U.S. News & World Report senior writer Michael Barone criticized The New York Times for making a “howling error” in reporting that the Bush administration claimed Saddam Hussein “posed an imminent threat to the world.” According to Barone, the Times made this assertion “despite the fact that Bush in his 2003 State of the Union message did not say that the threat was 'imminent,' but said it should be addressed anyway.” But while Bush never actually used the word “imminent” to describe the threat posed by Saddam, his spokesman affirmed that the Iraqi dictator posed “an imminent threat to U.S. interests.” The president and members of his administration routinely offered similar characterizations of the Iraq threat, describing it as “urgent,” “gathering,” and “mortal.”

From Barone's column in the December 12 edition of U.S. News & World Report:

My sense from such occasional glimpses that I get of life at the top of the administration is that people there have believed for some time that Iraq is obviously headed for success. But that's not how things have looked on the outside. Bush came to Washington from Texas, where the political dialogue was set by the Dallas Morning News and other newspapers with not much in the way of an ideological agenda. But in Washington, the dialogue is set by papers like the New York Times, whose White House correspondent wrote in a front-page story of “administration claims that Mr. [Saddam] Hussein posed an imminent threat to the world” --despite the fact that Bush in his 2003 State of the Union message did not say that the threat was “imminent” but said it should be addressed anyway. So deeply ingrained in the Times 's newsroom are the distortions and talking points of the anti-Bush left that its top people let a howling error like this on their front page.

Barone was referring to an October 3, 2003, Times article by reporter David Sanger, who wrote: “The preliminary report delivered on Thursday by the chief arms inspector in Iraq forces the Bush administration to come face to face with this reality: that Saddam Hussein's armory appears to have been stuffed with precursors, potential weapons and bluffs, but that nothing found so far backs up administration claims that Mr. Hussein posed an imminent threat to the world.”

As Media Matters for America has noted, although Bush and members of his administration did not actually utter the word “imminent,” they conveyed the same message with other words: Bush called Iraq an “urgent threat”; Vice President Dick Cheney called Iraq a “mortal threat”; and another senior White House official agreed in response to a press question that Iraq posed an “imminent threat.” During an interview with White House communications director Dan Bartlett on January 26, 2003, CNN host Wolf Blitzer specifically asked whether Saddam represented an “imminent threat to U.S. interests.” Bartlett replied, “Well, of course he is.” In addition, during an October 7, 2002, speech in Cincinnati, Bush said, “America must not ignore the threat gathering against us. Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof -- the smoking gun -- that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”