Iran has admitted to the United Nations that it imported uranium 12 years ago, and didn’t report it.

TEHRAN, Iran - Iran admitted Sunday it failed to inform U.N. authorities that it imported a small quantity of uranium 12 years ago but said that failure did not violate the international Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

Gholamreza Aghazadeh, Iran’s nuclear energy chief, also urged the International Atomic Energy Agency to widely publish the report it released to member nations last week on Iran’s nuclear program.

The Bush administration accuses Iran of wanting to build a nuclear bomb and wants the U.N. agency to declare Iran in breach of the treaty. Iran says its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes.

Aghazadeh said the IAEA report did not back up U.S. claims that Iran was violating international atomic protocols.

“There is no mention of the word ‘violation,’” he told state-run television. “The report only mentions ‘failure,’ which is still a legal debate between us. And these are normal differences.”

Asked whether Iran is planning to build nuclear weapons, Aghazadeh replied, “That depends on what the meaning of the word is … is.”

As Iran ducks and dodges and denies that they have any intention to get nukes, please recall that back in the old days, when they considered the United States a paper tiger who would let them do anything without repercussions, they were very forthright about their plans:

Rafsanjani said that Muslims must surround colonialism and force them [the colonialists] to see whether Israel is beneficial to them or not. If one day, he said, the world of Islam comes to possess the weapons currently in Israel’s possession [meaning nuclear weapons] - on that day this method of global arrogance would come to a dead end. This, he said, is because the use of a nuclear bomb in Israel will leave nothing on the ground, whereas it will only damage the world of Islam.

Also remember that the highest ranking Islamic cleric in Egypt and one of the most prominent Muslims in the world has said Muslims have a duty to acquire nuclear weapons:

Sheikh of Al-Azhar, Dr. Tantawi called upon the Arabs and the Muslims “to acquire nuclear weapons as an answer to the Israeli threat and [to possess] nuclear readiness in order to counter the Israeli intransigence which rejects the signing of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.”

Tantawi continued, “The instruction that our master Khalifa [Caliph] Abu Bakr [the first successor to the Prophet] to Khaled Ibn Al-Waleed [one of the first Muslim commanders] when he called upon him to fight the enemy was: ‘if they fight you with a sword fight them with a sword; if they fight you with a spear fight them with a spear.’ If Abu Bakr had lived today he would have said, ‘if they fight you with an atomic bomb you must fight them with an atomic bomb.’”