Former Iranian president Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani announced on Tuesday that Iran had successfully enriched uranium at a heavily-fortified buried facility in Natanz, southwest of Tehran, raising the specter that the U.S. and its allies would take pre-emptive military action against Iran.

Long considered a “moderate” by many in the West, Rafsanjani has been a key figure in Iran’s secret nuclear weapons program since 1985, when he sponsored a series of conferences to entice exiled nuclear scientists to return to Iran.

By announcing the success of Iran’s uranium enrichment program, Rafsanjani upstaged the current president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who made a similar announcement on Wednesday in the northeastern city of Mashad, bordering Afghanistan.

Rafsanjani beat Ahmadinejad to the punch by almost twenty-four hours in an interview with the Kuwait News Agency. The two men have been archrivals since Ahmadinejad bested Rafsanjani in a stage-managed election last June.

If nothing else, Rafsanjani’s involvement should remind us in the West that for all the factional fighting in Tehran, this regime stands united in its determination to development nuclear weapons and is willing to pay a high cost to achieve nuclear capability...

In Vienna, IAEA officials have been telling reporters that they don’t have much hope that ElBaradei will succeed in Tehran. One of their latest discoveries of Iran’s perfidy came when an IAEA team traveled to Pakistan recently, where they debriefed black market nuclear impresario, Dr. A.Q. Khan.

Dr. Khan reportedly provided the United Nations gumshoes new information about the equipment and blueprints he sold the Iranians starting in the late 1980s that directly contradicted Iran’s declarations to the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Dr. Khan’s information convinced the IAEA analysts that Iran has been operating a clandestine uranium enrichment plant, possibly for many years, and that Iran has been lying all along. Shocking!