The hunt for Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction has come to an end, the White House confirmed today.
Officials with the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), the body established to find the very weapons which justified the war, have reported that no weapons have been found.
In fact, Saddam did not have the capability to make WMDs since 1991, the inspectors found. The ISG returned to the US last month amid growing dangers from insurgents in Iraq.
White House press secretary Mr Scott McClellan said there was no longer an active search for weapons. "There may be a couple, a few people, that are focused on that," he said, but added that the search had largely concluded.
He went on: "If they have any reports of (weapons of mass destruction) obviously they'll continue to follow up on those reports. "A lot of their mission is focused elsewhere now."
An interim report, written by former ISG head Mr Charles Duelfer, will largely serve as the group's final conclusions. In the report last September, Mr Duelfer reported that Saddam not only had no weapons of mass destruction and had not made any since 1991, but that he had no capability of making any either.
Few changes will be made to the document, Mr McClellan said. The Duelfer document contradicted virtually all the pre-war claims from London and Washington about Saddam possessing biological and chemical weapons, and reconstituting Iraq's nuclear programme.
An intelligence official told the Washington Post newspaper that the chances of weapons being hidden inside Iraq, or having been shipped out of the country before the war, were very small. The search was called off amid the growing insurgency and risk of attack or kidnap in Iraq.