Search for WMD in Iraq ended

Effort folded shortly before Christmas

By Dafna Linzer

Updated: 11:55 p.m. ET Jan. 11, 2005

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 Saddam Hussein. The top CIA weapons hunter is home, and analysts are back at Langley.

In interviews, officials who served with the Iraq Survey Group (ISG) 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 A. 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 ISG's final conclusions and will be published this spring.

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Meanwhile, 1,357 American soldiers have died in Iraq because of George Bush's erroneous claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction that did not exist.