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"Charles S. Faddis is a retired CIA operations officer and the former head of the CIA's unit focused on fighting terrorism involving weapons of mass destruction. The author of "Willful Neglect: The Dangerous Illusion of Homeland Security," Faddis is also president of Orion Strategic Services, a Maryland-based security firm that does consulting work for the Department of Defense and counter-terrorist training for private firms. "

"Making dire predictions about Iran's nuclear programs has been a parlor game since the mid-1980s. Jane's Defence Weekly, a well-respected military-related publication, in 1984 estimated that the Islamic Republic was two years from making an atomic bomb. By 1992, the CIA was predicting an Iranian nuclear weapon by the end of the decade. In 1995, Israel agreed. The breathless warnings have almost never stopped. Today, Iran's potential to soon join the nuclear club is informed by the latest US estimate that Iran may be one year away from having enough enriched uranium for a weapon, though actually making one - if Iran wanted to - is still years off. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is set to attend the Non-Proliferation Treaty conference next week in New York with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who has called for stricter sanctions. "

Parliament has strongly criticised the government for ordering documents destroyed in a case of Swiss engineers suspected of involvement in a nuclear smuggling ring. A control committee said that the reasons the government gave for doing so were not convincing and that briefings given to members of parliament were not sufficient. Destroying the documents had also compromised an investigation. Claude Janiak, head of the delegation, said on Thursday that the government was wrong to do so but it had acted under pressure. He did not elaborate.

"The story of Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson sounds like a film, and now it is Cannes, from what I have seen from afar, has always seemed like the epicentre of surreality. Up close it is, if anything, even more surreal. We arrived on Sunday in a charming seaside town thronged with sightseers, journalists, aspiring actresses scarcely out of their teens, and white guys in linen blazers with tans and mobile phones. But daily this small, easygoing place is transformed, as the pressure of tens of thousands of people buying, selling, watching and writing about fantasy - with some documentary thrown in - grows. Every day the crowds grow thicker, the energy level higher and the fashion sense on the Croisette, the elegant sweep of palm-fringed pedestrian walkway by the sea, more extreme and startling. "