"A good deal of tyranny goes by the name of protection."
-- Crystal Eastman

Krugman on the Bush Administrations' continued propaganda (emphasis added):

"Last fall the former head of the C.I.A.'s counterterrorism efforts warned that 'cooked intelligence' was finding its way into official pronouncements. This week a senior British intelligence official told the BBC that under pressure from Downing Street, a dossier on Iraqi weapons had been 'transformed' to make it 'sexier' [sort of the same thing that currently has the New York Times in hot water] — uncorroborated material from a suspect source was added to make the threat appear imminent.

"It's now also clear that George W. Bush had no intention of reaching a diplomatic solution. According to The Financial Times, White House sources confirm that the decision to go to war was reached in December: 'A tin-pot dictator was mocking the president. It provoked a sense of anger inside the White House,' a source told the newspaper.

"Administration officials are now playing down the whole W.M.D. issue. Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary, recently told Vanity Fair that the decision to emphasize W.M.D.'s had been taken for 'bureaucratic reasons . . . because it was the one reason everyone could agree on.' But it was the W.M.D. issue that stampeded the Senate into giving Mr. Bush carte blanche to wage war."