We "know" these things, even though they are not factually true, because we've read and heard them repeated so often. So it goes with "imminent threat" even though Bush, factually, claimed the opposite in both his address to Congress a year ago and in his 2003 State of the Union address. In the State of the Union address, he said:
"Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words and all recriminations would come too late. Trusting in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein is not a strategy, and it is not an option."
In other words, Bush preempted Saddam's imminence.
Yet news outlets repeatedly headlined stories such as this one, for example, from Radio Free Europe on Oct. 8, 2002: "Iraq: Bush tells Americans Saddam is an imminent threat." Several paragraphs into this same story, reporter Andrew F. Tully, wrote: "But the U.S. president said this urgency does not mean that war is imminent or inevitable."
Come again?
Toward the end of his report, Kay said that, barring conclusions, this much is clear: "Saddam . had not given up his aspirations and intentions to continue to acquire weapons of mass destruction."
Perhaps most important of all were Kay's concluding remarks that, despite enormous physical risk to inspectors, they are committed to finishing the task for two reasons.
One, because whatever they find will be different from pre-war intelligence. Discovering those differences is critical to the quality of future intelligence and thus future security. And two, chillingly, he said:
"We have found people, technical information and illicit procurement networks that if allowed to flow to other countries and regions could accelerate global proliferation."
And that is after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Surely before the war, those circumstances posed a threat, perhaps even imminent, that if allowed to flower would have provided the incontrovertible proof we so crave - too late.