At the same time, US President George W. Bush (news - web sites) declined to repeat his prediction that US-led forces scouring Iraq will discover the prohibited weapons he cited as the chief reason for the March 2003 invasion.
"There is no doubt in my mind that Saddam Hussein was a grave and gathering threat to America and the world," Bush said during a brief public appearance with visiting Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski.
The case for war has drawn election-year scrutiny because the former head of the US-led effort to find banned weapons in Iraq, David Kay, said recently that he did not think such stockpiles existed on the eve of the invasion.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan, who also refused to say he thought Kay's successor would succeed, mounted a defense of the administration's pre-war warnings about the threat posed by Saddam.
"I think some in the media have chosen to use the word 'imminent.' Those were not words we used. We used 'grave and gathering' threat," he insisted.
But if Bush never called Saddam's Iraq an "imminent threat" in so many words, he said it was "urgent," Vice President Dick Cheney (news - web sites) called it "mortal" and it was "immediate" to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
In an October 7, 2002 televised speech to the nation, Bush likened the standoff with Iraq to the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis, when Soviet missiles were revealed to be based just 90 miles (145 kilometers) off US shores.
In that same speech, he warned that Saddam "could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists" like the al-Qaeda network behind the September 11, 2001 attacks.
"No terrorist state poses a greater or more immediate threat to the security of our people and the stability of the world than the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq," Rumsfeld testified to lawmakers in September 2002.
Other senior Bush aides shied away from using the word "imminent" but agreed with that characterization in exchanges with reporters.
On January 26, 2003, CNN television asked White House communications director Dan Bartlett "is he (Saddam) an imminent threat to US interests, either in that part of the world or to Americans right here at home?"
"Well, of course he is," Bartlett replied.
On May 7, 2003, a reporter asked then White House spokesman Ari Fleischer (news - web sites): "We went to war, didn't we, to find these -- because we said that these weapons were a direct and imminent threat to the United States? Isn't that true?"
"Absolutely. One of the reasons that we went to war was because of their possession of weapons of mass destruction. And nothing has changed on that front at all," the spokesman replied.
"Another way to look at this is if Saddam Hussein holds a gun to your head even while he denies that he actually owns a gun, how safe should you feel?" Fleischer told reporters on October 9, 2002.
