These photos are from MSNBC, not the Onion:
After the 9/11/01 attacks a bunch of smart people said it wouldn't be a good idea to invade Afghanistan and Iraq because then those countries would become US colonial possessions and those are never easy to manage and having such possessions would make us no safer. This turned out to be the case. Now the US is stuck trying to run those countries without enough troops to do it so they have to use our tax dollars to hire people from abroad. Lots of those people understandably can't be trusted to help us manage our colonies so here's the Defense Department's solution: a handheld lie detector to be used for screening non-US personnel. If there is a problem, American knowhow can always come up with a space gizmo* that wouldn't be admissable in our own courts but would cow our colonial subjects exposed to movies like Men in Black. Trying to come up with a word to describe this device and its intended uses the best Unqualified Offerings could come up with was "evil." That will work.
*that uses algorithms and stuff