Team hunting Iraq WMD ends its search

WASHINGTON -- The hunt for biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons in Iraq has come to an end nearly two years after President Bush ordered US troops to disarm Saddam Hussein. The top CIA weapons hunter is home, and analysts are back at Langley, Va.

In interviews, 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 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 survey group's final conclusions and will be published this spring.

The survey group, now enmeshed in counterinsurgency work, remains under Pentagon command.

Intelligence officials said the survey group has interviewed every person it could find connected to programs that ended more than 10 years ago, and every suspected site within Iraq has been fully searched -- or stripped bare by insurgents and thieves.