A senior US official overseeing the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has said the search will continue, but the focus now includes whether Saddam Hussein intended to develop such weapons.
"Ultimately what we want is a comprehensive picture, not just simply answering questions - were there weapons, were there not weapons?" Charles Duelfer told reporters after a closed-door briefing to the Senate Armed Services Committee.
"The hunt will go on until we're able to draw a firm and confident picture of what the programs were and where the regime was headed with respect to them. But we're looking at it from soup to nuts - from the weapons end to the planning end and to the intentions end," he said.
The new direction of trying to determine whether the former Iraqi president was actively pursuing the development of banned weapons reflects the Bush administration's evolving public rationale for the war on Iraq.
Initially, the administration said an invasion was necessary to find and destroy weapons of mass destruction that Iraq possessed and was prepared to use. With none uncovered, the White House now says the war, in which more than 500 US troops and thousands of Iraqis have died, was justified by Saddam's alleged intent to build and use such weaponry.
"We are looking for weapons, we're looking for production equipment, we're looking for the decisions by the regime to sustain a capability ... but we have not found existing stocks of weapons as some had expected," Duelfer said.
Duelfer, appointed by the CIA in January, guides the on-the-ground hunt by the Defence Department's Iraq Survey Group of about 1,300 personnel. He said they regularly receive reports of hidden weapons which are then checked out, "but we haven't found any at this point in time."
Duelfer's predecessor, David Kay, said as he stepped down that he did not believe Iraq had large stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons when U.S. forces invaded Iraq last year.
But Duelfer said it was still too early to draw conclusions and make final judgements.
"Much work remains to be done," Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John Warner, a Virginia Republican, said.
The failure to find banned weapons in Iraq has emerged as a key political issue ahead of the November presidential election. Republicans urge patience until the hunt is finished, while Democrats say the lack of banned weapons showed that the White House exaggerated the threat from Iraq to push for war.
The administration has also been accused of focusing resources on Iraq instead of the hunt for Osama bin Laden, whom Washington believes masterminded the September 11, 2001, attacks.
Senator John Rockefeller of West Virginia, the senior Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee which was also briefed by Duelfer, said the team should finish its work.
But the current direction suggested an investigation that is "more of a history of a subject which did not pan out in terms of the American purpose of invading Iraq in the first place, thus I'm not entirely pleased about that," he added.
Maj. Gen. Keith Dayton, head of the Iraq Survey Group, said documents and interviews gave useful information for fighting terrorism. "It has been very important to breaking up cells and capturing individuals," he said, but gave no details.
Iraq had a complex system for procuring military goods and technology which it financed mainly through oil smuggling that was conducted through arrangements with neighbouring countries, Duelfer said in an unclassified summary of his testimony.
Money was also obtained from "kickback payments" made on contracts set up through the UN's oil-for-food program, he said. Iraq derived "several billion dollars" between 1999 and 2003 from oil smuggling and kickbacks, he said.