WASHINGTON — Saddam Hussein did not produce or possess any weapons of mass destruction for more than a decade before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq last year, according to a comprehensive CIA report released Wednesday.
Hussein intended to someday reconstitute his illicit programs and rebuild at least some of his weapons if United Nations sanctions were eased and he had the opportunity, the report concluded. But the Iraqi regime had no formal, written strategy to revive the banned programs after sanctions, and no staff or infrastructure in place to do so, the investigators found.
The report said that Hussein's illicit-weapons capability was "essentially destroyed" after the Persian Gulf War in 1991 and was never rebuilt. It said Hussein considered the U.N. sanctions "an economic stranglehold" that in effect curbed his ability to build or develop weapons in the ensuing 12 years.
The only known attempts to produce illicit weapons came a year after the 2003 invasion, the report said in a new disclosure. In March of this year, investigators found that insurgents in Baghdad were trying to recruit former weapons scientists to develop nerve gases and ricin, a biological toxin, to attack U.S. forces. The discovery led to a series of raids.
The 1,000-page report by Charles A. Duelfer, head of the CIA's Iraq Survey Group weapons-hunting teams, is the most definitive account yet of Iraq's long-defunct weapons programs and comes as the presidential campaign increasingly is focused on President Bush's decision to go to war in Iraq primarily to disarm Hussein of suspected chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.
More than 1,000 U.S. troops have been killed, and thousands more have been wounded.
Based on 16 months' work, the report vastly expands on previous efforts by U.N. inspectors and Duelfer's predecessor, David Kay.
In his report, and in testimony Wednesday to the Senate Armed Services Committee, Duelfer refuted many of the Bush administration's most dramatic claims before the war, basing his findings in part on extensive information gleaned from interrogations of Hussein and some of his top aides.
Duelfer said, for example, there was no evidence that Hussein sought to import uranium from Africa, as Bush claimed in his 2003 State of the Union speech. Duelfer said investigators also found no evidence that Hussein had passed illicit weapons material to Al Qaeda or other terrorist organizations, or had any intent to do so.
