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I've alternated between calling life under the Bush administration as some Carrollian absurdity and an Orwellian nightmare. Turns out that we in the liberal blogosphere aren't the only ones making some literary allusions.

First up in our ever-growing list of scandals is Halliburton subsidiary KBR, who will finally be subject to an investigation and hearing over 13 electrocutions deaths in their facilities in Iraq. Despite being notified that the electrical system was not grounded in the shower area way back in 2004, Staff Sgt. Ryan Maseth died in January of this year from the improper grounding of the water pump in his barracks. Maseth's family is suing KBR civilly for their negligence in maintaining the facilities for the Department of Defense.

Next scandal du jour comes from an ex-22 year CIA veteran, suing the Bush adminstration to declassify documents that show that they were deliberately suppressing information that he provided that Iran was not pursuing a nuclear weapons program. Told on five occasions to falsify his report or not to file it at all, the agent, who is fluent in Farsi and Arabic (because those aren't valuable skills in Bush's War on Terror™), was fired, after several attempts to discredit him turned up nothing. Out of curiosity, how many times do we have to have experts tell us the Bush administration is wrong about Iran's nuclear designs before the media stops furthering that narrative?

And finally, we have Huzaifa Parhat, a Chinese-born Muslim who has been detained at Guantanamo for more than six years. The heavily censored judicial review has become public and the Fed's case against Parhat was so flimsy--citing the same source multiple times, the accusations based on "bare and unverifiable" claims that even the judicial panel was compelled to cite Lewis Carroll's nonsensical poem, The Hunting of the Snark:

''We are not persuaded,'' the panel wrote.

"Lewis Carroll notwithstanding, the fact that the government has 'said it thrice' does not make an allegation true.''

Then for the sake of clarity, it disclosed its source:

Through the Looking-Glass author Lewis Carroll's 1876 poem called The Hunting of the Snark, an account of an absurd international voyage by a 10-member crew whose names all begin with `B.'

They include a baker, a beaver, a bellman and a barrister. The ruling went so far as to quote the relevant line, I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true.

Despite this slapdown, the Justice Department has not decided how to move forward with Parhat.