Hussein was waning threat, report says

WASHINGTON -- The government's most definitive account of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs, to be released today, will show that Saddam Hussein posed a diminishing threat at the time the United States invaded and did not possess nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons or have concrete plans to develop them, US officials said yesterday.

The officials said the 1,000-page report by Charles Duelfer, chief US weapons inspector in Iraq, concluded that Hussein had the desire but not the means to produce unconventional weapons that could threaten his neighbors or the West. President Bush has continued to assert in his campaign stump speeches that Iraq had posed ''a gathering threat."

The officials said Duelfer, an experienced former United Nations weapons inspector, found that the state of Hussein's weapons development programs and knowledge base was less in 2003, when the war began, than it was in 1998, when international inspectors left Iraq.

''They have not found anything yet," said one US official who had been briefed on the report.

A senior US government official said the report includes comments Hussein made to debriefers after his capture that bolster administration assertions, including his statement that his past possession of weapons of mass destruction ''was one of the reasons he had survived so long." He also maintained that such weapons had saved his regime by halting Iranian ground offensives during the Iran-Iraq war and deterred coalition forces from pressing on to Baghdad during the Gulf War of 1991.

The official said Duelfer will tell Congress in the report and in testimony today that Hussein intended to reconstitute weapons of mass destruction programs if he were freed of the UN sanctions that prevented him from getting needed materials.

Duelfer's report said Hussein was pursuing an aggressive effort to subvert the international sanctions through illegal financing and procurement efforts, officials said. The official said the report states that Hussein intended to resume full-scale efforts to produce weapons of mass destruction after the sanctions were eliminated and details his efforts to hinder international inspectors and preserve his weapons of mass destruction capabilities.

Representative Jane Harman, Democrat of California and vice chairwoman of the House intelligence committee, said she hadn't read Duelfer's report but has been told that it thoroughly undercuts the administration's assertions that Iraq posed a serious threat. ''Intentions do not constitute a growing danger," Harman said.

The report is being released at a point in the presidential campaign when Senator John F. Kerry of Massachusetts is aggressively challenging the Bush administration about its prewar justifications for invading Iraq, which centered largely on the contention that Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. People familiar with the report said it was being released today because Duelfer was ready and his schedule permitted him to testify to Congress.

Administration officials discussed some of the report's findings yesterday, publicly arguing that it showed that Hussein was a long-term threat, even though no weapons of mass destruction were found. White House press secretary Scott McClellan called Hussein's effort to evade the UN sanctions ''very revealing."

''We all thought that we would find stockpiles, and that was not the case," McClellan said. ''The fact that he had the intent and capability and that he was trying to undermine the sanctions that were in place is very disturbing. And I think the report will continue to show that he was a gathering threat that needed to be taken seriously, that it was a matter of time before he was going to begin pursuing those weapons of mass destruction."

Duelfer's findings follow reports by the Senate intelligence committee and his predecessor, David Kay, that criticized the prewar assessment that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons.

Another government official briefed on the report said that Iraq's nuclear-related activity in particular had been dormant for years before the invasion.