Iran: "Too Late" To Stop Nuke Program

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Tuesday that it was "too late" to stop Iran's nuclear program and warned the U.S. and its allies not to push for new U.N. sanctions, comparing his country to a lion sitting quietly in a corner.

"We advise them not to play with the lion's tail," Ahmadinejad said, drawing applause from a room of reporters, Iranian officials and foreign dignitaries at a Tehran news conference.

Asked about Ahmadinejad's comment that it was too late to halt Iran's nuclear push, U.S. State Department Spokesman Sean McCormack said: "It isn't."

"He could make the decision today to take up the reasonable offer to negotiate with the rest of the world so that Iran can make peaceful nuclear energy and not have a cloud hanging over the country," McCormack said. "The international system is not going to be intimidated by these kinds of threats and this bluff and bluster by the Iranian government."

But shortly after Ahmadinejad's press conference, Iran issued its harshest refutation yet of American demands to release dual citizens held in Iran on espionage charges.

Iran's foreign ministry said American abuses — from prisoner mistreatment at Guantanamo to a UCLA police officer's shocking an
Iranian-American student with a Taser — showed Washington had no
right to criticize Iran's human rights record.

"Instead of offering inefficient suggestions, America should assess its own tactics - secret prisons, mistreatment and even inhuman treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib," Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini said in a statement released by his office.

Iran has detained Haleh Esfandiari, director of the Middle East Program at the Washington-based Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars; Kian Tajbakhsh with George Soros' Open Society Institute; journalist Parnaz Azima from the U.S.-funded Radio Farda; and Ali Shakeri, a peace activist and founding board member at the University of California, Irvine, Center for Citizen Peace building.

The Iranian statement referred to three Iranian-Americans charged with espionage and endangering national security, without providing names.

Despite pressure, Iran has only become stronger, Ahmadinejad said at the news conference.

The Iranian president also appeared to dismiss ambitions of using the controversial nuclear program for weapons making.

"What is atomic bomb good for? Thoughts can't be changed by nuclear bomb. Today is the day of thought and logic," he said.

Washington and some of its allies fear Iran is trying to develop atomic weapons in violation of its commitments under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Iran denies the accusations and says the treaty gives it the right to pursue uranium enrichment for peaceful purposes.

Ahmadinejad has repeatedly called for direct negotiations with Washington in the nuclear standoff, an offer President Bush's administration refuses to accept until Tehran verifiably halts all enrichment activities.

CBS News foreign affairs analyst Pamela Falk says "Iranian officials have ratcheted up the pressure for negotiations with more direct threats - while their technology advances."

The U.N. Security Council first imposed sanctions on Iran in December and modestly increased them in March over Iran's refusal to suspend enrichment. The council is now preparing to debate on a third round of punitive measures.

An IAEA report in May provided the potential trigger for another round of sanctions by saying Tehran continued to defy the Security Council ban on enrichment and instead was expanding its activities.

But, Falk says, "with contentious issues creating a rift in the U.S. - Russia relationship, the Bush administration is now going to have to deal with Moscow's problem with missile defense systems before there is likely to be consensus at the U.N. on Iran."