Jonathan Schwarz continues his ruthless exposure of the lies of Colin Powell in yet another outstanding post at A Tiny Revolution. Step by step, with relentless detail, he shows how almost every assertion of "fact" Powell made during his pre-attack UN presentation (which "clinched the deal for war," as the mooing herd of punditry all agreed afterward) was unsupported by intelligence data -- and that Powell knew this when he spoke. Jon has chapter and verse, link and source -- it's devastating. Powell was the "human face" of a monstrous conspiracy to lead the United States into an unnecessary war, an act of aggression, a war crime of Nuremberg proportions. And tens of thousands of innocent people lie dead because of it. How many thousands more will die in the global chaos and instability that this act of criminal insanity has unleashed?

These murdering liars: it just chokes you with fury, what they've done -- and what they will get away with. For be assured: even if Patrick Fitzgerald makes all our dreams come true, handing down indictments for Karl Rove, "Scooter" Libby and even the great sulphurous belch of corruption that is Dick Cheney, Bush will simply pardon them all -- just like Papa did in his last days in office, with a bagful of pardons that quashed the investigation into the Iran-Contra scam (which was, in many respects, a very similar act of warmongering treason).

What's more, even if -- in the wildest dream on the edge of possibility -- Bush himself gets caught in the cross-hairs, there's always the old Nixon-Ford ploy. You take a pliable outsider and say: "I'll make you Vice President if you promise to pardon me when I'm gone and you take over." Cheney -- an old Nixon White House hand who became Ford's chief of staff and was a top insider in all the Bush I machinations -- knows how to play this game. Sure, if worst comes to worst, you may have to step down from office -- but nobody does time, and more importantly, nobody loses any money.

No, these guys will sleep on feather-beds for the rest of their lives, feted -- and fattened with cash -- in the gilded bubble of the right-wing elite. The fix is in -- and as always, it is the innocent, the weak and the most vulnerable in the world who will pay the cost for the crimes of these bloated, bloodsoaked liars.