ney is the lord of the lies, the Bushevik Beelzebub, now hopelessly caught in his own deceptions and treachery.

We now know they both kept repeating a known lie -- that Iraq had secret trailers used as biological weapons labs -- long after a Pentagon-sponsored fact-finding group unanimously concluded the trailers had nothing whatsoever to do with weapons of any kind.

The report in the Washington Post caused White House spokesman Scott McClellan to fume. How could the Post, McClellan howled, give the impression "that the president was saying something he knew at the time not to be true." Matrons across America reached for their smelling salts, faint at the notion that someone might suggest that Dubya purposefully lied. Mercy me.

Bush and Cheney's lies are legion. They effectively used lies to scare the hell out of the American people and they still do. But now, they must manufacture more lies to fuel more fear to keep their mass-deception operation going. They are struggling to keep the old lies alive until the new ones roll off the assembly line.

Their base -- the corporate-military-religious right folks --is eager to carry the new canards to the faithful as soon as the marketing launch time is just right. The menace of Iran is the sure-bet product, with the usual suspects in the media anxious to sell it.

Iraq was sold as a threat and Saddam Hussein's horrible weapons were what we most had to fear. Biological and chemical weapons in Iraq were fearsome. Bush assured the United Nations the evil regime in Iraq had a "continued appetite" for nuclear bombs.

Saddam, Cheney solemnly warned us, was hankering to build some nukes. The first thing he would do would be to slip a few dirty bombs to his old pal and partner in terror, Osama bin Laden.

The Busheviks created the mythology, mounted on a tripod of smoking-gun "evidence." Saddam was attempting to buy uranium for nuclear weapons. He bought aluminum tubes that could "only be used" for nuclear weapons. He constructed and operated mobile biological labs in trailers to manufacture disease-bearing weapons. Slam-dunk. Or so they thought.

All lies. Pure lies. And as each of these lies became apparent and independent intelligence experts reported this information, the Busheviks kept parroting the lies that suited their political purposes.

The pattern is repeated and unmistakable. Bush, Cheney and company would keep spouting the lies that were the result, not of "intelligence failures," but were known to be lies. This was necessary to continue the grand deception used to sell the war in the first place and cloak the truth about the real reasons for the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Ambassador Joseph Wilson and European intelligence operatives knew the story that Iraq was trying to buy enriched uranium from Niger was false. An Italian newspaper revealed how a bunch of international scam artists used obviously forged documents to promote the hoax in a dizzying scheme to sell the lie.

Their motive was simple. They wanted to make money selling the fabricated information to intelligence services, long before the Busheviks had set their sights on Iraq. The French spotted the fraud right away, and so did the Italians.

But after Sept. 11, the fraud was revived with the help of one of outgoing Italian Prime Minister and Bush ally Silvio Berlusconi's magazines. The same forged documents were recycled. The British and the Busheviks drooled all over them.

Of course, those were the very governments looking for any claim -- true or not -- to make the case for war with Iraq. Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's private intelligence operatives in the Pentagon pounced on the bogus Niger story and made it one of the principal reasons for war. Bush even used it in a State of the Union address.

Joe Wilson knew the story had holes, and warned the CIA. When he told the truth -- that the White House knew it was peddling lies -- he had to pay a price. Bush and Cheney unleashed their political thugs Karl Rove and Scooter Libby to discredit, even destroy Wilson. Exposing his wife's undercover job as a CIA officer was just one weapon they used.

Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, who brought the indictment of Scooter Libby to a federal grand jury and is still investigating others in the White House, argued that the Busheviks were involved in a concerted effort to lash out against a critic.

In a legal filing in the case, Fitzgerald said leaks of classified information were used in a "concerted action" by "multiple people in the White House" involved in the plan to "discredit, punish or seek revenge against" Wilson.

Libby claimed he got the OK from Cheney, with Bush's authorization, to leak intelligence information to friendly reporters. It's about time Bush and Cheney released transcripts of their interviews with Fitzgerald. That would sure help clear the air or, more likely, fill the atmosphere with more lies -- criminal ones at that.

The "National Journal's" Murray Waas blew the lid off another example of the Busheviks' incessant use of a phony rationale for war long after experts have discredited it. That was Saddam's procurement of high-strength aluminum tubes for the purpose of developing nuclear weapons.

Waas reported that as early as October 2002, Bush and Cheney had reports from the Energy Department and the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research concluding that the tubes were "intended for conventional weapons."

That judgment -- which turned out to be the correct one -- was never shared with the Congress and certainly not with the American people. Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser, insisted the tubes were "only really suited for nuclear weapons." The Busheviks ignored all the expert reports that challenged Rice's false assertion.

"We have found the weapons of mass destruction," Bush proclaimed to a group of Polish television reporters when one of them dared to ask the president where they were.

Remember, the Poles sent troops to Iraq, and the nation's political leaders -- bribed with U.S. money -- told their people the young Poles were fighting to save the world from Saddam's illicit weapons arsenal.

Bush made his unequivocal proclamation on May 29, 2003. But the Washington Post reports that two days before Bush bragged about the phony find of weapons, a secret fact-finding mission "had already concluded that the trailers had nothing to do with biological weapons."

A prime source for these frightening tales was an Iraqi engineer who defected to Germany in 1999. German intelligence gave him the code name "Curveball" and he was in time to become the Busheviks' main man in providing information on Iraq's "secret labs."

The Germans had concluded, years before the Busheviks decided to go to war with Iraq, that "Curveball" was a fraud, a liar and a nut. But those credentials made him a perfect puppet-informant for Cheney and Rumsfeld. He was willing to say anything to confirm their suspicions that Saddam had an active biological-weapons program.

After Saddam's fall, the weapons Rumsfeld said he knew "exactly" where to find were elusive. No one could find any. So you can imagine how excited the warmongers were when they got word the military had captured two trailers possibly used for bioweapons production. Cheney and Rummy were toasting each other and swilling down single-malt scotches.

Anxious for the satisfaction and propaganda value of the moment, the Pentagon hurried a team of technical experts to Iraq to evaluate the trailers. The CIA already had a draft of a white paper describing the trailers as "the strongest evidence to date that Iraq was hiding a biological warfare program."

The technical team, the Post reported, included eight Americans and a Brit, "each with at least a decade of experience in one of the essential technical skills needed in bioweapons production."

The experts worked in the sweltering sun, checking vats and valves, taking hundreds of photographs. By the end of the day, there were different opinions about what the trailers were used for, but there was certainty about what they were not.

One team member whose identity was protected told the Post, "Within the first four hours, it was clear to everyone that these were not biological labs."

On May 27, the technical team transmitted their unanimous findings. Within a day, the CIA posted on its Web site the paper titled "Iraqi Mobile Biological Warfare Agent Production Plants." The next day, Bush proclaimed, "We have found the weapons of mass destruction." The lies lived. The truth was buried.

By late June, then-secretary of state Colin Powell said that the "confidence is increasing" that the trailers were meant to be used to produce biological weapons. In September, Cheney said the "mobile biological laboratories" could have been used to produce anthrax and smallpox. Lies, lies and more lies, and they knew it.

If we had a real Senate Intelligence Committee, instead of that horrible excuse for one run by that shameless White House whore, Sen. Pat Roberts, the panel would be demanding to know who got the technical team report on the trailers and what was done with it.

I'm sure Rumsfeld saw the report, since the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency assembled the technical team. Poor Rummy. All those generals are calling for his head.

What took them so long?

Rumsfeld is the worst defense secretary in American history and certainly one of the worst military strategists since the invention of gunpowder.

The very name Rumsfeld should mean an arrogant person bursting with incompetence. Bush is right to keep him on board. Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice are rats richly deserving to be with their captain on his sinking ship of state.

They deserve their fates. The tragedy is how many more Iraqis and Americans will die for their lies.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Bill Gallagher, a Peabody Award winner, is a former Niagara Falls city councilman who now covers Detroit for Fox2 News. His e-mail address is gallaghernewsman@sbcglobal.net.