Iraq's Illicit Weapons Gone Since Early '90s, CIA Says

Bush, who delivered a national security campaign speech in Pennsylvania on Wednesday, did not mention the weapons report, but White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters aboard Air Force One that it showed that Hussein "was a threat we needed to take seriously." He said Hussein "retained the intent and capability to produce weapons of mass destruction" and was "working to undermine sanctions."

Democrats seized Wednesday on the dense, three-volume report as proof that Hussein did not pose a threat to the United States before the war, as the White House continues to argue.

"In short, we invaded a country, thousands of people have died, and Iraq never posed a grave or growing danger," said Sen. John D. "Jay" Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Rep. Jane Harman (D-Venice), the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said: "The Duelfer report is yet another example that there really are two Americas. There's the one that exists in the Bush fantasy world, and then there's the real America."

Among the report's highlights:

* The Iraqi president had abandoned his nascent nuclear program and had destroyed his stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons by December 1991. No infrastructure or other evidence was found showing that the illicit weapons programs were revived before the 2003 war.

* Hussein knew he had no banned weapons before the war and believed Washington ultimately would make peace with his secular regime to counter the growing power and nuclear threat of what he considered his main enemy: neighboring Iran's Islamic government.

* Hundreds of individuals and companies from around the world, and government agencies and officials in Syria and Yemen, helped funnel conventional weapons and other goods to Iraq in violation of U.N. sanctions and are named in the report.

* Widespread kickbacks and other corruption in the U.N.'s "oil-for-food" program "rescued Baghdad's economy from a terminal decline created by sanctions" and helped subsidize the Iraqi regime. Overall, Hussein amassed more than $11 billion from oil smuggling and other illicit programs.

Duelfer spoke to the Senate Intelligence Committee in closed session Wednesday morning, and then in public to the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Asked in the Senate committee hearing to explain how U.S. intelligence agencies could have been so wrong about Iraq's weapons, Duelfer said that U.S. analysts were convinced that Hussein would never give up his quest for weapons because they were vital to his survival.