USA

Information Clearinghouse: US denies ' imminent' threat warning

THE White House today denied it ever warned that Saddam Hussein posed an "imminent" threat to the United States.

It is already smarting from the failure so far to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

"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," spokesman Scott McClellan said.

But if US President George W. Bush never called Saddam's Iraq an "imminent threat" in so many words, he said it was "urgent".

Vice President Dick Cheney called it "mortal" and it was "immediate" to Defence 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 145km 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