WASHINGTON – The hunt for biological, chemical and nuclear weapons in Iraq has come to an end nearly two years after President Bush ordered U.S. troops to disarm now-deposed President Saddam Hussein. The top CIA weapons hunter is home, and analysts are back at Langley, Va.
Officials who served with the Iraq Survey Group said the violence in Iraq, coupled with a lack of new information, led them to fold up the effort shortly before Christmas.
Four months after Charles Duelfer, who led the weapons hunt in 2004, submitted an interim report to Congress that contradicted nearly every prewar assertion about Iraq made by top Bush administration officials, a senior intelligence official said the findings will stand as the survey group’s final conclusions and will be published this spring.
President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other top administration officials contended before the U.S. invasion in March 2003 that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program and had chemical and biological weapons.
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