Iranian media deride Obama's request for 'toy plane'

Iranian media have called Obama's request "shameless"  President Barack Obama acknowledged for the first time a US drone was in Iranian hands and said Washington wanted it back. "We've asked for it back - we'll see how the Iranians respond ," Obama said at a White House news briefing with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki.
Obama refused to elaborate on the remote-controlled spying aircraft's mission or why the stealth aircraft fitted with reconnaissance equipment failed to return to its base in neighbouring Afghanistan.
Iranian state news agency FARS decided not to mince words while reporting story, with a headline proclaiming "Obama Begs Iran to Give Him Back His Toy Plane" contnuing with "US President Obama is hoping that the Iranian government is in a Christmas mood because he has asked Tehran to send him his Christmas present back."
They also dubbed the US president's request as "shameless".
"We have asked for it back. We'll see how the Iranians respond," Obama said following a meeting at the White House with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.
Obama's comments were the first official confirmation that the United States had asked for the return of the RQ-70 drone that was downed by Iran over a week ago.
Iranian officials claim their forces captured the drone December 4 through a digital attack on its aviation technology, which they say caused it to land safely inside northern Iran.
US officials have attributed the drone's loss to a technical malfunction.
In the week since, Pentagon and State Department officials have repeatedly said they were unaware of any efforts by the American government to contact Iran to have the drone returned to the US.
"With respect to the drone inside of Iran, I'm not going to comment on intelligence matters that are classified," Obama said.
U.S. officials have said the bat-winged RQ-170 Sentinel aircraft was part of an intensified effort to monitor suspect nuclear sites in Iran, The New York Times reported.
Speaking later in the afternoon US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said she was doubtful the US would get its "equipment" back.
"Given Iran's behaviour to date, we do not expect them to comply," she said during a press conference with her British counterpart.
US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta called the return request "appropriate." But he acknowledged Iran was unlikely to send it back.
"I don't expect that will happen, but I think it's important to make that request," Panetta told reporters traveling with him aboard a US military aircraft.
Tehran last week lodged a formal complaint with the U.N. Security Council alleging the drone violation of Iranian airspace amounted to a US "invasion."
Panetta said he didn't know the condition of the drone and what Iran or other countries might be able to glean about its capabilities.
Panetta said: "It's a little difficult to know just frankly how much they are going to be able to get from having obtained those parts. I don't know the condition of those parts, I don't know exactly what state they're in, so it's a little difficult to tell what they are going to be able to derive from what they have been able to get."
A senior commander of Iran's Revolutionary Guard said on Sunday that Iran would not send the drone back.
"This is not only an intelligence victory for us, but a defeat for our enemies," the commander said.
President Obama did not say how US officials asked Iran to return the drone, since there are no diplomatic relations between the two countries.
The request was most likely made through the Swiss ambassador in Tehran, who represents US interests there in the absence of a US embassy.
A leading parliamentary official told Iranian state television Iranian military experts recovered valuable data from the drone and were discovering its technological principles through reverse-engineering.
Parviz Sarvari, head of the Iranian Parliament's national security and foreign policy committee, told the state-run Al-Alam satellite news channel the experts were "in the final steps of breaking into the aircraft's secret code."
"The findings will be used to support our accusations against the United States," Sarvari said. And the extracted information will be used to sue Washington over the incursion, he said.
He added, "Iranian engineers will soon build an aircraft superior to the American [drone] using reverse-engineering."
The RQ-170 Sentinel, nicknamed "The Beast of Kandahar," is an unmanned aerial vehicle developed by Lockheed Martin Corp. and operated by the US Air Force for the CIA.
The bat-wing aircraft with radar-evading technology is capable of lingering for hours at 50,000 feet and monitoring developments on the ground.
Officials say the drone was flying a mission for the CIA over Iran at the time that it was downed by an Iranian cyber attack.
Publicly, US officials have remained tight-lipped about the drone's mission and have not strayed beyond a vague statement issued by coalition military forces in Afghanistan shortly after Iranian state-run media showed the US drone.
Iran announced last Sunday that its defence forces had downed the aircraft through a sophisticated cyber attack.
The drone is the first such loss by the US. US officials have described the loss of the aircraft in Iran as a setback and a fatal blow to the stealth drone program.
The US media revealed on Thursday that Pentagon and the CIA considered several options on how to retrieve or destroy the drone, including sending a cross-border commando raid and delivering an air strike to destroy it.
However all were deemed too risky, since Tehran would consider such an operation an act of war, should it be discovered.
"No one warmed up to the option of recovering it or destroying it because of the potential it could become a larger incident," an unnamed official told the Washington Post on Thursday.
The existence of the aircraft has been known since 2009, when a model was photographed at the main US airfield in Kandahar, Afghanistan.
The unmanned surveillance plane was a stealth aircraft being used for secret missions by the CIA, US officials admitted earlier this week.
The aircraft is among the highly sensitive surveillance platform in the CIA's fleet that was shaped and designed to evade enemy defenses.
Current and former Washington defence officials said even the US military cannot use such a highly sophisticated stealth aircraft as the country is in relatively short supply and is only flown by the CIA.
The Iranian state broadcaster Thursday evening released the first images of the highly advanced US stealth spy drone.
Commander of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) Aerospace Forces Brigadier General Amir Ali Hajizadeh appeared on Iranian TV last night to explain how Iranian forces downed the United States' highly advanced radar-evading spy drone last week.
Among the United States' main concerns is that Iran could use an intact aircraft to examine the vulnerabilities in stealth technology and take countermeasures with its air defence systems. Another is that China or other US adversaries could help Iran extract data from the drone that would reveal its flight history, surveillance targets and other capabilities.
The drone was reportedly programmed to destroy such data in the event of a malfunction, but Iranian officials have claimed failed to do so.