Powell, who has said he wants to avoid the political limelight during the campaign for the November 2 election, avoided directly criticism of Kerry, but made clear he did not agree with the candidate's assessment that Bush is alienating allies by pursuing a unilateral approach.

In comments here and in Atlanta, Georgia a day after Bush and Kerry butted heads on foreign policy in the first of three debates, Powell said the sole incorrect assertion in his February 5, 2003, presentation to the UN Security Council on Iraq's weapons was that Saddam still had stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction.

"The only thing where we got it wrong and where the presentation did not hold up was actual stockpiles," he told reporters at the Atlanta Press Club. "We have seen nothing to suggest that he had actual stockpiles."

"So that was not right, and as we have gone back and looked through the intelligence, there are indications that we had bad sourcing and we should have caught some of this bad sourcing," Powell said.

"For that, I am not only disappointed but I regret that that information was not correct."

In Thursday's debate, Kerry took aim at Bush's justification for going to war in Iraq, saying that Powell had been forced to apologise to world leaders for the inaccuracy of his UN presentation and that the president had erred by shifting resources from finding Osama bin Laden to ousting Saddam.

However, Powell, who has previously lamented the mistakes in his UN presentation, said that despite the problem, Bush had still been right to go to war.

"Those stockpiles would have reappeared since he was no longer under observation or control by the international community," he said later at the State Department after meeting with Belgian Foreign Minister Karel De Gucht.