The Sinn Fein leader spoke of some recent actions by the Army and RUC during the White House meeting.

He said: "I don't want to see British soldiers living up my streets. I don't want to see the RUC leaning on young people. I don't want to see our landscape in any way broken up by this huge military structure."

Earlier in the day, Adams said British soldiers fired one shot in south Armagh and were making raids in Belfast. British forces had besieged one house for three hours and abused a Sinn Fein councilor, Gerard Brophy, when he went to investigate.

Making his first visit to the United States since the Good Friday Agreement was signed, Mr Adams held talks at the White House with National Security Adviser Sandy Berger during which he also met Mr Clinton.

'Dead-end issue'

Mr Adams said earlier that the focus on disarming paramilitary groups could wreck the Good Friday Agreement and that he was worried about attempts to exclude his party from executive positions after elections to the Northern Ireland Assembly in June.

He said disarming the IRA and the paramilitary Unionist groups was a "dead-end issue" which opponents of the agreement could use to obstruct it.

"There is an attempt now to claw back, to present this as a precondition, as an obstacle, to prevent, if we get a mandate, our party from taking up positions on the executive. That cannot be allowed," he said.

"One of the purposes of the visit here is to warn people of how this obstructed and collapsed the peace process before.

'We always have to be vigilant'

Mr Adams said he thought political leaders in Ireland, Britain and the United States had the right priorities but if they lost interest in Northern Ireland the peace process could stall.

"We always have to be vigilant about all the difficulties, about those who don't want change, those who would prefer the old agenda," he said.

"The danger is if they (the leading politicians) don't focus, if they go to deal with some other issue then the bureaucrats who have run the place, the system, take over and take all back the gains that have been made."