Preemptive Karma reports:

Clackamas County Oregon prosecutor Alfred French is being asked by a local veterans group to step down from his job, according to KATU news in Portland. French signed an affidavit declaring that he knows Kerry is lying about his record in Vietnam. French also appeared on the Swift Boat ad declaring Kerry lied about what happened. French later admitted that he had no firsthand knowledge of Kerry's actions and was relying on stories from friends.

So far, the seven soldiers charged in the Abu Ghraib Iraq prison abuse scandal have been military police. That's about to change as charges are ready to be filed against two military intelligence officers, Spc. Armin J. Cruz and Spc. Roman Krol.

[Former Sargeant] Kenneth A. Davis made the allegations in a May statement to U.S. Army investigators and in recent interviews with The Associated Press. He said Cruz and Krol forced prisoners to crawl across the prison floor while demanding that they confess to raping a boy in prison. Davis said Cruz and Krol also handcuffed the naked men together face-to-face, forcing them to embrace.

Bump and Update: 13 year old Jake Eakin finally gets an experienced lawyer to defend him against adult murder charges.

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Read this one...Not even Scott Turow or John Grisham could make this up. A juvenile murder trial, a 'sleeping judge, a 'felon prosecutor' and an inexperienced defense attorney. By award-winning journalist Ken Armstrong (formerly of Mills/Armstrong Chicago Tribune fame) and Jonathan Martin in today's Seattle Times. 13 year old Craig Sorger is murdered and two of his 12 year old playmates are charged:

The two suspects, Evan Savoie and Jake Eakin, are scheduled to stand trial Sept. 14 in Grant County Superior Court. They will be the youngest murder defendants tried as adults in the state's modern history.....police questioned the two boys [who were] last seen with Craig — each 12 years old, and neither in trouble with the law before. Police would question them again and again in days to come, collecting shifting statements that were not confessions, but that would lead prosecutors to charge them with first-degree murder.

Mark Geragos began his cross-examination of Amber Frey today. Half the legal analysts predicted he'd leave her alone. The other half, including me, predicted he'd go after her. He went after her, portraying her as desperate to find a man to take care of her and her child, obsessive in the number of times she called Scott and eager to work as a police informant to get back at Scott after she found out he lied to her. Expect more of the same tomorrow.

[Note: For readers who don't care about Scott Peterson, Kobe Bryant and Michael Jackson, don't bother telling us that in the comments. We'll continue to cover it anyway. Just scroll on by the posts which are clearly designated in the title. This is a site about politics, crime and injustice. That includes high-profile crimes in the news.]

Specialist Charles Graner is fighting abuse charges in Iraq. He wants the trial moved out of Baghdad. Graner is the soldier charged not just with abuse, but with adultery. It's curious that the article, while mentioning that he is accused of accused of photographing the infamous picture of Private First Class Lynndie England dragging a detainee around on a leash and "posing for a picture by a pile of naked detainees," fails to mention that Graner's adultery count involves his relationship with England who reportedly is now pregnant with his child and awaiting trial herself in Fort Bragg.

Nor does the article mention that Graner, a death row prison guard in civilian life, has been accused of abuse before, both against his wife and against prison inmates. Graner faces the most serious charges of all the Abu Ghraib guards.

In a May 4th article, the New York Times noted that, "inmates and advocates for prisoner rights asserted in 1998 that guards at the prison routinely beat and humiliated prisoners, including through a sadistic game of Simon Says in which guards struck prisoners who failed to comply with barked instructions." The Times also cited allegations of physical abuse by Graner against his ex-wife who received at least three restraining orders against him.

Jeremy Sivits, another former Abu Ghraib prison guard who is cooperating with the investigation, reported:

The Washington Post reviews gonzo journalist Hunter Thompson's new bookHey Rube: Blood Sport, the Bush Doctrine, and the Downward Spiral of Dumbness: Modern History From the Sports Desk.

Sounds like vintage Hunter....I just ordered my copy.

If you haven't been reading Hunter's Hey Rube column at ESPN, you should be.

Staff Sgt. Ivan L. "Chip" Frederick II, the highest ranking reserve officer involved in the Abu Ghraib Iraq prison abuse scandal has announced he will plead guilty to some of the charges against him.

"I have accepted responsibility for my actions at Abu Ghraib prison. I will be pleading guilty to certain charges because I have concluded that what I did was a violation of law."

Frederick is a W. Va. state prison guard in his civilian life. The allegations against him were very serious:

Frederick is accused of having helped force a prisoner to stand on a box with wires placed on his hands, a scene displayed in one of the photos from the prison. Frederick's charge sheet says the prisoner was told he would be electrocuted if he fell off the box, although the wires were not connected to a power source.

Frederick also is accused of forcing naked detainees into a pyramid position and photographing the scene. He also allegedly ordered detainees to masturbate in front of other prisoners and guards, posing two detainees to simulate oral sex while photographing them. One photo from the prison shows Frederick standing behind a naked prisoner smeared with feces. Frederick's mother, Jo Ann Frederick, has said the inmate spread the feces on himself.

Frederickson initially claimed the abuse was directed by higher-ups. He now says he will accept responsibility:

Bush finally speaks and calls for no more Kerry attack ads. Too little, too late. Not to mention, he didn't call for those on the air to be taken down.

Update: Reuters describes Bush's statement this way:

President Bush called on Monday for ads attacking John Kerry's record in Vietnam to be stopped along with others run by independent groups, and said Kerry should be proud of his war service. But Bush stopped short of condemning a group that calls itself Swift Boat Veterans for Truth or its specific accusations that the Democratic presidential candidate lied about his war record in Vietnam.

ABC News Australia reports Bush's statement as "Bush refuses to denounce anti-Kerry campaign."

[Thanks to Michael in the comments who pointed out that Bush fooled a lot of media and us that he had denounced the attacks on Kerry's record, when in fact, he was just calling for an end to 527's--political ads funded by independent groups. MSNBC is still mis-stating Bush's position, with a headline that says,"Bush calls for halt to Swift Boat veterans’ ads."]

William Dedge walked out of a Florida prison last week after serving 22 years for a rape he didn't commit. Finally, the press is asking, who's accountable when this happens? The St. Petersburg Times is calling for an independent investigation to answer that question--and for the prosecutor to lose his law license if it turns out he is at fault:

Money is only part of the recompense. Dedge also needs to know that the people who helped to steal his youth will face their own judgment. Being a prosecutor is a high privilege and with that comes the corresponding responsibility to put truth-seeking above all other considerations. When prosecutors are uninterested in evidence of a defendant's innocence, they have lost their professional way. They should not only lose their job but their license to practice law.

The States' Attorneys office say there will be no such investigation into the prosecutor, who fought allowing Dedge to get a DNA test for 8 years, and then, after the results came back showing Dedge was not the rapist, insisted for three years Dedge was still guilty. As Carl Hiaassen says, it's an abomination.

Florida does not allow compensation for the wrongfully convicted. That needs to change as well.

The New York Times reports that there may be as many as 250,000 protesters in New York for the Republican convention. That's mind-boggling from a logistics standpoint when you consider how many of them will be traveling to NY from other cities around the country. Where will they stay? How will they get around once they arrive? Who will feed them?

True, back in 1969 or 70, when masses of college students descended on Washington to protest the Vietnam war, we never thought about that stuff. I remember getting in a car with some students I didn't even know, having found them through a bulletin board of some kind, driving a few days from Ann Arbor, MI to Washington, and once there, sleeping in a kind of gymnasium, and having one of the best weekends ever. I marched, I met what seemed like a million sympatico souls, and it was an experience that probably contributed in large measure to my continued activism as an adult --and to my passing activism on to my child as a positive value.

Decades later, it's a little different. I've tried to think back to the Washington march days to remember whether any of us showered between leaving Ann Arbor and arriving back there days later. For the life of me, I just can't remember. I guess it wasn't an issue then. Now, it would be a big issue and I can't help but wonder, where will 250,000 visiting protesters to New York sleep, eat, cleanse and regroup when their energy sags and their funds are depleted? New York City is not Woodstock. The atmosphere will not be "We are all one." And camping out under the stars in Central Park is unlikely to be an option with New York's finest.

What do you make of this? President Bush will come to New York next week to make his speech Thursday night. But he won't be staying overnight.

But now it turns out that Mr. Bush may not spend a single night in the city that helped transform his presidency. At this point, the unofficial plan is for him to arrive in Manhattan sometime on Thursday, Sept. 2, the final day of the four-day convention, deliver his acceptance speech that night, then leave immediately for Pennsylvania. Campaign officials say that the schedule could still change, and that Mr. Bush may have a brief New York sleepover in the end. But either way, the incumbent president has no plans to visit ground zero, or to hang around in his room at the Waldorf-Astoria for days watching the party on television.

Not that he'll be missed, but still....if I were a Republican delegate, I'd be insulted.

Speaking of informants or "rats" as they are known in the trade, there's a very cool looking new website, Who's A Rat?, dedicated to outing them and the cops they work for:

Who's A Rat is a database driven website designed to assist attorneys and criminal defendants with few resources. The purpose of this website is for individuals and attorneys to post and share all exclusive information related to local, state and federal informants...

Here's a press release-- on the site.

[It] is the first site to allow users around the country to post local, state and federal agents' and informants' names, pictures and related information

Not suprisingly, law enforcement is not amused. The site, by Sean Bucci, made its debut last week. It takes paypal donations. While there, check out the "rat of the week" feature.

Update: At least one federal court has ruled a defendant has a right to maintain a website seeking information on rats in his case.