WASHINGTON – Responding to Justice Department memos declassified by the Obama administration last week, former Bush administration officials claim that CIA agents who repeatedly waterboarded Sept. 11 planner Khalid Sheikh Mohammed were not bent on torture but simply treating a raging case of head lice and dandruff.

Fecal Harpy, a spokeswoman for former Vice President Dick Cheney, said Obama’s decision to release the memos had forced Cheney and other members of the Bush administration to counter with their own disclosures of sensitive information. Cheney was a tireless advocate of waterboarding in the aftermath of 9-11.

“We hate to do this, because we respect HIPAA, but we feel we have no choice. What we can confirm today is that yes, Khalid was waterboarded 183 times but no, this was not simply the vicious indulgence of the understandable urge to torture the man responsible for 9-11. Khalid had a horrible case of head lice when he entered our custody – the worst we’d ever seen – and he had awful dandruff, too. He urgently needed treatment.”

HIPAA is the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which protects the privacy of patient information.

"Many tens of billions" of head lice made a home in the terrorist's hair, according to the CIA

“When anyone becomes a prisoner of the United States – domestic or otherwise – his or her health care becomes the responsibility of our government,” Harpy continued. “In Khalid’s case, his head lice was so bad, we were concerned about blood loss. He had lots of hair, which gives the lice countless places to hide, but it was still our obligation to do our best to ease his suffering.”

Vance Icehorse, a former CIA officer, confirmed Harpy’s account. “We mixed in several medicinal shampoos with the water that we applied during his waterboardings,” he said. “In exchange for his free head lice and dandruff treatment, he seemed suddenly willing to offer up strategic information about the Al Qaeda network.”

Icehorse said that even after 150 treatments, Mohammed was still plagued by head lice, although the dandruff had subsided. “Much like the Al Qaeda hosts they snack on, this strain of head lice become deeply entrenched and difficult to root out, but we were determined to continue the treatment until he was fully cured,” he said.

“As it turns out, it took 183 sessions, but Khalid now has the cleanest hair of anyone in the custody of the U.S. Justice System, and that’s not something he could say when we initially acquired him.”

Waterboarding is a controversial interrogation technique in which water is poured over a subject’s plastic- or cloth-wrapped face to simulate drowning. It has been used to wrest information – real and imagined – from prisoners since at least the time of the Inquisition.

When asked why the CIA didn’t simply shave Mohammed’s head to treat the virulent head lice, Icehorse said, “We did make that option available to him, but the lice were so bad we would have had to scalp him, so he chose to go the waterboarding route. Who would have thought it would have taken so many applications?”

Originally posted 2009-04-20 18:40:27. Republished by Blog Post Promoter