President Clinton has been asked by the Sinn Fein president, Mr Gerry Adams, for US support that there will be no rowing back on the Belfast Agreement and to ensure that all the equality measures for nationalists will be implemented.
Mr Adams also asked the President to take a "positive position" on eventual British disengagement from Northern Ireland. But he recognised that this would have to be done in a discreet way at first, Mr Adams said.
He is the first leader of the Northern Ireland political parties to meet President Clinton since the referendums approving the Belfast Agreement.
The President attended the meeting between his National Security Adviser, Mr Sandy Berger, and Mr Adams in the White House yesterday while the Sinn Fein leader was briefing US officials on the current situation.
Earlier at a press conference at the National Press Club, Mr Adams repeated that the definition of consent and self-determination in the agreement was flawed and not binding on Irish republicans.
This stance articulated by Mr Adams in a speech in New York last Wednesday has been criticised by the former Labour Party leader, Mr Dick Spring, and the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Mr Andrews, in the Dail on Thursday.
"Consent means what it says," Mr Andrews said.
Mr Adams said he had not heard this criticism. "What the document says is that consent is a two-way process, that it cannot be interpreted as a veto and that nationalist consent is required as well as unionist consent, and that is the originality of this definition."
Asked if the new Article 3 in the Constitution did not enshrine this definition of self-determination and was accepted by the 96 per cent of the voters in the Republic, Mr Adams said: "People did not vote for that. Nowhere in the agreement is that defined as a binding act of national self-determination."
Mr Adams said the preamble to the agreement said that self-determination must be exercised without "external impediment", and "while the British claim jurisdiction over our affairs, that clearly is a matter of external impediment".
Mr Adams rejected the charge that he could be accused of "nitpicking" the agreement by his rejection of its formulation of self-determination as meaning consent both North and South before there could be a united Ireland.
"I live in the North, and no one asked my consent to British rule or being discriminated against. No one ever asked my consent about being a displaced person.
"I support the right of the unionists to consent on the basis of a level playing field which also enshrines, as the agreement does, the need for nationalist consent. That removes the veto. I'm against it for anyone."