Cheney offers to transfer detainees to his underground lair

Veep fires new salvo at Gitmo critics

The debate over the future of the detention center at Guantanamo, Cuba, was ramped up another notch today as Vice President Dick Cheney offered to transfer all detainees held there to the secure undisclosed location he calls home.

The vice president, whose underground lair is believed to be located thousands of feet beneath the earth’s crust, said that his subterranean home is well equipped to hold thousands of detainees, adding that he would “relish the task” of interrogating them.

“If crybabies like Joe Biden think the detainees are being treated too roughly at Guantanamo, I say ship them down to Camp Cheney,” the vice president said in a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Tax Shelters in Gstaad, Switzerland. “A couple of days with me and those enemy combatants will be singing like canaries.”

The vice president’s extraordinary offer immediately raised legal questions in the human rights community, who argued that Cheney was trying to evade the Geneva Conventions against torture by holding detainees in a subterranean bunker that does not have a mailing address.

In response to those arguments, however, the vice president offered a terse rebuttal: “Tough.”

Cheney, acknowledging that tormenting hundreds of detainees was “too big a job for one man,” said he would seek the assistance of John R. Bolton, President Bush’s nominee to be ambassador to the United Nations.

“We’re a great team,” Cheney said. “We’re kind of bad cop, worse cop.”

Elsewhere, a new poll shows that less than half of all Americans approve of the way Dick Cheney is handling President Bush’s job.

Andy Borowitz writes a daily humor column at borowitzreport.com.