Baghdad, Iraq ? A senior Iraqi official said Monday there was no need for U.N. weapons inspectors to return to Baghdad and branded as a “lie” allegations that Saddam Hussein still had weapons of mass destruction.

In response to the comments by the Iraqi information minister, the U.S. State Department said Baghdad was refusing to give a straight answer on resuming inspections after nearly four years.

“They refuse to face up to their obligations and obfuscate and look for ways to move the goal posts when it’s a simple situation,” spokesman Philip Reeker said.

“The issue is not inspections but verified disarmament,” he said. “Iraq needs to disarm.”

Iraq’s information minister, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, said President Bush was lying about the country’s alleged weapons programs to drum up support for his Iraq policy, which calls for Saddam’s ouster as a threat to the Mideast.

Bush “knows that he is standing in quicksand when it comes to his baseless talk on Iraq,” al-Sahhaf told the Arabic satellite television Al-Jazeera.

Al-Sahhaf also said Iraqi opposition leaders who met with key American officials in Washington last week were “bats … and a bad American product.” He called American courting of the opposition figures “a stupid game that reflects their (U.S.) bankruptcy.”

Al-Sahhaf said the U.N. work concerning alleged Iraqi weapons programs was completed. “They claim something remains. This talk can be responded to and disproved,” al-Sahhaf said in the interview conducted in Iraq and monitored in Cairo.

“This is a lie. This is an American stance,” he said of Washington’s insistence Iraq still possesses or seeks to build chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.

“Inspections have finished in Iraq,” he declared.

A report by the U.N. inspection agency issued in January 1999 a month after inspectors were withdrawn mentioned priority issues that Iraq had not satisfactorily resolved. Those included its development of VX, a deadly chemical weapons nerve agent; its missile production capabilities; and many remaining question marks about its biological weapons program.

Despite intense discussions within the Bush administration about preparation for a possible invasion of Iraq, the president said Saturday that he had no “imminent war plan” but that Saddam remains “an enemy until proven otherwise.”