David Kay's successor is reporting in, and his initial conclusions are what many of us expected:

The new chief weapons inspector in Iraq told Congress on Tuesday that a lack of cooperation from ousted Iraqi officials was thwarting American efforts to untangle the many remaining mysteries surrounding Iraq's suspected illicit weapons program.

In the public version of testimony delivered behind closed doors to two Senate committees on Tuesday, the inspector, Charles A. Duelfer, acknowledged that American inspectors had still not found any evidence of an illicit arsenal. But he seemed less inclined than his predecessor, David Kay, to close the door on the possibility that such weapons might yet be found, saying that inspectors were continuing to pursue leads — "some quite intriguing and credible" — about concealed caches.

...Mr. Duelfer, who took charge of the search in January, said at a news conference on Capitol Hill that the picture of Iraq's suspicious activities "is much more complicated than I anticipated going in."

..."The people we need to speak to have spent their entire professional lives being trained not to speak" about illicit weapons, Mr. Duelfer said in a public version of his testimony.

That last sentence echoes a remark Fred Barnes makes in the article to which I linked yesterday:

Bremer, the Coalition Provisional Authority administrator and America's chief asset here, says Saddam's oppression was worse than the Communists' in Eastern Europe and Russia. At least there was a period of transition in the Communist countries when the terror was lifted and the rules liberalized. Iraq went from a totalitarian tyranny to an open society in a single day. That's bound to be traumatic.

And the stuff of reflexive denial and obfuscation. Never underestimate the lingering effects of emotional scars. I once read a shorthand FBI profile of the repugnant murderer James Earl Ray who, abused in childhood, had "difficulty looking anyone square in the eye; flinched when lying, as if expecting a clout."

We'll likely see more from Duelfer in coming weeks and months. For now, it looks as though David Kay's assertion that the increasing diffusion of power in Ba'athist Iraq's research sector was correct; and that, as I've said all along, the lack of WMD discoveries does nothing to disprove the volume of evidence against Saddam Hussein. And all this is beyond the fact that, weapons or not, Hussein was a danger to the world and an impedement to success in the war on terror. Read the report yourself: small uncertainties notwithstanding, the burden of proof is still on Iraq.