Arms hunter Charles Duelfer’s report, in concluding Iraq might have resumed weapons-building “after sanctions were removed,” left out the crucial fact that the U.N. Security Council had planned controls over Baghdad for years to come, U.N. officials say.

The council, led by the United States, had decreed that inspections and disarmament of Iraq were to be followed by tough, open-ended monitoring.

“It’s been a little disturbing,” said Demetrius Perricos, chief U.N. weapons inspector. “All the arguments say that when sanctions ended, Saddam Hussein would have had a free hand. By the council’s own resolutions that wasn’t so.”

In his Oct. 6 report, CIA adviser Duelfer discredited President Bush’s stated rationale for invading Iraq, saying his Iraq Survey Group found no weapons of mass destruction there. But he suggested Iraq might still have posed a threat.

Saddam “wanted to re-create Iraq’s WMD capability — which was essentially destroyed in 1991 — after sanctions were removed,” the report said, though it added that no such formal plan was uncovered.

This Duelfer finding became a new focus for the Bush administration. Vice President Dick Cheney told one audience on Oct. 7, “As soon as the sanctions were lifted, (Saddam) had every intention of going back” to building weapons.

An academic expert on the Iraq inspections regime was among those disputing this, noting that lifting the U.N. embargo would not have opened that door.

“This is not the case under Resolution 687 and later ones,” said Yale University’s James S. Sutterlin.

Years of Security Council resolutions preceding the 2003 U.S.-British invasion mandated that U.N. arms monitors would remain in Iraq once Baghdad’s WMD programs were shut down — as Duelfer acknowledged they were in the 1990s. With unusual powers and the best technology, the monitors in this second stage would “prevent Iraq from developing new capabilities,” said a blueprint for the Ongoing Monitoring and Verification program.

Resolutions also stipulated that U.N. trade sanctions would not be lifted until the ongoing monitoring program was in place — and lifted then only for civilian goods.

The Security Council, where Washington has a veto, would decide how long to keep monitoring in place. Perricos said it was expected to last years.

“You couldn’t have disarmament and stop monitoring afterward,” he said.

In 19 pages of “Key Findings,” however, while raising the prospect of future threats, the Duelfer report ignores this plan to prevent them.

The CIA and Duelfer had no comment this week when asked why the role of the ongoing monitoring program went unacknowledged.

In 2002, the Bush administration had demanded and voted for renewed U.N. inspections in Iraq. Then, in the lead-up to war, it publicly questioned their effectiveness, even as U.N. experts were conducting 700 inspections and finding no WMD.