From Christopher Hitchens's broadside against the oxymoronic U.S. "intelligence community":
It is completely false for anybody to claim, on the basis of this admitted 'estimate,' that Iran has ceased to be a candidate member of the fatuously named nuclear 'club.' It has the desire to acquire the weaponry, it retains the means to do so, and it has been caught lying and cheating about the process. If it suspended some overtly military elements of the project out of a justifiable apprehension in 2003, it has energetically persisted in the implicit aspects - most notably the installation of gas centrifuges at the plant in Natanz and the building of a heavy water reactor at Arak. All that the estimate has done is to define weaponry down and to suggest a distinction without much difference between a 'civilian' and a 'military' dimension of the same program. The acquisition of enriched uranium and of plutonium, for any purpose, is identical with the acquisition of a thermonuclear weapons capacity. Iran continues to strive to produce both, neither of which, as it happens, are required for its ostensible civilian energy needs.
Read the whole thing.