US hunt for Iraq's banned weapons over: White House
13/1/2005 11:36
The US search for Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMD) was
over, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Wednesday.
The Iraq Survey
Group (ISG), consisting of some 1,200 military and intelligence specialists and
support staff, spent nearly two years in Iraq searching for the banned weapons
that the Bush administration cited to justify the Iraq war, but failed to find
any of such weapons.
There was on longer an active search for weapons and the
administration did not hold out hopes that any weapons would be found, he
said.
"I think that others have already addressed...that their physical
search has essentially ended," he said.
McClellan said there was still some
wrap-up work and the ISG continued to operate in Iraq under the multinational
force command.
House minority leader Nancy Pelosi, a Democratic from
California, said President George W. Bush should explain what happened. "Now
that the search is finished, President Bush needs to explain to the American
people why he was so wrong, for so long, about the reasons for war," she
said.
The Washington Post reported Wednesday that the ISG, established to
search for biological, chemical and nuclear weapons in Iraq, folded up the
effort shortly after Christmas last month because of violence in the Middle
Eastern country and lack of new information.
Charles A. Duelfer, who led the
weapons hunt in 2004, submitted an interim report to the Congress that
contradicted nearly every prewar assertion about Iraq made by top Bush
administration officials, and the findings would stand as the ISG's final
conclusion and would be published this spring, the report quoted a senior
intelligence official as saying.
Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other
top administration officials asserted before the March 2003 invasion that Iraq
was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program, had chemical and biological
weapons, and maintained links to al Qaeda affiliates to whom it might give such
weapons to use against the Untied States.
Duelfer was back in Washington
finishing some addenda to his September report before it was reprinted. "There's
no particular news in them, just some odds and ends," the intelligence official
was quoted as saying.
Xinhua
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