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Keith's Still Bushed featuring FEMA-Gate:

FEMA's been under fire from critics who claim the Gulf Coast recovery is moving too slowly. Now FEMA officials said they're investigating allegations of serious misconduct at the New Orleans office. CBS News has learned workers there accuse their bosses of intentionally holding up Katrina aid.

Under Cover of Darkness-Gate:

The Pentagon has decided to rescind a long-standing prohibition against press coverage of returning war dead, allowing families to say whether news organizations may photograph the arrivals, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said Thursday.

The remains of all U.S. service members killed overseas are flown to Delaware's Dover Air Force Base. But photographic images have been prohibited since 1991. The Bush administration rigorously enforced the ban, preventing pictures of troops killed in Iraq and Afghanistan from appearing in news coverage.

The new policy will leave it up to the families of slain service members to decide whether to allow the media to photograph the arrival of the remains in Dover.

"My conclusion was, we should not presume to make the decision for the families. We should actually let them make it," Gates said.

And Anthrax-Gate:

Poisonous anthrax that killed five Americans in the weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks doesn't match bacteria from a flask linked to Bruce Ivins, the researcher who committed suicide after being implicated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, a scientist said.

Spores used in the deadly mailings "share a chemical 'fingerprint' that is not found in the flask linked to Bruce Ivins," Roberta Kwok wrote in Nature News, citing Joseph Michael, a scientist at the Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Michael analyzed letters sent to the New York Post and offices of Senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy, and found a distinct "chemical signature" not present in the flask known as RMR-1029, which Ivins could access in his laboratory at Fort Detrick, Maryland.

February 17, 2009 MSNBC Rachel Maddow Show

John Amato:

Rachel grabs a scoop of an interview with Gitmo guard U.S. Army Specialist Brandon Neely, who detailed incidents of prisoner abuse and felt compelled to speak out:

Maddow: After serving as guard at Guantanamo for the first six months of its existence as a “war on terror” prison camp, Brandon Neely now says that he is ashamed by some of what he did there and he‘s still haunted by some things that he witnessed. Moved by conscience, Mr. Neely has come forward. He came forward first to the University of California at Davis Guantanamo Testimonials Project. He described incidents to them in quite graphic detail.

Neely: And for me, over time, it just really builds up. And every day I think about it and I relive those situations, and it gets the best of me. And the best way for me to deal with this is speak out. And around December, it just—everything just really hit me. And I just knew I had to talk. I knew I needed to speak about Guantanamo.

Here's the full transcript.

UPDATE: You can read Neely's full testimonials among others at UC Davis' Center for the Study of Human Rights in America.

Heather: Rachel's interview with Brandon Neely was also one of the subjects of Keith's Still Bushed segment. His commentary before and on the interview being as noteworthy as the interview itself.

Olbermann: And number one also torture-gate small picture. Army Private Brandon Neely has talked to the Associated Press about his time at a guard at Gitmo. "The stuff I did and the stuff I saw was just wrong" he says. This stuff...beatings of prisoners. Not beating vaguely rationalized by being part of that Jack Bauer crap enhanced interrogations. Go and beat a prisoner up and never say a word to him. Revenge. Revenge because this began in 2002 and soldiers like Brandon Neely were told these were some of the people responsible for 9-11. So when a shackled detainee came off the bus and started to resist being jammed into a small cage, Neely says he grabbed him and shoved him face first into the cement floor and was only vaguely aware that he was doing this to a trembling old man.

Neely only later found out the old man had started to resist him because he assumed he was about to be executed. Neely now in law enforcement in Texas says he feels guilt and shame over what he did to the point that his upbringing in a military family and the nondisclosure agreement he signed as he left Gitmo don't matter to him. Speaking out he says now is a good way to deal with this. And that is as true for us as a nation as it is for Brandon Neely as an individual. He will do his first television interview in about twenty minutes from now on Rachel's show. I think we had all better watch.

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Countdown's Still Bushed! Feb. 13, 2009 with Ridiculous-Amounts-Of-Money-Gate, US Attorneys-Gate and Investi-Gate.

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Keith takes Ari Fleischer and Bill-O to task in this edition of Still Bushed. They seem to have selective memory when it comes to who a certain shill was from a from fake news organization that the last administration let into the White House press corps to lob softballs before choosing to mock President Obama for giving Sam Stein from the HuffPo a chance to ask a question, and a tough one at that.

I'm not sure why anyone would take either of these clowns seriously. Neither have an ounce of credibility.

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Tonight's: Corporate Socialism-Gate, Poetic Justice Department-Gate and The People's House-Gate.

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From Countdown Jan. 23, 2009. Wicked Witch of the West-Gate, V.A.-Gate and Terrorist-Gate.

January 05, 2009 MSNBC Keith Olbermann

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Tonight's: Wow Did He Miss The Point-Gate, Mortgage-Gate and Torture-Gate.

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From Countdown, Nov. 14, 2008 featuring Blackwater-Gate, Bailout-Gate and Siegelman-Gate. Emptywheel has more on the latest in the Don Siegelman case.

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The hits keep on coming in the never ending list of scandals for the Bush Administration.  In today's line up, we have the news that the UN mandate for the US presence in Iraq is expiring at the end of this year.  To no one's surprise, the White House wants to continue an indefinite country-to-country commitment with Iraq.  However, Prime Minister Maliki has other plans. 

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said on Monday he is negotiating a deal with Washington that will for the first time set a timetable for a withdrawal of foreign forces as part of a framework for a US troop presence into next year.[..]

Iraqi politicians have not only bristled at the duration of any continuing defence pact with the United States, they have also expressed reservations about how many bases Washington should retain, what powers the US military should continue to hold to detain Iraqi civilians, and what immunity US troops should have from US law.

Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari has said that Washington has agreed to one key demand from Baghdad, the scrapping of immunity from prosecution in Iraq of the tens of thousands of foreign security contractors operating in the country.

Timetables for withdrawal?  What, does Maliki and the Iraqi government want the terrorists to win?  Next up is the Department of Justice's Office of Professional Responsibility, which according to a recent investigation by the LA Times has refused to release any information on professional misconduct.  However, with all we've learned about the leaking of Valerie Plame's name, the US Attorneys purge, Monica Goodling's hiring practices, not to mention the counsel sought by Mukasey and Gonzales on warrantless wiretapping, torture and terror detainees, does anyone have any doubt that the OPR is up to their gills in complaints?

And finally, there is the ultimate Slow Learner in Chief, who was told by Pres. Clinton and Richard Clarke in no uncertain terms that his biggest concern entering the Oval Office would be al Qaeda.  Now it's Bush's turn to get his successor up-to-date on the biggest threats.  Guess what his report says?

Now Mr. Bush has weighed in on his successor's big problem: Not Iraq, but Pakistan. Pakistan, home of al Qaeda. Al Qaeda now back to its pre- 9/11 strength, plotting its next attacks, in a Pakistani safe haven that was created in a stunning act of appeasement, approved and defended by President Bush.

Heckuva job, Bushie.

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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.

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The continuing sagas that make up the life under the Bush administration...

First up is Marc Halcon, owner of American Shooting Range in San Diego, California, who has divested himself of his interest in a vocational training school being developed by front companies for Blackwater, because of Blackwater's growing notoreity.

Next is a sad statement on the value of healthcare and marriage today, with a Kaiser Family Foundation poll that found that 7% of respondents either was or knew someone who married solely for access to their spouse's health benefits. And the GOP wanted me to believe that same sex marriages somehow cheapened the sanctity of my marriage.

And finally, in an ironic twist in the Nexus of Politics and Terror, the original prosecutor of the Hamdan case, Col. Morris Davis, is testifying on behalf of Salim Hamdan and speaking out over the kangaroo courts that the Bush administration is demanding to be able to claim progress in their War on Terror™.

Davis didn’t just say the Hamdan argument wasn't right, since it permits the use of evidence obtained by coercion or torture, to say nothing of hearsay, he also quoted the former general counsel of the Defense Department who he says told him “We can’t have acquittals. We’ve been holding these guys for years. How can we explain acquittals? We have to have convictions.” Col. Davis put it simply: he was under pressure to hurry through cases and get those convictions, so President Bush could use them politically before the 2006 mid-terms (elections). And there it all is in a nutshell. The military co-opting the Constitution and the sacred freedoms for which the heroes of that military fought and died as part of some kind of crazed worship of or fear of a cheap political hack and his gang. And as distant as it all seems, just plug yourself into that equation. You somehow wind up in Gitmo, in Salim Hamdan’s place. And you say, “but I’m an American citizen!” and the guard and the torturers standing behind the guard says to you, “Oh yeah? Prove it. Without a lawyer. Without the right to trial. Prove it. And until then, you want some water? Poured up your nose?”