No WMDs when US attacked

2004-10-06 21:04

Washington - Iraq gave up its weapons of mass destruction in 1991 and had no active chemical, biological or nuclear programmes at the time of the US-led invasion in 2003, the chief US weapons inspector concluded in a report released on Wednesday.

Charles Duelfer, head of the US Iraq Survey Group, found that Iraq's nuclear capability, far from being reconstituted as the United States had insisted before the war, was "decaying rather than being preserved" and would have taken years to rebuild, an official familiar with the report said.

Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, although intent on preserving the "intellectual capital" acquired over the years in developing weapons of mass destruction (WMD), set the end of UN sanctions as a higher priority.

This led him to give up stockpiled weapons and ultimately the programmes themselves, the official said.

"In terms of getting rid of weapons, by the end of 1991 they had gotten rid of just about everything," said the official, who briefed reporters before Duelfer's testified to congress on Wednesday.

Saddam clung to the capabilities to produce the weapons until as late as 1996 when the defection of Hussein Kamal, the Iraqi leader's son-in-law, led to the discovery of a biological warfare programme by UN arms inspectors, according to Duelfer's account.

More than 1 000 pages long, Duelfer's report traces the forces that propelled Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programmes from Iraq-Iran war with Iran in the 1980s, through the 1991 Gulf War, the 12-year period after when UN sanctions were in place, and finally 2003 US-led invasion.

His conclusions were drawn from documents, officials' testimony and debriefings of Saddam Hussein.

"He was not loquacious on the WMD activities, but he certainly put into perspective how he viewed threats," the official said of Saddam.

- AFP