May 4, 2006

TIMES HUMOR: BOROWITZ REPORT

Agency uses bureaucracy, red tape to hamstring nukes

In what some in the nuclear anti-proliferation movement are already calling a masterstroke, the United States has dispatched the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to Iran to slow down that nation's development of nuclear weapons, the White House confirmed today.

With diplomacy yielding few results and military action deemed too risky, sending FEMA to throw a monkey-wrench in Iran's nuclear program may have been just the "third way" that the Bush administration has been seeking, according to White House spokesman Tony Snow.

"We had been looking for a way to slow the Iranians down," Mr. Snow said. "And we all looked at each other and said, 'No one slows things down better than FEMA.'"

According to Mr. Snow, FEMA officials began infiltrating Iran's nuclear program early last week and started inundating the Iranians with unnecessary levels of bureaucracy and mind-numbing red tape.

The enrichment of uranium, which had been well underway before FEMA's arrival, now requires no fewer than 20 separate departmental approvals and the completion of over 40 hard-to-fill-out forms.

Speaking from his presidential residence today, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said that while he had originally hoped to have uranium enriched by 2007, that projection has now been pushed back until at least 2019.
White House spokesman Snow said that given FEMA's success in slowing Iran's nuclear program, it would soon move on to other missions, such as slowing Tom DeLay's prosecution.

Elsewhere, Los Angeles police exploded a newspaper rack believed to be a bomb but which was actually a promotional device for "Mission Impossible III," also believed to be a bomb.

For more from Andy Borowitz go to www.borowitzreport.com. Andy Borowitz is a nationally syndicated humor columnist whose work can be found in Newsweek and other publications.