Iran leader:Obama made big mistake

TEHRAN - Iran's president said yesterday that U.S. President Barack Obama made a big mistake when he accused the country of having hidden a newly revealed nuclear site. Iran reported the facility to the United Nations even earlier than required, he said.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's comments came hours before the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohammed ElBaradei, arrived in Iran to arrange an inspection of the uranium enrichment facility near the holy city of Qom. Iran agreed to allow UN inspectors into the facility at a landmark meeting with six world powers near Geneva on Thursday. It put nuclear talks back on track and included Iran's highest-level bilateral contact with the United States in three decades.

But the new site has raised concerns for the United States and many of its allies who suspect Iran of using its nuclear program to develop weapons capability - an allegation rejected by Tehran. ElBaradei recently said Tehran was on the wrong side of the law over its new plant because the country should have revealed its plans as soon as it decided to build the facility - a position backed by the United States.

Iranian officials disagree, saying that under IAEA safeguard rules, a member nation is required to inform the agency about the existence of a nuclear facility six months before introducing nuclear material into the machines. Iran says the new facility won't be operational for 18 months, and so it has not violated any IAEA requirements.

Ahmadinejad said Iran voluntarily revealed the facility to the IAEA in a letter September 21, four days before Obama and the leaders of France and Britain denounced Tehran and said it hid the nuclear site from the world for years.

Obama made a big and historic mistake, Iranian state TV quoted Ahmadinejad as saying during a speech yesterday. Later it became clear that (his) information was wrong and that we had no secrecy.

The IAEA has said that Iran is obliged under the Additional Protocol to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to notify the organization when it begins to design a new nuclear facility. Iran says it voluntarily implemented the Additional Protocol for two and a half years as a confidence-building gesture, but its parliament passed legislation in 2007 forcing the government to end such cooperation after the country was referred to the Security Council for sanctions over its refusal to suspend uranium enrichment.

The IAEA has countered by saying that a government cannot unilaterally abandon such an agreement.

Suspicion that Iran's newly revealed nuclear site was meant for military purposes was heightened by its location at least partly inside a mountain and next to a military base. Iran has said it built the facility in such a way only to ensure continuity of its nuclear activities in case of an attack.

Some are allowing themselves to threaten our legal facilities with military attack, and so we are going to come up with security measures for our nuclear facilities, Iran's senior nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili, said Friday. One of them is that we need to have a facility for uranium enrichment with a higher level of security, and that's why we decided to establish the new facility that is under construction.

ElBaradei arrived in Iran yesterday to meet with Iranian officials, state radio reported.

An IAEA spokesman said that in addition to the new nuclear facility, ElBaradei will also discuss a plan to allow Russia to take some of Iran's enriched uranium and enrich it to higher levels to fuel a research reactor in Tehran.

Western officials said Iran agreed to the plan at Thursday's meeting, a potentially significant move that would show greater flexibility by both sides.