a close look at what Charles Duelfer said:

From Chicago Tribune article:

David Kay's successor as chief U.S. weapons inspector, Charles Duelfer, reported to Congress on Oct. 6, 2004, that he, like Kay, had not turned up stockpiles of illicit weapons in Iraq. But Duelfer added an intriguing new dimension to the debate—a possible plot line of why Hussein had hoarded not his weapons but, rather, his ability to produce them. To give that dimension context: A nation capable of producing toxic weapons on relatively short notice wouldn't need to keep stockpiles.

Hussein had come "palpably close" to eradicating UN sanctions against Iraq, Duelfer concluded, by corrupting the UN's oil-for-food program, plundering it to bribe officials and citizens of influential countries. "He sought to balance the need to cooperate with UN inspections—to gain support for lifting sanctions—with his intention to preserve Iraq's intellectual capital for WMD and with a minimum of foreign intrusiveness and loss of face."

Duelfer's bottom line: As soon as Hussein's friends at the UN succeeded in removing sanctions from Iraq, the dictator would rebuild his prior WMD programs—and enhance them by acquiring nukes.
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Charles Duelfer's October 2004 report on his search for Iraqi weapons succinctly framed Hussein's modus operandi. Duelfer also said Hussein's scheme to parlay oil-for-food into the end of UN sanctions had almost succeeded. Duelfer wrote: "He sought to balance the need to cooperate with UN inspections--to gain support for lifting sanctions--with his intention to preserve Iraq's intellectual capital for WMD and with a minimum of foreign intrusiveness and loss of face. ... By 2000-2001, Saddam had managed to mitigate many of the effects of sanctions and undermine their international support. Iraq was within striking distance of a de facto end to the sanctions regime ..."

Once liberated from sanctions, Duelfer concluded, Hussein intended to recreate Iraq's illicit weapons capability.
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The most thorough hindsight attempt to evaluate the nuclear case for war was the Oct. 6, 2004, report to Congress by Charles Duelfer, the chief U.S. weapons inspector in postwar Iraq. Duelfer had succeeded David Kay, who concluded a year earlier that, based on statements from Iraqi scientists and senior government officials, "Hussein remained firmly committed to acquiring nuclear weapons." Paradoxically, this declaration had elicited vocal scorn for Kay from opponents of the war who previously had lionized him for his frankness in saying his searchers had found no stockpiles of illicit weapons.

Duelfer essentially echoed, but expanded, what Kay and the Senate Intelligence Committee had concluded: "Saddam aspired to develop a nuclear capability--in an incremental fashion, irrespective of international pressure and the resulting economic risks--but he intended to focus on ballistic missile and tactical chemical warfare capabilities." Duelfer said his searchers "discovered further evidence of the maturity and significance of the pre-1991 Iraqi nuclear program but found that Iraq's ability to reconstitute a nuclear weapons program progressively decayed after that date. ... "Senior Iraqis--several of them from the regime's inner circle--told [Duelfer's investigators] they assumed Saddam would restart a nuclear program once UN sanctions ended."

Duelfer reported that in the year before the war, Iraq "undertook improvements to technology in several areas that could have been applied to a renewed centrifuge program for uranium enrichment." But he found "no indication that Iraq had resumed fissile material or nuclear weapon research and development activities since 1991."

Duelfer, like the Senate Intelligence Committee before him, found no evidence to support intelligence and administration assertions that Iraq had tried to acquire uranium from other countries since the Gulf war. He similarly concluded that "high-level Iraqi interest in aluminum tubes appears to have come from efforts to produce 81 mm rockets, rather than a nuclear end use."
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From Wikipedia:

* Iraq's main goal was to end sanctions while preserving the capability to reconstitute WMD production.
* Iraq's WMD programs had decayed significantly since the end of the first Gulf War.
* No senior Iraqi official interviewed by the ISG believed that Saddam had forsaken WMD forever.
* "Iran was the pre-eminent motivator of this policy. All senior level Iraqi officials considered Iran to be Iraq's principal enemy in the region. The wish to balance Israel and acquire status and influence in the Arab world were also considerations, but secondary."
* Iraq had no deployable WMD of any kind as of March 2003 and had no production since 1991.
* The ISG judged that in March 2003, Iraq would have had the ability to produce large quantities of Sulfur Mustard in 3-6 months, and large quantities of nerve agent in 2 years.
* There was no proof of any biological weapons stocks since 1991.
* Iraq's nuclear program was terminated in 1991, at which point micrograms of enriched uranium had been produced from a single test gas centrifuge.
* Iraq had intended to restart all banned weapons programs as soon as multilateral sanctions against it had been dropped, a prospect that the Iraqi government saw coming soon.
* Smuggling was used by Iraq to rebuild as much of its WMD program as could be hidden from U.N. weapons inspectors.
* Iraq had an effective system for the procurement of items banned by sanctions.
* Until March 2003, Saddam Hussein convinced his top military commanders that Iraq did indeed possess WMD that could be used against any U.S. invasion force, in order to prevent a coup over the prospects of fighting the U.S.-led Coalition without these weapons.
* Iraq used procurement contracts allowed under the Oil for Food program to buy influence among U.N. Security Council member states including France, China, and Russia, as well as dozens of prominent journalists and anti-sanctions activists.
* "The former Regime had no formal written strategy or plan for the revival of WMD after sanctions. Neither was there an identifiable group of WMD policy makers or planners separate from Saddam. Instead, his lieutenants understood WMD revival was his goal from their long association with Saddam and his infrequent, but firm, verbal comments and directions to them."
In March 2005 Duelfer added an addenda to the original report, covering five topics:
* Prewar Movement of WMD Material Out of Iraq, stating "ISG judged that it was unlikely that an official transfer of WMD material from Iraq to Syria took place" but also acknowledging that "ISG was unable to complete its investigation and is unable to rule out the possibility that WMD was evacuated to Syria before the war."
* Iraqi Detainees, concluding "the WMD investigation has gone as far as feasible. ... there is no further purpose in holding many of these detainees".
* Residual Proliferation Risks: People, concluding "former WMD program participants are most likely to seek employment in the benign civil sector, either in Iraq or elsewhere ... However, because a single individual can advance certain WMD activities, it remains an important concern".
* Residual Pre-1991 CBW Stocks in Iraq, concluding "any remaining chemical munitions in Iraq do not pose a militarily significant threat ... ISG has not found evidence to indicate that Iraq did not destroy its BW weapons or bulk agents".
* Residual Proliferation Risk: Equipment and Materials, concluding "Iraq’s remaining chemical and biological physical infrastructure does not pose a proliferation concern".
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From USA Today article on Saddam reportedly warned US of terrorism:

Charles Duelfer, who led the official U.S. search for weapons of mass destruction after the first Gulf War, told ABC News the tapes show extensive deception but don't prove that weapons were still hidden in Iraq at the time of the U.S.-led war in 2003. "What they do is support the conclusion in the report which we made in the last couple of years, that the regime had the intention of building and rebuilding weapons of mass destruction, when circumstances permitted," he said.
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From a Paul Bremer speech:

I think the mystery is why the intelligence was not that good. Not just ours, but everybody’s. Charlie Duelfer, whoissued the final report on the search for weapons of mass destruction, made three points that were largely overlooked by the press. First that Saddam retained the strategic intention to reconstitute weapons of mass destruction. Secondly that Duelfer had found clear evidence that Saddam retained the program’s personnel and equipment quickly to resume those programs, including finding laboratories that were working on Ricin, which is one of the most deadly toxins, and efforts to aerosolize those. And thirdly, that Saddam’s intention was to reconstitute as soon as sanctions were lifted. But where the weapons went, we know he had them because he used them. Where they went, and what became of them, or perhaps more importantly why the intelligence communities of the world’s largest countries missed it, is something that historians are going to have to judge. I don’t have an independent view on it.

From the New York Sun (quoting a Fox News interview):

* “We found, you know, 10 or 12 sarin and mustard rounds.” The Web site of the Council on Foreign Relations says, “One hundred milligrams of sarin — about one drop — can kill the average person in a few minutes if he or she’s not given an antidote. Experts say sarin is more than 500 times as toxic as cyanide.”
* The New York Sun has reported on the 7-pound block of cyanide salt found in the Baghdad safehouse of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in January 2004.

Let's review some findings of David Kay

Dr. David A. Kay (born c. 1940) is an American scientist who is best known for heading the Iraq Survey Group and acting as a weapons inspector in Iraq after the 2003 Invasion of Iraq. David Kay received a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Texas at Austin, and also a Masters in International Affairs and Ph.D. from Columbia University.

After the 1991 Gulf War, Kay led teams of inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Iraq to search out and destroy banned chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. Following the U.S. invasion of Iraq, he returned to the country, working with the Central Intelligence Agency and U.S. military in 2003 and 2004 to determine if Saddam Hussein's regime had continued developing banned weapons.

We now know that Iraq had not installed any chemical or biological weapons inside any warheads, so they couldn’t be classified as “WMDs” that were ready to fire. But Bush was right in saying that Iraq was certainly a growing threat.

Here are some of the findings and statements of David Kay:

--Iraq was a stockpile of scientists and technology and actual equipment for producing WMD, while we're in a world where terrorists and others are seeking those weapons
--there clearly were terrorist groups passing through and operating in Iraq still seeking WMD capability
--Iraq well could have been that supplier if the war had not intervened
--Iraq was becoming the marketplace for selling the knowledge of how to make them, the knowledge of how to make small amounts, which is, after all, mostly what terrorists wants
--Iraq remained a very dangerous place in terms of WMD capabilities, even though we found no large stockpiles of weapons
--What we have found is a substantial body of evidence that reports that the Iraqis had an intention to continue weapons production at some point in the future
--we found undeclared activities in the chemical and biological and missile area that were never declared to the U.N. and not discovered during previous inspections
--we discovered that the Iraqis initiated work on new agents: Congo-Crimean hemorrhagic fever being one, brucellosis, another, that they had not done before and had not declared
--we found 97 vials of material that they hid from the inspectors to preserve a restart capability
--recent discussions with an Iraqi scientist who, in 1993, had hid in his own refrigerator reference strains for, active strains, that were still active when we found them -- Botulinum toxin, one of the most toxic elements known
--he was asked to hide others, including anthrax, but refused at the time
--we now have three cases in which scientists have come forward with equipment, technology, diagrams, documents and, in this case, actual weapons material, reference strains and Botulinum toxin, that they were told to hide and that the UN and Hans Blix didn't find. These could only be found after the war in which they had free access to investigate.
--there were other strains being searched for in Iraq for at least one more cache of weapons — of strains that David Kay says is certain to exist, although not found
--Iraq conducted new research on biological capable agents, such as Brucella, Congo Crimean Hemorrhagic Fever, and Naflotoxin (ph), as well as efforts to weaponize Ricin right up until the start of the war
--only time and a little growth media would have produced large amounts of Botulinum toxin
--in fact, it would have taken Iraq an estimated 3-6 months to restart mustard production, and a maximum estimate of two years to produce VX. This fact was again cited during Charles Duelfer’s report
--David Kay's team has identified 130 ammunition storage points of significant size, some larger than 50 square kilometers. These are sites that contain, the best estimate is, between 600,000 and 650,000 tons of arms. That's about one-third of the entire ammunitions stockpile of the much-larger U.S. military. This type of stuff was all supposed to have been declared to the UN. It wasn't.
--Iraq was seeking long range missiles that went well beyond the UN limitations.
--we now have evidence that he was seeking propellants for Scud missiles from N. Korea as late as 2002. Ironically, Iraq had declared that it got rid of all of its Scud missiles in the early 1990s.
--Saddam was ready to restart his nuclear program as soon as sanctions had eroded, which was coming very soon. This was one of the major facts that was later confirmed by Charles Duelfer.
--Documents and equipment, hidden in scientists' homes, that would have helped Iraq resume uranium enrichment by centrifuge and electromagnetic isotope separation.
--A prison laboratory complex that possibly was used to test biological weapons agents on humans. Kay said his investigations have shown that Iraqi officials working to prepare for U.N. inspections were ordered not to declare the facility to the U.N.
--there is absolutely no evidence of any political pressure to manipulate any intelligence or to influence how any inspection team was to perform
--the world is safer without Saddam in power
--Iraq was becoming more dangerous than we realized

David Kay understands the decision to go to war. "I think it's often easy to forget that in the case of Saddam, here's an individual who had invaded two neighboring countries, used chemical weapons against one of those, used them against his own neighbors, and who, by U.N. testimony, had cheated and lied for a decade," he said.

The decision to go to war was "absolutely prudent."

"All I can say is if you read the total body of intelligence in the last 12 to 15 years that flowed on Iraq," Kay said, "I quite frankly think it would be hard to come to a conclusion other than (that) Iraq was a gathering, serious threat to the world with regard to WMD."

"I will just say I'm convinced myself, if I had been there, presented (with) what I have seen as the record of the intelligence estimates, I probably would have come to - not probably - I would have come to the same conclusion that the political leaders did."

"I think at the end of the inspection process, we'll paint a picture of an Iraq that was far more dangerous than even we thought it was before the war. It was of a system collapsing. It was a country that had the capability in weapons-of-mass-destruction areas and in which terrorists, like ants to honey, were going after it."

"I think the world is far safer with the disappearance and the removal of Saddam Hussein," Kay told the Senate Armed Services Committee.