Ahmadinejad joins Q&A session

New York: Iran's hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad broke away from events at the UN General Assembly to hold an informal question-and-answer session with high-powered members of America's most prestigious foreign policy think tank, despite objections from some Jewish groups and the Bush administration.

The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) said afterwards that Ahmadinejad had engaged in a "protracted punch and counter-punch" with 19 members for about 90 minutes in the conference room of a New York City hotel late on Wednesday.

But it said the controversial Iranian leader had offered no new policies or opinions other than those he has aired widely on issues raging from his country's disputed nuclear programme to the Holocaust.

"I'm not sure we learned anything new," CFR president Richard Haass said in a statement after the meeting. But Haass added that the Iranian leader may have learned about American attitudes from those who he sparred with, some of them Jewish panellists who had visited former concentration camps in Poland.

Ahmadinejad has engaged in a media blitz during his trip to New York to attend the General Assembly, giving interviews to Time magazine and CNN, among others.

The New York Times, which had a reporter who is a CFR member at the private meeting, said Ahmadinejad spoke "with a tone that oozed polite hostility." He entered with "a jaunty smile, a wave and an air of supreme confidence" and ended the evening by asking Council members "whether they were simply shills for the Bush administration," the newspaper reported. It said there were no introductory handshakes before the talk began.

The newspaper also reported that the group's invitation to Ahmadinejad to talk had stirred objections from Bush administration figures and prominent Jewish leaders.

Ahmadinejad has frequently called the Holocaust a "myth" and has demanded more research to determine whether six million Jews really perished.

CFR chairman Peter G. Peterson told him on Wednesday that the majority of Americans, Jews and non-Jews alike, were "horrified" by his assertions.

Ahmadinejad replied that he doubted that was the case for all Americans, a CFR statement said.