claims.

Here's a question I'm not seeing answered. If Libby was authorized to disclose newly declassified information to Judith Miller, and if it was all on the up and up, why did Libby, Cheney and Bush let her do 85 days in jail for refusing to say she got the information from Libby?

And, as Digby says, if they wanted to declassify and disclose information favorable to their case for war in Iraq, why didn't they call a press conference? Why did they give it to selected reporters? That's not disclosure to the public, that's a selective leak for partisan purposes.

Do the missing e-mails from the Office of the Vice President implicate Bush and Cheney in Plamegate? Jason Leopold writes:

The officials, some of whom are attorneys close to the case, added that more than two dozen emails that the vice president's office said it recently discovered and handed over to leak investigators in February show that President Bush was kept up to date about the circumstances surrounding the effort to discredit former Ambassador Joseph Wilson.

The sources indicated that the leak probe is now winding down, and that soon, new information will emerge from the special counsel's office that will prove President Bush had prior knowledge of the White House campaign to discredit Plame Wilson's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who accused the administration of "twisting" intelligence on the Iraqi threat in order to win public support for the war.

If you are wondering what President Bush told Fitzgerald during his 2004 interview, Jason reports,

Ryan Singel at Wired News has the latest on the class action lawsuit against AT&T for turning over customer records to the feds in Bush's warrantless NSA surveillance program.

AT&T provided NSA eavesdroppers with full access to its customers' phone calls, and shunted its customers' internet traffic to data-mining equipment installed in a secret room in its San Francisco switching center, according to a former AT&T worker cooperating in the Electronic Frontier Foundation's lawsuit against the company.

Mark Klein, a retired AT&T communications technician, submitted an affidavit in support of the EFF's lawsuit this week. That class action lawsuit, filed in federal court in San Francisco last January, alleges that AT&T violated federal and state laws by surreptitiously allowing the government to monitor phone and internet communications of AT&T customers without warrants.