WASHINGTON, September 17 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – A draft report by top US weapons inspectors in Iraq, Charles Duelfer, concluded that Iraq has no weapons of mass destruction, raising concerns the invasion of the oil-rich country was based on false pretexts.

Based on documents signed by senior leaders and the debriefings of former Iraqi scientists and top officials, the report confirms earlier conclusions that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported.

The alleged threat from weapons of mass destruction was the main justification used by the Bush administration for the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

The report was drafted by Duelfer’s Iraq Survey Group, which has been working since the summer of 2003 to verify the claims. More than a thousand civilian and military weapons specialists, translators and other experts have been devoted to the effort.

Same Conclusions

The draft of Duelfer's report appears to back the view of his predecessor, David Kay.

Kay, resigned last month over failure to find any such weapons and said he had come to the conclusion that Iraq had no stockpiles of banned weapons when the United States invaded the country 18 months ago.

He told Reuters on January 23 that he came to realize that there were no such weapons in Iraq . “I don't think they existed,” he said over the phone.

It is the same conclusion reached by former Chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix, whose team of 1,200 experts searching Iraq for WMD before the Match invasion concluded that no such weapons have been found.

In an earlier interview published March 5, Blix said the invasion was illegal as the United States and Britain “hyped” intelligence to attack the oil-rich country.

Blix had earlier accused the British government of “over-interpreting” intelligence on Iraq's alleged capability of deploying weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes, lashing out at the "culture of spin and hyping" adopted by Downing Street.

Declassify

Duelfer said in March that he was still unable to find any banned weapons in Iraq , telling the intelligence he intends to focus on Saddam Hussein's "intentions" instead of hidden weapons.

An intelligence official said Duelfer could wrap up the report as soon as this month, but noted it may take time to declassify it.

But press reports said those who discussed the report inside and outside the government did so Thursday on the condition of anonymity because it contains classified material and is not yet completed.

The Duelfer report will come months after the Senate Intelligence Committee released a scathing assessment of the prewar intelligence on Iraq .

After a year long inquiry, the Republican-led committee said in July the CIA kept key information from its own and other agencies' analysts, engaged in “group thinking” by failing to challenge the assumption that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and allowed President Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell to make false statements.

In the runup to the US-led invasion of Iraq last year, Bush repeatedly cited an alleged secret WMD program as a justification for the offensive, but he came under an intense fire after a post-invasion search for evidence of such a program has come up with nothing.

Bush, however, recently backed off his statements, claiming he would have attacked Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein from power even if he had known that his regime lacked WMDs.

Earlier this week, Secretary of State Colin Powell told lawmakers he now thought stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons would probably never be found.

The report’s findings coincided with the UN Secretary General’s long delayed judgment that the US-led invasion of Iraq was “illegal”, and out of line with the UN charter.