Cheney Proves Effectiveness of Torture

Washington, D.C., March 12, 2006 -- Vice President Dick Cheney, a leading advocate of the use of torture in the so-called "war on terror", successfully demonstrated the effectiveness of the technique this month by allowing himself to personally undergo a one-week program of "coerced interrogation", the compassionately conservative term for the practice. During the week, the Vice President proved the value of torture by unwillingly confessing to a wide range of infractions, some of them quite surprising.

"We wouldn't have gotten the full range of information out of Vice President Cheney without using the coerced interrogation techniques he's been advocating," said David Addington, the vice president's current chief of staff. "I think Mr. Cheney has conclusively demonstrated that torture – I'm sorry, that should read 'coerced interrogation' – is a valuable weapon in the war on terror, and one that should not be restricted by unnecessary rules and limitations just to satisfy a mob of mewling liberals and the namby-pamby international community."

Vice President Cheney's torture experiment took place in an undisclosed location known only by its code name, "The Presidential Palace". During the experiment, Mr. Cheney was subjected to a large range of the coerced interrogation techniques currently utilized by military interrogators and the CIA in prison camps in Iraq, Guantanamo, and Central Europe, including simulated drowning, electrical shocks, forced homoerotic behavior including photography, dog attacks, sleep deprivation, light and sound techniques, and more.

"It worked like a charm," said Mr. Addington. "Mr. Cheney sang like a canary."

While the full list of Mr. Cheney's confessions is classified, a participant in the exercise who asked that his name remain confidential revealed a number of interesting tidbits extracted during the week, some expected, some, in the words of the unnamed source, "less so".

By day two of the exercise, Mr. Cheney had confessed to using his political influence to arrange no-bid contracts for Halliburton, a company he formerly headed and in which he is a major stockholder; drafting the country's energy policy so as to directly benefit his colleagues in the oil and nuclear industries with no consideration paid to the environment, alternative fuels, or reducing America's dependence on foreign energy sources; orchestrating the leak of Valerie Wilson née Plame's secret CIA identity, partly in retaliation for Ambassador Joseph Wilson's refutation of Bush's false Niger assertion and partly in retaliation for the interception by Mrs. Wilson of a shipment of fake WMD Cheney and others had arranged to be planted in Iraq prior to the invasion; assisting in the theft of the presidential elections that led to George W. Bush's first and second terms; and willfully distorting information regarding the non-existence of WMD in Iraq so as to help make a case for war on false pretences.

"None of that was any surprise to anybody," said the source. "But it was interesting to hear the stuff coming out of his own mouth."

By day four, however, Mr. Cheney had confessed to crimes that, on the surface, seemed quite surprising.

"According to Mr. Cheney, he was the fabled second shooter on the grassy knoll in the Kennedy assassination. That was certainly news to me," said the unnamed source.

Mr. Cheney also confessed to complicity in the murder and burial of union leader Jimmy Hoffa in 1975; to personally faking the Apollo moon landings; to having created the famed crop circles that appear sporadically in England; to sinking the battleship USS Maine in Havana Harbor in 1898, sparking the Spanish-American War; and to having flown a simulated flying saucer in the vicinity of Roswell, New Mexico, on at least twelve separate occasions from 1947 to the present.

"Beyond merely demonstrating that torture is a proven, effective technique for extracting valuable and accurate information from an unwilling subject, the success of the coerced interrogation exercise has brought to light the extraordinary versatility of Vice President Cheney," said Mr. Addington. "He also seems to have an amazing amount of energy for a man with a bum ticker."

By Ion Zwitter, Avant News Editor