Published 15 December 2005

(word count: 750)

Controversy continues over Republican Arizona Senator John McCain's attempt to attach an amendment to the Great Patriotic Motherhood Apple Pie Aunt Bee Omnibus Freespending Pork Bill that would, as a Weekly Standard article put it, "'make torture illegal' at Pentagon facilities throughout the world."

The controversy seems to come, not from former prisoners of war, but from pansycrats who have never served in uniform and therefore define torture as being forced to endure a night of fretful sleep before bagging that fatcat lobbyist's fat kickback.

CIA Director Porter Goss denied any evil-doing in a USA Today story by declaring "This agency does not do torture" and further claimed that the CIA "remains officially neutral on the proposal by Sen. John McCain."  Additionally, an unnamed, unknown, un-outed politically connected spokescrat, whose spouse definitely does not work as a field spook in Central Europe, leaked through official unofficial channels that the CIA also simultaneously denies and remains officially neutral on the issues of spying, assassination, political destabilization, violent regime change, propping up dictators, bankrolling insurgencies with laundered drug money and peeking into women's beach cabanas with surveillance satellites.

In a related denial, an unknown, unnamed, unrecognized Pentagon Spokescrat said the US military simultaneously denies and remains officially neutral about maintaining a gulag of clandestine political prisons in Central Europe as claimed in reports by Human Rights Watch and many libertarian websites, and will not comment on torture chambers purportedly located in Cabinda, Goa, Macau, Quemoy, Sikkim, and Saint-Pierre et Miquelon.

Since these are actual places that nobody who has ever attended a US public school has ever heard of, no one, especially reporters, can determine if the Pentagon is telling the truth or just kidding, thereby allowing them to maintain both plausible deniability and deniable plausibility.

In yet another related denial that confuses everyone, President Bush vowed to shake the cobwebs and dust bunnies off of his never-used veto pen and wield it against any McCain anti-torture amendment, even as, per the same Weekly Standard article, "'Torture' per se is something the administration is happy to disavow."  As one libertarian wag has remarked, "this would apparently mean that the President is both against torture and against an amendment that is against torture."

Still another denial comes from an unknown, unnamed, unrecognized Guantanamo Spokescrat who insisted that no terrorist detainee has ever been subjected to the unspeakable torture technique know as "gender coercion" in which female interrogators look at a Muslim man while he is naked, straddle him, spray him with perfume, make him wear a bra on his head, and massage his back in a "sexually provocative manner."

Oddly, two dozen Congressmen, immediately upon hearing of this practice, categorically, vehemently, and unequivocally denied frequenting an upscale DC gentlemen's pleasure emporium in which female facilitators are remunerated with thousands of dollars for looking at a man while he is naked, straddling him, spraying him with perfume, making him wear a bra on his head, and massaging his back in a "sexually provocative manner."

(There also seems to be no truth to the rumor that former Abu Ghraib bad girl Pfc. Lynndie Englund has been promised a job at the same gentlemen's pleasure emporium once she's bounced from the brig, but nobody is denying it either.)

On yet another seemingly related front, an unknown, unnamed, unrecognized spokescrat for the Greater DC Kiwanis Club issued the following statement:

"Many Kiwanis members, in an effort to raise funds at local fairs and festivals, have frequently set up a 'dunking game booth' in which members sit on a perch while paying contestants throw baseballs at a target in an attempt to dunk the member into a tank of water.  We categorically, vehemently, and unequivocally deny that this fun and benign entertainment is in any way related to a torture technique known as 'waterboarding,' which CIA operatives categorically, vehemently, and unequivocally deny ever using, in which Middle Eastern terrorists are dunked into a tank of water to simulate drowning in an effort to gain information."

Returning to an earlier denial, CIA Director Porter Goss, speaking in a November 20, 2005 USA Today interview, said: "For the record, I will state again, and assert with eyeball-to-eyeball frankness, this agency does not do torture."

In a totally unrelated interview, in which an unknown, unnamed, unrecognized Libertarian Party spokescrat categorically, vehemently, and unequivocally denies any connection to the preceding paragraph, Kermit the Frog said, "For the record, I will state again, and assert with eyeball-to-eyeball frankness, I am not a Muppet."