For Scientific American, a magazine I have, as a scientist, read for many years and respect highly (although I do not subscribe to SA MIND), this assessment strikes me as a rather shallow analysis that, more crucially, fails to take into account major influences on the judgments made by the press and the public. To suggest that the deceptions were not "premeditated" seems an unwarranted selection of the motivations involved. "Premeditation" by the publics or the media had nothing to do with the run up to the Iraq war. The White House and two right wing "think tanks" premeditated, planned, and then engaged in a very deliberate and massive propaganda effort to deceive the public and promote the invasion of Iraq well ahead of the actual event. Dick Cheney is, in fact, even now, STILL pushing the notion that Saddam did indeed have WMD, and not merely planning on producing them when he got the chance. And it was the Bush administration that coined the terms "regime change" and "Al Qaeda in Iraq". True, the corporate media followed through with their amplification of the Iraqi threat and their mindless, false justification for the invasion, but to label that "not premeditated", after 9/11, ignores the inveterate habit of the MSM backing the Bush administration 100% with little thought. On the other hand, Internet pundits, those on the left, and many others including the men on the teams responsible for searching for those WMD in Iraq, ridiculed the administration's propaganda effort in promoting the Iraq war on those grounds, or for that matter, based on any pretext. While it is true that pundits on the political right favored the Bush propagandistic interpretation of events after 9/11, the notion regarding some sort of meditation, pre- or otherwise, totally misses the point. They were PERSUADED by the White House arguments. In the meantime, the public was overwhelmed by a torrent of propaganda both by media pundits and directly from the White House media machine. The public was massively PERSUADED. No subtle notions like "straw man" and "weak man" analyses need be invoked. True, such rhetorical ploys are well established and widely recognized, but this was a classic situation in which PERSUASION through deceptive propaganda techniques was indeed PREMIDITATED by the Bush administration and carried through until the Congress as well as the public were hoodwinked into supporting the invasion. Hitler, Mao, and Stalin themselves could not have done a better job of promoting their aims through deception and evasiveness - - planned well ahead. If more of the public in the USA had been capable of recognizing the massive scam through critical thought and mistrust of the Bush administration, the situation might have well turned out differently despite the propaganda effort.