Iran Fires Missile Tests After Secret Nuclear Facility Disclosed

WASHINGTON, Sept. 27, 2009— -- Iran put on a show of force today, essentially thumbing its nose at the world by test-firing a series of missiles, two days after the White House embarassed Tehran by revealing the location of a supposedly secret nuclear site.

Iran began its tests of short- and long-range missiles today amid shouts of "Allahu Akbar," or "God is great" in Arabic.

After the tests, the head of Iran's Revolutionary Guard Air Force said they were a success, and the country was ready to fight off attacks from any country.

"We are going to respond to any military action in a crushing manner and it doesn't make any difference which country or regime has launched the aggression," state media quoted Gen. Hossein Salami as saying.

The latest provocation from the Iranian regime comes after President Obama revealed to rest of the world last week that Iran was building a secret underground nuclear facility in the mountains near the city of Qom.

"The Islamic Republic of Iran has been building a covert uranium enrichment facility near Qom for several years," Obama said Friday, when addressing world leaders at the G-20 summit in Pittsburgh, after U.S. officials learned that Iran had disclosed the facility's existence to the International Atomic Energy Association of the facility just last week.

U.S. officials say they have known about the secret facility for a while.

"We have been following this for several years in cooperation with some of our international partners, watching and assessing what the Iranians were doing. And then when this became known, actually through the Iranians beginning to provide some information about it, we disclosed the fact and gave the information we had to the International Atomic Energy Agency," Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on CBS's "Face the Nation."

She said that if Iran really intended the facility to be used for peaceful purposes, not weapons production, it would have been disclosed earlier.

"So I guess one has to ask, if it's for a peaceful purposes, why was it not public? Why was the fact of it not generally known instead of through our working with partners to discover it?" Clinton said.