It's official: No WMD

And "official" makes it so. Now they can put that search expense money into elections security, I guess.

The search for elusive weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has officially ended, the Washington Post says.

The daily reported on Wednesday that officials who served with the group charged with hunting banned weapons said insecurity in Iraq and a lack of new information had led them to fold up the effort shortly before Christmas.

[...]

The Post said the findings of an interim report that Duelfer submitted to the US Congress in September will stand as the ISG's final conclusions, according to a senior intelligence
official.

[...]

The report found that Iraq had no stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons and its nuclear programme had decayed before the US-led invasion in 2003, in findings contrary to pre-war assertions of the Bush administration.

Reuters article at Al Jazeera

With little fanfare, U.S. President George Bush's highly publicized search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq ended before Christmas.

Washington Times article

"With little fanfare"? We didn't even hear about it until now.


photo snagged from Maru

Update 11:00am :

Congress allotted hundreds of millions of dollars for the weapons hunt, and there has been no public accounting of the money. A spokesman for the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency said the entire budget and the expenditures would remain classified.

WaPo article