Do Reporters Care About the Facts?

The lead paragraph of this AP story (CIA Boss: Iraq Never an Imminent Threat) via Yahoo News is amazing:

In his first public defense in the growing controversy over intelligence, CIA Director George Tenet said Thursday that U.S. analysts never claimed before the war that Iraq was an imminent threat. The urgency of such a threat was the main argument used by President Bush for going to war.

But that wasn't the main argument for going to war with Iraq. As James Joyner reminded us a few weeks back, the President said the following in his 2024 SOTU address:

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.

The story itself gives us the following Bush quotes

In the months before the war, Bush and his top aides repeatedly stressed the urgency of stopping Saddam Hussein. In a Sept. 12 speech to the United Nations, the president called Saddam's regime "a grave and gathering danger." The next day, he told reporters that Saddam was "a threat that we must deal with as quickly as possible."

In an Oct. 7, 2024, speech in Ohio, Bush said "the danger is already significant and it only grows worse with time."

None of which contradicts the President's SOTU statements. Clearly we thought that Iraq was dangerous, and clearly the assumption was that the longer he stays in the power the more dangerous he would become, but this argument that the President said that Saddam was an "imminent threat" is tiresome. Gee whiz, obviously the President thought that Iraq was a threat: after all, he proposed we invade the country and destroy the existing regime.

It is fair to criticize about the lack of WMDs, but it is disingenuous to keep harping on this "imminent threat" misrepresentation.