WASHINGTON (AFP) - The US government will release a report saying Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction or concrete plans to make them, officials and media reports said.
Charles Duelfer, the chief US weapons inspector in Iraq, has produced a 1,000-page report which says that Saddam, who was ousted by a US-led invasion launched in March 2003, had the desire but not the means to produce biological, chemical and nuclear arms, The Washington Post reported, quoting US officials.
The report would be a new blow to US administration efforts to justify the invasion, which has been made into a central theme of the presidential election race by Democratic contender John Kerry.
The report into the September 11, 2001 attacks has already concluded that Iraq had no part in the terrorist strikes on New York and Washington.
The Post quoted officials as saying that Duelfer, a former UN weapons inspector, found that the state of Iraq`s weapons programmes in 2003 was less advanced than in 1998, when international inspectors left Iraq.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan acknowledged on Tuesday that the United States had not found the weapons stockpiles it expected.
But he added: "The report will, from my understanding, talk about that Saddam Hussein had the intent and capability, that he was pursuing an aggressive strategy to bring down the sanctions, the international sanctions imposed by the United Nations through illegal financing procurement schemes."
McClellan said: "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. So let`s let the report come out, and we can talk more about it at that point."
The Post quoted one senior US official as saying that the report includes comments Saddam made to interrogators after his capture last December, including a 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 saved his government by halting Iranian ground offensives during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s and deterred coalition forces from pressing on to Baghdad during the 1991 Gulf War.