WASHINGTON (AP) — FBI Director Louis Freeh acknowledged the documents foul-up in the Oklahoma City bombing case had caused enormous problems, "which we regret." He suggested Tuesday that the FBI had done the right thing by admitting the mistake.

Freeh, who is retiring at the end of the month, two years short of his 10-year term, touched on the Oklahoma City case in a speech to members of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

The bureau's belated disclosure of over 4,000 documents in the bombing case led Attorney General John Ashcroft to postpone the scheduled May 16 execution of convicted bomber Timothy McVeigh to June 11.

The bombing papers have now been turned over to McVeigh's defense team, and he is seeking a stay of execution.

Freeh said that during his tenure he stepped up ethics training for young FBI agents so they would learn "that doing the right thing may be something that causes embarrassment, it may be something that causes institutional problems, but something which at the end of the day they have to do because it's the right thing to do."

"And if it results in problems ... we've recently been through that experience," Freeh said, citing the initial failure to hand over some documents in the Oklahoma City bombing case. That failure, he said, caused "enormous concerns and problems, which we regret."

"But you know that's what we've been preaching to these young men and women," said Freeh. "Their job at the end of the day is not to gauge whether their actions are going to cause embarrassment or not."

The Simon Wiesenthal Center, an international Jewish human rights and Holocaust remembrance group, presented Freeh its national leadership award.