Iraq: The US Defence Secretary, Mr Donald Rumsfeld, yesterday dismissed a report that the United States was planning to keep four military bases in Iraq after US occupying troops withdrew, writes Conor O'Clery North America Editor New York
The story, which quoted senior Bush administration sources, was "enormously unhelpful" he said, and there had been "zero discussion" among senior Bush officials about keeping US bases there.
However, at a Pentagon briefing yesterday Mr Rumsfeld did say that the US was re-evaluating its "military footprint" in the area, and that this would be a subject of discussion with countries in the region that "will take place over an orderly period of time".
The sources of the story, which made the lead in Sunday's New York Times and was reported worldwide, were "at the very bottom in terms of relialibility, credibility, judgment, knowledge," said Mr Rumsfeld in some agitation.
"The impression that's left around the world is that we plan to occupy the country, we plan to use their bases over over a long period of time, and it's flat false," he said.
Mr Rumsfeld also hinted heavily that the idea of an Islamic republic in Iraq similar to Iran as advocated by Shia demonstrators in Baghdad was not acceptable to the US.
The principles for a future Iraq enunciated by President George Bush included a country that was "organised and arranged in a way that the people in the country, the various ethnic and religious groups, are able to have a voice in their government in some form.
"We hope for a system that will be democratic and have free speech, free press and freedom of religion," he said.
What was going on in Iran today he would not characterise as a democratic system, he added, and "I don't think I would say that it fits the principles I have indicated."
There were, he said, "a lot of people in Iran who would feel that that small group of clerics who determine what takes place in that country is not their idea of how they would want to run their lives."
Mr Rumsfeld said the US now had inspection teams inside Iraq searching for evidence of weapons of mass destruction.
However, he declined to confirm a story, which also appeared in the New York Times, saying that a US team had been told that Iraqis had destroyed and buried chemical weapons and biological warfare equipment only days before war broke out on March 20th.
The report said the information had been relayed by an Iraqi scientist claiming to have worked in Saddam Hussein's chemical weapons programme.
The scientist reportedly said Iraq had secretly sent stockpiles of deadly agents and weapons technology to Syria in the mid-1990s.
At the same briefing the Chief of the General Staff, Gen Richard Myers, insisted that cluster bombs were "absolutely" less dangerous to civilians than land mines.
He was responding to questions about the use of these bombs by the US in residential areas, a military practice criticised by human rights groups.
Despite widespread media reports of injuries to Iraqi civilians caused by cluster bombs, he said, he had not heard of such injuries but promised to look into them.
Regarding a report of a cluster bomb being handed to four marines which went off, injuring the marines, he said it was an improvised device designed to harm the soldiers.
Another marine had been injured in a firefight with unknown assailants at an airport in Mosul, he said.