Sellafield nuclear power plant safety fears as ‘potentially deadly nitrogen gas leaks’
One incident involved an ‘elevated level’ of nitrogen gas,
which can cause asphyxiation, at the plant’s Magnox facility. The incident
was played down, the source claimed.
Safety at the UK’s biggest nuclear
site is under threat due to a culture of secrecy and ‘cover ups’, a whistle
blower told the Mirror. The source described a potentially deadly incident
in which nitrogen gas, which can cause asphyxiation, leaked at the
Sellafield Magnox storage facility. The incident was covered up, the source
claimed, adding that staff are afraid to raise safety issues because they
fear they will be “targeted”.
The leak was at the Magnox Swarf Storage
Silo – the most hazardous building within Sellafield in Cumbria – where
waste products from used nuclear fuel rods are stored. The source said the
leak in May 2023 was raised as an incident report and “was of a level
that needed to be escalated”. But it was not escalated, according to the
whistleblower, who added that “no lessons were learned”. They said:
“There is no confidence or trust in the senior management now. We are
dealing with nuclear waste and people are afraid to speak up.
The problem is that people are being victimised if they report safety issues. “Or
they are escalated to managers who then try to cover them up or sweep them
under the carpet. And that is a really dangerous culture in a place like
Sellafield.”
Mirror 5th July 2025,
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/sellafield-nuclear-power-plant-safety-35504096
U.S. sanctions U.N. expert critical of Israel’s war in Gaza
Francesca Albanese has called for an arms embargo on Israel and accused the U.S. ally of waging a “genocidal campaign” in Gaza.
The United States said on Wednesday it was imposing sanctions on Francesca Albanese, the United Nations’ special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, who has been very critical of U.S. ally Israel’s war in Gaza.
“Today I am imposing sanctions on UN Human Rights Council Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese for her illegitimate and shameful efforts to prompt (International Criminal Court) action against U.S. and Israeli officials, companies, and executives,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a statement.
In a post on X late on Wednesday, Albanese wrote that she stood “firmly and convincingly on the side of justice, as I have always done,” without directly mentioning the U.S. sanctions. In a text message to Al Jazeera, she was quoted as dismissing the U.S. move as “mafia style intimidation techniques.”
Albanese, an Italian lawyer and academic, has called on states at the U.N. Human Rights Council to impose an arms embargo and cut off trade and financial ties with Israel while accusing the U.S. ally of waging a “genocidal campaign” in Gaza.
Israel has faced accusations of genocide at the International Court of Justice and of war crimes at the ICC over its devastating military assault on Gaza. Israel denies the accusations and says its campaign amounts to self-defense after a deadly October 2023 Hamas attack.
In a report published earlier this month, Albanese accused over 60 companies, including major arms manufacturers and technology firms, of involvement in supporting Israeli settlements and military actions in Gaza. The report called on companies to cease dealings with Israel and for legal accountability for executives implicated in alleged violations of international law.
Albanese is one of dozens of independent human rights experts mandated by the United Nations to report on specific themes and crises. The views expressed by special rapporteurs do not reflect those of the global body as a whole.
Rights experts slammed the U.S. sanctions against Albanese. Dylan Williams, vice president for government affairs at the Center for International Policy think tank, labeled them as “rogue state behavior” while Amnesty International said special rapporteurs must be supported and not sanctioned.
“Governments around the world and all actors who believe in the rule-based order and international law must do everything in their power to mitigate and block the effect of the sanctions against Francesca Albanese and more generally to protect the work and independence of Special Rapporteurs,” Amnesty International’s Secretary General Agnes Callamard, a former UN special rapporteur, said.
Since returning to office in January, President Donald Trump has stopped U.S. engagement with the U.N. Human Rights Council, extended a halt to funding for the Palestinian relief agency UNRWA and ordered a review of the U.N. cultural agency UNESCO.
He has also announced U.S. plans to quit the Paris climate deal and the World Health Organization.
His administration imposed sanctions on four judges at the ICC in June in retaliation over the war tribunal’s issuance of an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a past decision to open a case into alleged war crimes by U.S. troops in Afghanistan.
Palantir’s Shadow War On Iran
July 2, 2025, Kit Klarenberg, https://www.kitklarenberg.com/p/palantirs-shadow-war-on-iran
As the dust settles on the “12 Day War”, it is ever-clearer that the conflict was a crushing defeat for Israel and the US. In retrospect, the Zionist entity’s sole success was a wave of assassinations in the conflict’s first hours. A fawning June 19th Financial Times report hinted cutting-edge technology drawing together diverse data and intelligence sources was responsible. This raises the obvious question of whether Tel Aviv was assisted in its murderous spree by notorious private spying giant Palantir.
An avowedly pro-Israel tech giant founded by Donald Trump confidante and ardent Zionist Peter Thiel, which reportedly provides artificial intelligence tech supporting Tel Aviv’s genocide in Gaza, Palantir’s tendrils extend typically unseen into almost every conceivable sphere of public and private life across the West. Moreover, the firm – launched with seed funding from CIA venture capital wing In-Q-Tel – has long-played a pivotal but barely acknowledged role in the International Atomic Energy Agency’s monitoring of Tehran’s nuclear research.
The interpretation Palantir was one way or another involved in Israel’s illegal “preemptive” war of aggression against Tehran is amply reinforced by the release of sensitive Israeli documents by Iran’s intelligence ministry. These files indicate the IAEA previously provided Israeli intelligence with the names of several Iranian nuclear scientists, who were subsequently assassinated. Additionally, current Association chief Rafael Grossi enjoys a close, long-running, clandestine relationship with Israeli officials. Subsequent disclosures could expose the IAEA’s dark alliance with Palantir.
‘Fishing Expedition’
In July 2015, the Obama administration inked the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Tehran. Under its auspices, in return for sanctions relief, the IAEA was granted unimpeded access to Iran’s nuclear facilities, to ensure the Islamic Republic was not developing nuclear weapons. Vast amounts of information on and within the sites, including surveillance camera photos, measurement data, and documents were collected along the way. The Association consistently found Iran was stringently adhering to the JCPOA’s terms.
Following Trump’s first inauguration however, the JCPOA began to come apart at the seams. In October 2017, he refused to certify Iran’s compliance with its obligations on bogus grounds, and began threatening to tear up the agreement outright and reimpose sanctions. The next March, then-IAEA director general Yukiya Amano sounded alarm over this prospect, claiming the JCPOA had produced “the world’s most robust [nuclear] verification regime” in Iran, and its cessation would represent a “great loss”. He went on to boast of how Association inspectors:
“Now spend 3,000 calendar days per year on the ground in Iran. We have installed some 2,000 tamper-proof seals on nuclear material and equipment. We have carried out more than 60 complementary accesses [unannounced inspections] and visited more than 190 buildings…We collect and analyse hundreds of thousands of images captured daily by our sophisticated surveillance cameras…about half of the total number of such images that we collect throughout the world. We collect over one million pieces of open source information each month.”
Amano added IAEA activities in Tehran were “supported by state-of-the-art technology, including data collecting and processing systems.” Unmentioned was that these innovative resources were provided by Palantir. The company’s central role in scrutinizing Iran’s nuclear compliance and intimate handshake with the IAEA was revealed two months later by Bloomberg, mere days before the Trump administration shredded the Agreement and launched a “maximum pressure” campaign against Tehran. Former US energy secretary Ernest Moniz effusively praised Palantir’s contribution:
“We have a completely unique and unparalleled intrusive verification regime that was not there before the agreement.”
A tool dubbed Mosaic served as “the analytical core” and “platform of choice” for the IAEA’s verification mission in Iran. The software helped the Association “plan and justify unscheduled probes”, collating and processing data from around 400 million “digital objects” globally, “including social media feeds and satellite photographs.” Mosaic was also charged with examining en-masse documents not only collected by the IAEA, but tens of thousands of sensitive files stolen by Mossad from Tehran.
Bloomberg quoted Ali Vaez, International Crisis Group’s Iran Project director, as expressing concern about Mosaic analysing “dirty” data obtained by Mossad, “which prides itself on deception.” After all, “even a small amount of false information could trigger a flurry of unnecessary snap inspections and derail an agreement that took years to reach.” The broader the terms of Palantir’s work with the IAEA, the more the mission “appears as a fishing expedition,” Vaez fretted, suggesting Iran could become less willing “to open its doors to inspectors.”
Vaez’s comments were eerily prophetic. Recent disclosures of intensive collusion between the IAEA and Zionist entity authorities, and the resultant prospect Association inspections assisted Israeli and US attacks on Tehran, prompted Iranian lawmakers to unanimously pass legislation indefinitely suspending cooperation with the Association on June 25th. It is unlikely IAEA inspectors will ever be permitted to tread on the Islamic Republic’s territory again. But Bloomberg highlighted a number of other anxieties that have only gained in gravity in light of recent events.
‘False Assumption’
For one, the outlet recorded how Palantir’s IAEA role granted the company “access to information that governments don’t,” while questioning whether “an international agency known for its independence” could truly remain neutral and objective given “Thiel’s close personal ties to Trump.” Furthermore, Bloomberg noted the Association’s Palantir-provided “enhanced investigative abilities” had “raised concern that the IAEA may overstep the boundary between nuclear monitoring and intelligence-gathering,” transforming its inspectors into unwitting “potential cyber sleuths.”
Such fears were only exacerbated by Mosaic being based upon Palantir’s highly controversial “predictive-policing software”. For the IAEA, this capability turned “databases of classified information into maps” helping “inspectors visualize ties between the people, places and material involved in nuclear activities” in Tehran. The risk of innocent Iranian civilians being made targets for surveillance, harassment, or even assassination created by erroneous data being fed into and/or pumped out by Mosaic is gargantuan.
Bloomberg quoted a representative of a British company “that advises governments on verification issues” as saying “predictive-analysis” systems were extremely vulnerable to such corruption, “either by accident or design.” He noted, “you will generate a false return if you add a false assumption into the system…[and] end up convincing yourself that shadows are real.” Of course, a dangerous “false assumption” lay at the very core of the IAEA’s inspection mission in Iran – namely, that Tehran was developing nukes in the first place.
The Islamic Republic has for decades consistently denied any suggestion it harbours ambitions to possess nuclear weapons. Her denials were corroborated by a November 2007 US National Intelligence Estimate expressing “high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted” any and all research into nuclear weapons. This assessment remained unchanged for several years, and was reportedly shared by Mossad. As Bloomberg recorded, come May 2018 the IAEA had “certified Iran’s work 10 times.”
In March 2025, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard testified to Congress that Iran had not restarted the nuclear weapons program it halted in 2003. On June 17th, with the 12 Day War well-underway, IAEA chief Grossi declared “we did not have any proof of a systematic effort” by Tehran “to move into a nuclear weapon.” Yet, Israel justified its attacks based on an intelligence dossier that concluded the Islamic Republic had in fact reached the “point of no return” in acquiring nukes.
That dodgy dossier depended in no small part on the findings of a May IAEA report. The document provided no new information – its dubious charges related “to activities dating back decades” at three sites where purportedly, until the early 2000s, “undeclared nuclear material” was handled. If this report was analysed by Palantir’s “predictive-analysis” systems, it is all but inevitable false results and connections would’ve been created, in turn influencing the Zionist entity’s targets and strategy.
One of the “predictive policing” tools innovated by Palantir guiding Mosaic’s operations is Gotham, which is used by an uncertain number of Western law enforcement agencies. Leaked documents on the resource show it collects an extraordinary volume of data on entire populations – whether they are law-abiding, suspected of having committed a crime, or simply connected to individuals accused of wrongdoing. This includes sex, race, names, contact details, addresses, prior warrants, mugshots, surveillance photos, personal relationships, past and current employers, and identifying features such as tattoos.
In October 2024, a major Norwegian asset manager divested from Palantir due to the company offering “AI-based predictive policing systems”, aiding the Zionist entity’s mass surveillance of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. These systems are designed “to identify individuals who are likely to launch ‘lone wolf terrorist’ attacks, facilitating their arrests preemptively before the strikes that it is projected they would carry out.” Their deployment results in countless Palestinians languishing in Israeli dungeons without charge or trial.
If Mosaic informed the Zionist entity’s strategy during the 12 Day War, that may account for why individuals with no connection whatsoever to Iran’s civilian nuclear program were directly targeted for assassination. This includes Majid Tajan Jari, a prominent professor in the field of AI locally, slain in an Israeli strike on a residential building in Tehran on June 16th. Yet, reliance on faulty or false information collated by Mosaic would simultaneously explain the conflict ending in embarrassing defeat for Israel, and victory for Tehran.
Spying on Iran: How MI6 infiltrated the IAEA
The Iranian government has alleged that the IAEA supplied the identities of its top nuclear scientists to Israeli intelligence, enabling their assassinations, and provided critical intelligence to the US and Israel on the nuclear facilities they bombed during their military assault this June.
Leaked confidential files indicate the International Atomic Energy Agency was infiltrated by a veteran British spy who has claimed credit for sanctions on Iran.
The Grayzone, Jul 02, 2025, By Kit Klarenberg, https://thegrayzone.substack.com/p/spying-on-iran-how-mi6-infiltrated?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=474765&post_id=167288793&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=n09ij&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
A notorious British MI6 agent infiltrated the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on London’s behalf, according to leaked documents reviewed by The Grayzone. The agent, Nicholas Langman, is a veteran intelligence operative who claims credit for helping engineer the West’s economic war on Iran.
Langman’s identity first surfaced in journalistic accounts of his role in deflecting accusations that British intelligence played a role in the death of Princess Diana. He was later accused by Greek authorities of overseeing the abduction and torture of Pakistani migrants in Athens.
In both cases, UK authorities issued censorship orders forbidding the press from publishing his name. But Greek media, which was under no such obligation, confirmed that Langman was one of the MI6 assets withdrawn from Britain’s embassy in Athens.
The Grayzone discovered the résumé of the journeyman British operative in a trove of leaked papers detailing the activities of Torchlight, a prolific British intelligence cutout. The bio of the longtime MI6 officer reveals he “led large, inter-agency teams to identify and defeat the spread of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons technology, including by innovative technical means and sanctions.”
In particular, the MI6 agent says he provided “support for the [IAEA] and Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons [OPCW] and through high level international partnerships.”
Langman’s CV credits him with playing a major role in organizing the sanctions regime on Iran by “[building] highly effective and mutually supportive relations across government and with senior US, European, Middle and Far Eastern colleagues for strategy” between 2010 and 2012. He boasts in his bio that this achievement “enabled [the] major diplomatic success of [the] Iranian nuclear and sanctions agreement.”
The influence Langman claimed to have exerted on the IAEA adds weight to Iranian allegations that the international nuclear regulation body colluded with the West and Israel to undermine its sovereignty. The Iranian government has alleged that the IAEA supplied the identities of its top nuclear scientists to Israeli intelligence, enabling their assassinations, and provided critical intelligence to the US and Israel on the nuclear facilities they bombed during their military assault this June.
This June 12, under the direction of its Secretary General Rafael Grossi, the IAEA issued a clearly politicized report recycling questionable past allegations to accuse Iran of violating the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Three days later, Israel attacked the country, assassinating nine nuclear scientists as well as numerous top military officials and hundreds of civilians.
Iranian former Vice President for Strategic Affairs Javad Zarif has since called for the IAEA’s Grossi to be sacked, accusing him of having “abetted the slaughter of innocents in the country.” This June 28, the Iranian government broke ties with the IAEA, refusing to allow its inspectors into the country.
While Iranian officials may have had no idea about the involvement of a shadowy figure like Langman in IAEA business, it would likely come as little surprise to Tehran that the supposedly multilateral agency had been compromised by a Western intelligence agency.
Langman’s name placed under official UK censorship order
In 2016, Langman was named a Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George, the same title bestowed on fictional British spy James Bond. By that point, the supposed secret agent held the dubious distinction of being publicly ‘burned’ as an MI6 operative on two separate occasions.
First, in 2001, journalist Stephen Dorril revealed that Langman had arrived in Paris weeks prior to Princess Diana’s fatal car crash in the city on August 31 1997, and was subsequently charged with conducting “information operations” to deflect widespread public speculation British intelligence was responsible for her death.
Then, in 2005, he was formally accused by Greek authorities of complicity in the abduction and torture of 28 Pakistanis in Athens. The Pakistanis, all migrant workers, were suspected of having had contact with individuals accused of perpetrating the 7/7 bombings in London, July 2005.
Brutally beaten and threatened with guns in their mouths, the victims “were convinced their interrogators were British.” When Greek media named Langman as the MI6 operative who oversaw the migrants’ torture, British news outlets universally complied with a government D-notice – an official censorship order – and kept his identity under wraps when reporting on the scandal.
London vehemently denied any British involvement in torturing the migrants, with then-Foreign Secretary Jack Straw dismissing the charge as “utter nonsense.” In January 2006 though, London admitted MI6 officers were indeed present during the Pakistanis’ torture, although officials insisted the operatives played no active part in their arrests, questioning or abuse.
Following his withdrawal from Athens, Langman returned to London to head the UK Foreign Office’s Iran Department, a shift which highlights his importance to MI6 and suggests the British government had no qualms about his allegedly brutal evidence gathering methods.
Britain’s Foreign Office collaborates closely with MI6, whose agents use it as cover just as the CIA does with State Department diplomatic postings.
MI6’s man on Iran takes credit for “maximum pressure” strategy
While leading the Foreign Office’s Iran Department from 2006 – 2008, Langman oversaw a team seeking to “develop understanding” of the Iranian government’s “nuclear program.”
It’s unclear exactly what that “understanding” entailed. But the document makes clear that Langman then “generated confidence” in that assessment among “European, US and Middle Eastern agencies” in order to “delay programme [sic] and pressurise Iran to negotiate.” The reference to “Middle Eastern agencies” strongly implied MI6 cooperation with Israel’s Mossad intelligence services.
In April 2006, Tehran announced it had successfully enriched uranium for the first time, although officials denied any intention to do so for military purposes. This development may have triggered Langman’s intervention.
The Islamic Republic has rejected any suggestion it harbors ambitions to possess nuclear weapons. Its denials were corroborated by a November 2007 US National Intelligence Estimate expressing “high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted” any and all research into nuclear weapons. This assessment remained unchanged for several years, and was reportedly shared by the Mossad, despite Benjamin Netanyhau’s constant declarations that Iran was on the brink of developing a nuclear weapon.
Langman’s IAEA support work overlaps with Iran sanctions blitz
International governmental attitudes towards Iran changed abruptly between 2010 and ‘12. During this period, Western states and intergovernmental institutions initiated an array of harshly punitive measures against the country, while Israel ramped up its deadly covert operations against Iran’s nuclear scientists.
This period precisely overlapped with Langman’s tenure at the Counter-Proliferation Centre of the UK Foreign Office. His bio implies he used this position to influence the IAEA and other UN-affiliated organizations to foment a campaign of global hostility towards Iran.
In June 2010, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 1929, which froze the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps’ assets, and banned overseas financial institutions from opening offices in Tehran. A month later, the Obama administration adopted the Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability, and Divestment Act. This set off a global chain of copycat sanctions by Washington’s vassals, who often imposed even more stringent measures than those levied by the UN and US.
In March 2012, the EU voted unanimously to cut Iranian banks out of the SWIFT international banking network. That October, the bloc imposed the harshest sanctions to date, restricting trade, financial services, energy and technology, along with bans on the provision of insurance to Iranian companies by European firms.
BBC reporting on the sanctions acknowledged European officials merely suspected Tehran of seeking to develop nuclear weapons, but lacked concrete proof. And behind the scenes, the MI6 operative Langman was claiming credit for helping legitimize the allegations against Iran.
Following the Western-led campaign isolation of Iran from 2010 – 2012, over its purported nuclear weapon program, the Obama administration negotiated a July 2015 agreement known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Under the JCPOA’s terms, the Islamic Republic agreed to limit its nuclear research activities in return for sanctions relief. In the years that followed, the IAEA was granted virtually unlimited access to Tehran’s nuclear complexes, ostensibly to ensure the facilities were not used to develop nuclear weapons.
Along the way, IAEA inspectors collected vast amounts of information on the sites, including surveillance camera photos, measurement data, and documents. The Iranian government has since accused the Agency of furnishing the top secret profiles of its nuclear scientists to Israel. These include the godfather of Iran’s nuclear program, Mohsen Fakrizadeh, who was first publicly named in a menacing 2019 powerpoint presentation by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The following year, the Mossad assassinated Fakrizadeh in broad daylight with a remote-controlled machine gun.
Internal IAEA documents leaked this June indicated that IAEA Secretary General Rafael Grossi has enjoyed a much closer relationship with Israeli officials than was previously known, and suggested he leveraged his cozy ties with Tel Aviv to secure his current position.
During a June 24 interview with Fox News’ war-crazed anchor Martha MacCallum, Grossi did not deny making the inflammatory claim that “900 pounds of potentially enriched uranium was taken to an ancient site near Isfahan.” Instead the IAEA director asserted, “We do not have any information on the whereabouts of this material.”
Well before Grossi rose to the top of the IAEA with Western and Israeli backing, the agency appears to have been penetrated by a British intelligence agent who took responsibility in his bio for engineering the West’s economic attack on Iran.
The IAEA has not responded to an email from The Grayzone seeking clarification on its relationship with Langman and the MI6.
How Iran could build a bomb in secret – despite Trump’s $30bn offer
Iran enters ‘era of nuclear ambiguity’ with its capabilities ‘hidden and unverifiable’
Radina Gigova, 27 June 25, https://inews.co.uk/news/world/how-iran-build-bomb-secret-despite-trumps-30bn-offer-3775501
Despite US strikes on Iranian nuclear sites, the Trump administration is reportedly prepared to offer Tehran financial incentives to strike a deal over its nuclear programme.
Sources familiar with current plans told CNN that Washington could offer investment in a civilian energy worth up to $30bn (£21.9bn) if the regime is willing to abandon uranium enrichment and adopt transparency measures, as well as sanctions relief.
But Iran has signaled that it intends to rebuild the programme after acknowledging heavy damage by US strikes, and it could do so in secret after passing a law to suspend co-operation with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which would block inspections on its nuclear sites and pave the way to withdrawal from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
How far Iran has progressed towards nuclear weapons, and what steps it could take next, could now be hidden from view, experts say.
“The truth is, no one really knows – and that’s exactly the problem,” said Sina Toossi, an Iran specialist and senior fellow at the Centre for International Policy, a Washington DC think-tank.
“Iran is entering an era of nuclear ambiguity, where its capabilities are deliberately hidden and unverifiable,” he said.
The ambiguity has been heightened after President Donald Trump said he would consider bombing Iran again.
Trump said he had spared Khamanei’s life during the original raids. US officials told the Reuters news agency on June 15 that Trump had vetoed an Israeli plan to kill the supreme leader.
“His Country was decimated, his three evil Nuclear Sites were OBLITERATED, and I knew EXACTLY where he was sheltered, and would not let Israel, or the U.S. Armed Forces, by far the Greatest and Most Powerful in the World, terminate his life,” Trump said in a social media post.
“I SAVED HIM FROM A VERY UGLY AND IGNOMINIOUS DEATH,” he said.
Iran’s decision to suspend IAEA co-operation just two days after a ceasefire “marks a turning point in the decades-long nuclear dispute”, and is “a strategic setback for both the United States and Israel”, Toossi added.
Iran retains nuclear capabilities
Donald Trump claimed last Saturday that US “bunker-buster” bombs had thoroughly destroyed Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities, including sites at Natanz and Fordo – the latter located deep underground – and a storage site in Isfahan.
“The strikes were a spectacular military success,” the US President declared, adding that Iran’s core enrichment infrastructure had been “completely and totally obliterated”.
Iranian officials, for their part, continue to deny any intention of developing a nuclear bomb.
But experts caution that Iran retains the potential to weaponise.
“Yes, Iran retains the technical capability and infrastructure to eventually build a nuclear bomb behind the scenes, despite the recent Israeli and US strikes,” said Dr Andreas Krieg, senior lecturer at the School of Security Studies at King’s College London, Royal College of Defence Studies and fellow at the Institute of Middle Eastern Studies.
The strikes caused substantial damage to critical nuclear facilities, including the enrichment and conversion sites at Natanz, Fordo, and Esfahan, according to US officials. However, intelligence reports and satellite imagery indicate that Iran likely relocated a large portion of its enriched uranium stockpile – and possibly even advanced centrifuges – to secret locations ahead of the attacks.
“This preserved the most critical elements of its breakout capability. Moreover, Iran’s knowledge base – its cadre of nuclear scientists and engineers – is intact. Human capital, unlike physical infrastructure, is difficult to eliminate and can reconstitute programmes even after significant setbacks,” said Dr Krieg.
Krieg noted that the IAEA has acknowledged that although inspections at declared sites have been hindered, there is only limited visibility into any potential undisclosed or secret facilities.
“This opens the possibility of a clandestine parallel programme – especially given that Iran has previously experimented with such pathways during the AMAD programme in the early 2000s,” he said, referring to an alleged secret Iranian nuclear weapons development project believed to have been active at the start of the century.
“Therefore, while recent military operations may have delayed Iran’s ability to assemble a bomb, they have not eliminated the potential,” he said.
“If Iran were to exit the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty or reduce co-operation with the IAEA, concerns about a hidden weapons programme would intensify. In the absence of a durable diplomatic solution, Iran’s latent capability remains a central strategic risk in the region.”
Dr Pavel Podvig, a senior researcher and nuclear specialist at the UN Institute for Disarmament Research, said the US and Israel could struggle to keep track of a hidden programme.
“It would be very difficult without IAEA access,” he said. “Look at North Korea – and North Korea wasn’t really making a special effort to hide facilities underground.”
A clandestine “breakout” would prioritise storage of any remaining highly enriched uranium, he added, which could potentially be further enriched to weapons-grade at an unknown facility.
Basis of a deal may already exist
Krieg believes “it is imperative that the Trump administration, through mediators like Qatar, is transforming this current momentum of the ceasefire into a sustainable and mutually acceptable nuclear deal, including enrichment constraints and effective oversight mechanisms”.
Uranium is the central element in question, and according to the UN’s nuclear watchdog, no other country has as much enriched uranium at this level as Iran does without also engaging in a nuclear weapons programme.
John Erath, senior policy director at the Centre for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, agrees that Iran may have the capability to build a nuclear weapon and that negotiating a new agreement, similar to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear deal reached in 2015 and abandoned by Trump in 2018 – could be the basis of a new deal.
“We have an example of an arrangement that provided confidence that closed off the path to nuclear weapons for Iran,” he said, referring to the JCPOA, “and so, if I were negotiating a new arrangement, I would use that as a starting point but I would have something that would not have an expiration date.”
“If you want to demonstrate that you do not have nuclear weapons, be completely transparent, be completely open, and they were not that,” Erath claimed, referring to the Iranian government. “They were doing things that they wanted to keep hidden, that they wanted to keep in secret, that were only things that you could do if you were considering a nuclear weapons programme.”
Iranian officials have indicated reluctance to re-enter talks after the US and Israeli attacks, citing a lack of trust, although Tehran’s ambassador to the UN left the door open to a regional nuclear consortium involving Gulf states – a previous proposal floated by the US.
The 12-day war has “certainly put the possibility of further negotiations under serious threat”, Erath said. “[But that’s] what happened, and we have to live with the consequences.”
Why Limit Iranian Enrichment Peacefully When You Can Bomb Them Instead?
A deal was limiting Iran’s enrichment of uranium until Donald Trump pulled the U.S. out of it. Instead the Dealmaker bombed Iran, threatening to set the region on fire, writes Joe Lauria. With a ceasefire what does he do now?
By Joe Lauria, Consortium News. June 24, 2025, https://consortiumnews.com/2025/06/24/why-limit-iranian-enrichment-peacefully-when-you-can-bomb-them-instead/
In the last great achievement of international diplomacy, the United States and its allies Britain, France and Germany, concluded a deal in 2015 with Russia, China and Iran — something that today would be unthinkable — to limit Iran’s nuclear enrichment to purely civilian uses at 3.67 percent.
Negotiations on the deal began in November 2013, just three months before the U.S.-backed unconstitutional change of government in Kiev that started the long slide in U.S.-Russian relations. That did not prevent the nuclear deal from being concluded in July 2015 and endorsed by the Security Council in October of that year.
Seven years later, Washington and its European allies began fighting a hot war against Moscow through its proxy Ukraine. Relations with China have also sharply deteriorated. The idea of such cooperation on Iran now is unthinkable.
But in 2013 such wise diplomacy was still possible and the result was a peaceful resolution of the Iranian enrichment issue.
Iran agreed to stringent monitoring by the International Atomic Energy Agency and in exchange, the United States, Europe and the United Nations lifted economic sanctions against Tehran.
The IAEA certified that the deal was working. Iran was sticking to 3.67 percent enrichment. Diplomacy worked. Iran’s nuclear program was in check.
But the Israelis had opposed it all along because Israel’s aim has long been to overthrow the government in Iran in Israel’s quest for regional dominance.
Netanyahu could not stop Barack Obama from working with the Chinese and the Russians to conclude the deal that solved the nuclear issue and left the Iranian government in a more secure position.
Then Donald Trump became president. He did what Netanyahu wanted. He pulled the U.S. out of the deal, saying it was a lousy agreement and he could do better. But there was no new deal. Iran continued to cooperate with the existing agreement for a year before increasing enrichment, eventually to 60 percent for leverage in the negotiation. (90 percent is needed for a bomb, but U.S. intelligence and the IAEA said in recents months that Iran is not pursuing a bomb).
Obama’s vice president, Joe Biden, did nothing to return the U.S. to the deal to save it when he got into the White House, dishonoring probably Obama’s greatest achievement.
Trump 2.0’s idea of a better deal to limit Tehran’s enrichment was to demand zero percent after Iran agreed to return to 3.67 percent. Trump would look like a fool if he accepted 3.67 percent, as that would mean agreeing to the very deal that was working well before he tore it up.
So it was bombs away instead.
Clearing Smoke Reveals Trump’s Lies
More than 24 hours after the smoke cleared above Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan nuclear facilities Trump’s lies during his address Saturday night came clearly into view.
The strikes were not “a spectacular military success.” Iran’s “key nuclear enrichment facilities” were not “completely and totally obliterated.” There is no evidence that a single centrifuge was damaged and Iran’s 60 percent enriched fuel had already been removed and is in a location unknown to Israel, the U.S. and the IAEA.
Trump called Iran the “bully of the Middle East” when any neutral person knows that bully is Israel backed by the U.S., the bully of the world.
In just the past few months, with U.S. backing, Israel has invaded Lebanon and Syria, launched an unprovoked attack on Iran and is committing genocide in Gaza. The last time Iran invaded anyone was Iraq in 1982 but only after Iraq had invaded it first in 1980.
Israel gets away with this by portraying itself as the perpetual victim of an imminent new Holocaust 80 years after the fact and thus needs to invade and bomb its neighbors in “self defense” to pre-empt this from happening.
Regional hostility toward Israel does not stem from a reaction to its decades of aggression against Palestinians and its neighbors but purely from anti-semitic hatred. These countries must constantly be attacked to wipe out this hatred, not to reconstitute an ancient Hebrew empire from (beyond) the River to the Sea.
One power that empire never conquered was Persia
With their overlapping empires — Israel’s regional and the U.S.’s global — Iran, the land of Darius and Cyrus, is the prime target. The U.S. has sought to control it since at least its 1953 coup restored the shah to power for its oil and because of its Cold War rivalry with Russia.
Trump mimicked Israel, calling Iran “the world’s number one state sponsor of terror,” when an objective analysis would correctly award that title to the Gulf Sunni monarchies, principally Saudi Arabia, all allied with the United States.
They have sponsored al-Qaeda and ISIS and all their offshoots and rebrandings, while Iran has mostly supported militia resisting occupations in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and Gaza.
Though formed in 1982 in response to Israel’s invasion and occupation of Lebanon, Hezbollah was only designated a terrorist organization by the European Union in 2013, for instance. Though founded in 1987, the EU did not view Hamas as a terrorist group until 2001.
Then Trump said of Iran:
“They have been killing our people, blowing off their arms, blowing off their legs with roadside bombs. That was their specialty. We lost over 1,000 people, and hundreds of thousands throughout the Middle East and around the world have died as a direct result of their hate.”
This is a bizarre statement that can only be related to attacks by militia against U.S. occupation forces in Iraq after the U.S. 2003 invasion. But only some of these groups were Iranian-backed and they killed not a thousand, but 169 U.S. soldiers, whom Trump referred to as “our people,” as if they were tourists and not an occupying army.
Trump’s thousand U.S. victims appears to come from propaganda put out by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, which calls itself “a leading independent research institute, serving as Israel’s global embassy for national security and applied diplomacy.”
It combats what it calls “apartheid antisemitism.” It falsely called the 2015 nuclear agreement that Trump withdrew from “a deal that would allow Iran to become a nuclear-armed state.” In 2015, Haaretz named Sheldon Adelson, Trump’s principal donor, “one of the main financers of JCFA in recent years.”
Israel had to cut short its ambitions to conquer Iran (at least overtly) and agree to a ceasefire because it was running out of interceptor missiles; it’s economy, already weakened by Gaza, was threatened at $200 million a day; and it sustained far more damage than it will admit.
Now that there is a ceasefire, Trump is back to square one. The New York Times reported:
“Rafael Mariano Grossi, the director of the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog, welcomed news of a cease-fire. In a social-media post, he said he has invited Iran’s foreign minister Abbas Araghchi to meet to discuss a diplomatic solution on Iran’s nuclear program.”
That solution would be a return to 3.67 percent enrichment and Iran giving up its 60 percent stockpile, in other words, returning exactly to the deal Trump tore up to plunge the region into extreme danger with his bombing stunt.
Where will he turn now?
Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former U.N. correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and other newspapers, including The Montreal Gazette, the London Daily Mail and The Star of Johannesburg. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London, a financial reporter for Bloomberg News and began his professional work as a 19-year old stringer for The New York Times. He is the author of two books, A Political Odyssey, with Sen. Mike Gravel, foreword by Daniel Ellsberg; and How I Lost By Hillary Clinton, foreword by Julian Assange.
Trump rejects leaked intelligence that says strikes did not destroy Iran nuclear programme.
Donald Trump insists nuclear sites in Iran were
“completely destroyed” by US military strikes, despite an intelligence
report casting doubt on their success The leaked damage assessment from the
Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency estimates the attack only set Iran’s
nuclear programme back “a few months”
BBC 25th June 2025,
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/c20xel1e97gt
How the US and Israel Used Rafael Grossi to Hijack the IAEA and Start a War on Iran
Rafael Grossi, director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), allowed the IAEA to be used by the United States and Israel—an undeclared nuclear weapons state in long-term violation of IAEA rules—to manufacture a pretext for war on Iran, despite his agency’s own conclusion that Iran had no nuclear weapons program.
Israel began working on a nuclear weapon in the 1950s, with substantial help from Western countries, including France, Britain and Argentina, and made its first weapons in 1966 or 1967. By 2015, when Iran signed the JCPOA nuclear agreement, former Secretary of State Colin Powell wrote in a leaked email that a nuclear weapon would be useless to Iran because “Israel has 200, all targeted on Tehran.”
The agency’s chief has not only continued its subservience to U.S. and Western interests, but also its practice of turning a blind eye to Israel’s nuclear weapons.
Medea BenjaminNicolas J.S. Davies, Jun 23, 2025, https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/how-the-us-and-israel-used-rafael-grossi-to-hijack-the-iaea-and-start-a-war-on-iran
Rafael Grossi, director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), allowed the IAEA to be used by the United States and Israel—an undeclared nuclear weapons state in long-term violation of IAEA rules—to manufacture a pretext for war on Iran, despite his agency’s own conclusion that Iran had no nuclear weapons program.
On June 12th, based on a damning report by Grossi, a slim majority of the IAEA Board of Governors voted to find Iran in non-compliance with its obligations as an IAEA member. Of the 35 countries represented on the Board, only 19 voted for the resolution, while 3 voted against it, 11 abstained and 2 did not vote.
Rafael Grossi, director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), allowed the IAEA to be used by the United States and Israel—an undeclared nuclear weapons state in long-term violation of IAEA rules—to manufacture a pretext for war on Iran, despite his agency’s own conclusion that Iran had no nuclear weapons program.
On June 12th, based on a damning report by Grossi, a slim majority of the IAEA Board of Governors voted to find Iran in non-compliance with its obligations as an IAEA member. Of the 35 countries represented on the Board, only 19 voted for the resolution, while 3 voted against it, 11 abstained and 2 did not vote.
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The United States contacted eight board member governments on June 10th to persuade them to either vote for the resolution or not to vote. Israeli officials said they saw the U.S. arm-twisting for the IAEA resolution as a significant signal of U.S. support for Israel’s war plans, revealing how much Israel valued the IAEA resolution as diplomatic cover for the war.
The IAEA board meeting was timed for the final day of President Trump’s 60-day ultimatum to Iran to negotiate a new nuclear agreement. Even as the IAEA board voted, Israel was loading weapons, fuel and drop-tanks on its warplanes for the long flight to Iran and briefing its aircrews on their targets. The first Israeli air strikes hit Iran at 3 a.m. that night.
On June 20th, Iran filed a formal complaint against Director General Grossi with the UN Secretary General and the UN Security Council for undermining his agency’s impartiality, both by his failure to mention the illegality of Israel’s threats and uses of force against Iran in his public statements and by his singular focus on Iran’s alleged violations.
The source of the IAEA investigation that led to this resolution was a 2018 Israeli intelligence report that its agents had identified three previously undisclosed sites in Iran where Iran had conducted uranium enrichment prior to 2003. In 2019, Grossi opened an investigation, and the IAEA eventually gained access to the sites and detected traces of enriched uranium..
Despite the fateful consequences of his actions, Grossi has never explained publicly how the IAEA can be sure that Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency or its Iranian collaborators, such as the Mojahedin-e-Khalq (or MEK), did not put the enriched uranium in those sites themselves, as Iranian officials have suggested.
While the IAEA resolution that triggered this war dealt only with Iran’s enrichment activities prior to 2003, U.S. and Israeli politicians quickly pivoted to unsubstantiated claims that Iran was on the verge of making a nuclear weapon. U.S. intelligence agencies had previously reported that such a complex process would take up to three years, even before Israel and the United States began bombing and degrading Iran’s existing civilian nuclear facilities.
The IAEA’s previous investigations into unreported nuclear activities in Iran were officially completed in December 2015, when IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano published its “Final Assessment on Past and Present Outstanding Issues regarding Iran’s Nuclear Program.”
The IAEA assessed that, while some of Iran’s past activities might have been relevant to nuclear weapons, they “did not advance beyond feasibility and scientific studies, and the acquisition of certain relevant technical competences and capabilities.” The IAEA “found no credible indications of the diversion of nuclear material in connection with the possible military dimensions to Iran’s nuclear program.”
When Yukiya Amano died before the end of his term in 2019, Argentinian diplomat Rafael Grossi was appointed IAEA Director General. Grossi had served as Deputy Director General under Amano and, before that, as Chief of Staff under Director General Mohamed ElBaradei.
The Israelis have a long record of fabricating false evidence about Iran’s nuclear activities, like the notorious “laptop documents” given to the CIA by the MEK in 2004 and believed to have been created by the Mossad. Douglas Frantz, who wrote a report on Iran’s nuclear program for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2009, revealed that the Mossad created a special unit in 2003 to provide secret briefings on Iran’s nuclear program, using “documents from inside Iran and elsewhere.”
And yet Grossi collaborated with Israel to pursue its latest allegations. After several years of meetings in Israel and negotiations and inspections in Iran, he wrote his report to the IAEA Board of Governors and scheduled a board meeting to coincide with the planned start date for Israel’s war.
Israel made its final war preparations in full view of the satellites and intelligence agencies of the western countries that drafted and voted for the resolution. It is no wonder that 13 countries abstained or did not vote, but it is tragic that more neutral countries could not find the wisdom and courage to vote against this insidious resolution.
The official purpose of the International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA, is “to promote the safe, secure and peaceful use of nuclear technologies.” Since 1965, all of its 180 member countries have been subject to IAEA safeguards to ensure that their nuclear programs are “not used in such a way as to further any military purpose.”
The IAEA’s work is obviously compromised in dealing with countries that already have nuclear weapons. North Korea withdrew from the IAEA in 1994, and from all safeguards in 2009. The United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France and China have IAEA safeguard agreements that are based only on “voluntary offers” for “selected” non-military sites. India has a 2009 safeguard agreement that requires it to keep its military and civilian nuclear programs separate, and Pakistan has 10 separate safeguard agreements, but only for civilian nuclear projects, the latest being from 2017 to cover two Chinese-built power stations.
Israel, however, has only a limited 1975 safeguards agreement for a 1955 civilian nuclear cooperation agreement with the United States. An addendum in 1977 extended the IAEA safeguards agreement indefinitely, even though the cooperation agreement with the U.S. that it covered expired four days later. So, by a parody of compliance that the United States and the IAEA have played along with for half a century, Israel has escaped the scrutiny of IAEA safeguards just as effectively as North Korea.
Israel began working on a nuclear weapon in the 1950s, with substantial help from Western countries, including France, Britain and Argentina, and made its first weapons in 1966 or 1967. By 2015, when Iran signed the JCPOA nuclear agreement, former Secretary of State Colin Powell wrote in a leaked email that a nuclear weapon would be useless to Iran because “Israel has 200, all targeted on Tehran.” Powell quoted former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad asking, “What would we do with a nuclear weapon? Polish it?”
In 2003, while Powell tried but failed to make a case for war on Iraq to the UN Security Council, President Bush smeared Iran, Iraq and North Korea as an “axis of evil,” based on their alleged pursuit of “weapons of mass destruction.” The Egyptian IAEA Director, Mohamed ElBaradei, repeatedly assured the Security Council that the IAEA could find no evidence that Iraq was developing a nuclear weapon.
When the CIA produced a document that showed Iraq importing yellowcake uranium from Niger, just as Israel had secretly imported it from Argentina in the 1960s, the IAEA only took a few hours to recognize the document as a forgery, which ElBaradei immediately reported to the Security Council.
Rafael Grossi, director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), allowed the IAEA to be used by the United States and Israel—an undeclared nuclear weapons state in long-term violation of IAEA rules—to manufacture a pretext for war on Iran, despite his agency’s own conclusion that Iran had no nuclear weapons program.
On June 12th, based on a damning report by Grossi, a slim majority of the IAEA Board of Governors voted to find Iran in non-compliance with its obligations as an IAEA member. Of the 35 countries represented on the Board, only 19 voted for the resolution, while 3 voted against it, 11 abstained and 2 did not vote.
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The United States contacted eight board member governments on June 10th to persuade them to either vote for the resolution or not to vote. Israeli officials said they saw the U.S. arm-twisting for the IAEA resolution as a significant signal of U.S. support for Israel’s war plans, revealing how much Israel valued the IAEA resolution as diplomatic cover for the war.
The IAEA board meeting was timed for the final day of President Trump’s 60-day ultimatum to Iran to negotiate a new nuclear agreement. Even as the IAEA board voted, Israel was loading weapons, fuel and drop-tanks on its warplanes for the long flight to Iran and briefing its aircrews on their targets. The first Israeli air strikes hit Iran at 3 a.m. that night.
On June 20th, Iran filed a formal complaint against Director General Grossi with the UN Secretary General and the UN Security Council for undermining his agency’s impartiality, both by his failure to mention the illegality of Israel’s threats and uses of force against Iran in his public statements and by his singular focus on Iran’s alleged violations.
The source of the IAEA investigation that led to this resolution was a 2018 Israeli intelligence report that its agents had identified three previously undisclosed sites in Iran where Iran had conducted uranium enrichment prior to 2003. In 2019, Grossi opened an investigation, and the IAEA eventually gained access to the sites and detected traces of enriched uranium.
Despite the fateful consequences of his actions, Grossi has never explained publicly how the IAEA can be sure that Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency or its Iranian collaborators, such as the Mojahedin-e-Khalq (or MEK), did not put the enriched uranium in those sites themselves, as Iranian officials have suggested.
While the IAEA resolution that triggered this war dealt only with Iran’s enrichment activities prior to 2003, U.S. and Israeli politicians quickly pivoted to unsubstantiated claims that Iran was on the verge of making a nuclear weapon. U.S. intelligence agencies had previously reported that such a complex process would take up to three years, even before Israel and the United States began bombing and degrading Iran’s existing civilian nuclear facilities.
The IAEA’s previous investigations into unreported nuclear activities in Iran were officially completed in December 2015, when IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano published its “Final Assessment on Past and Present Outstanding Issues regarding Iran’s Nuclear Program.”
The IAEA assessed that, while some of Iran’s past activities might have been relevant to nuclear weapons, they “did not advance beyond feasibility and scientific studies, and the acquisition of certain relevant technical competences and capabilities.” The IAEA “found no credible indications of the diversion of nuclear material in connection with the possible military dimensions to Iran’s nuclear program.”
When Yukiya Amano died before the end of his term in 2019, Argentinian diplomat Rafael Grossi was appointed IAEA Director General. Grossi had served as Deputy Director General under Amano and, before that, as Chief of Staff under Director General Mohamed ElBaradei.
The Israelis have a long record of fabricating false evidence about Iran’s nuclear activities, like the notorious “laptop documents” given to the CIA by the MEK in 2004 and believed to have been created by the Mossad. Douglas Frantz, who wrote a report on Iran’s nuclear program for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2009, revealed that the Mossad created a special unit in 2003 to provide secret briefings on Iran’s nuclear program, using “documents from inside Iran and elsewhere.”
And yet Grossi collaborated with Israel to pursue its latest allegations. After several years of meetings in Israel and negotiations and inspections in Iran, he wrote his report to the IAEA Board of Governors and scheduled a board meeting to coincide with the planned start date for Israel’s war.
Israel made its final war preparations in full view of the satellites and intelligence agencies of the western countries that drafted and voted for the resolution. It is no wonder that 13 countries abstained or did not vote, but it is tragic that more neutral countries could not find the wisdom and courage to vote against this insidious resolution.
The official purpose of the International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA, is “to promote the safe, secure and peaceful use of nuclear technologies.” Since 1965, all of its 180 member countries have been subject to IAEA safeguards to ensure that their nuclear programs are “not used in such a way as to further any military purpose.”
The IAEA’s work is obviously compromised in dealing with countries that already have nuclear weapons. North Korea withdrew from the IAEA in 1994, and from all safeguards in 2009. The United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France and China have IAEA safeguard agreements that are based only on “voluntary offers” for “selected” non-military sites. India has a 2009 safeguard agreement that requires it to keep its military and civilian nuclear programs separate, and Pakistan has 10 separate safeguard agreements, but only for civilian nuclear projects, the latest being from 2017 to cover two Chinese-built power stations.
Israel, however, has only a limited 1975 safeguards agreement for a 1955 civilian nuclear cooperation agreement with the United States. An addendum in 1977 extended the IAEA safeguards agreement indefinitely, even though the cooperation agreement with the U.S. that it covered expired four days later. So, by a parody of compliance that the United States and the IAEA have played along with for half a century, Israel has escaped the scrutiny of IAEA safeguards just as effectively as North Korea.
Israel began working on a nuclear weapon in the 1950s, with substantial help from Western countries, including France, Britain and Argentina, and made its first weapons in 1966 or 1967. By 2015, when Iran signed the JCPOA nuclear agreement, former Secretary of State Colin Powell wrote in a leaked email that a nuclear weapon would be useless to Iran because “Israel has 200, all targeted on Tehran.” Powell quoted former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad asking, “What would we do with a nuclear weapon? Polish it?”
In 2003, while Powell tried but failed to make a case for war on Iraq to the UN Security Council, President Bush smeared Iran, Iraq and North Korea as an “axis of evil,” based on their alleged pursuit of “weapons of mass destruction.” The Egyptian IAEA Director, Mohamed ElBaradei, repeatedly assured the Security Council that the IAEA could find no evidence that Iraq was developing a nuclear weapon.
When the CIA produced a document that showed Iraq importing yellowcake uranium from Niger, just as Israel had secretly imported it from Argentina in the 1960s, the IAEA only took a few hours to recognize the document as a forgery, which ElBaradei immediately reported to the Security Council.
Bush kept repeating the lie about yellowcake from Niger, and other flagrant lies about Iraq, and the United States invaded and destroyed Iraq based on his lies, a war crime of historic proportions. Most of the world knew that ElBaradei and the IAEA were right all along, and, in 2005, they were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, for exposing Bush’s lies, speaking truth to power and strengthening nuclear non-proliferation.
In 2007, a U.S. National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) by all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies agreed with the IAEA’s finding that Iran, like Iraq, had no nuclear weapons program. As Bush wrote in his memoirs, “…after the NIE, how could I possibly explain using the military to destroy the nuclear facilities of a country the intelligence community said had no active nuclear weapons program?” Even Bush couldn’t believe he would get away with recycling the same lies to destroy Iran as well as Iraq, and Trump is playing with fire by doing so now.
ElBaradei wrote in his own memoir, The Age of Deception: Nuclear Diplomacy in Treacherous Times, that if Iran did do some preliminary research on nuclear weapons, it probably began during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, after the US and its allies helped Iraq to manufacture chemical weapons that killed up to 100,000 Iranians.
The neocons who dominate U.S. post-Cold War foreign policy viewed the Nobel Prize winner ElBaradei as an obstacle to their regime change ambitions around the world, and conducted a covert campaign to find a more compliant new IAEA Director General when his term expired in 2009.
After Japanese diplomat Yukiya Amano was appointed as the new Director General, U.S. diplomatic cables published by Wikileaks revealed details of his extensive vetting by U.S. diplomats, who reported back to Washington that Amano “was solidly in the U.S. court on every key strategic decision, from high-level personnel appointments to the handling of Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program.”
After becoming IAEA Director General in 2019, Rafael Grossi not only continued the IAEA’s subservience to U.S. and Western interests and its practice of turning a blind eye to Israel’s nuclear weapons, but also ensured that the IAEA played a critical role in Israel’s march to war on Iran.
Even as he publicly acknowledged that Iran had no nuclear weapons program and that diplomacy was the only way to resolve the West’s concerns about Iran, Grossi helped Israel to set the stage for war by reopening the IAEA’s investigation into Iran’s past activities. Then, on the very day that Israeli warplanes were being loaded with weapons to bomb Iran, he made sure that the IAEA Board of Governors passed a resolution to give Israel and the U.S. the pretext for war that they wanted.
In his last year as IAEA Director, Mohamed ElBaradei faced a similar dilemma to the one that Grossi has faced since 2019. In 2008, U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies gave the IAEA copies of documents that appeared to show Iran conducting four distinct types of nuclear weapons research.
Whereas, in 2003, Bush’s yellowcake document from Niger was clearly a forgery, the IAEA could not establish whether the Israeli documents were authentic or not. So ElBaradei refused to act on them or to make them public, despite considerable political pressure, because, as he wrote in The Age of Deception, he knew the U.S. and Israel “wanted to create the impression that Iran presented an imminent threat, perhaps preparing the grounds for the use of force.” ElBaradei retired in 2009, and those allegations were among the “outstanding issues” that he left to be resolved by Yukiya Amano in 2015.
If Rafael Grossi had exercised the same caution, impartiality and wisdom as Mohamed ElBaradei did in 2009, it is very possible that the United States and Israel would not be at war with Iran today.
Mohamed ElBaradei wrote in a tweet on June 17th 2025, “To rely on force and not negotiations is a sure way to destroy the NPT and the nuclear non-proliferation regime (imperfect as it is), and sends a clear message to many countries “that their ‘ultimate security’ is to develop nuclear weapons!!!”
Despite Grossi’s role in U.S.-Israeli war plans as IAEA Director General, or maybe because of it, he has been touted as a Western-backed candidate to succeed Antonio Guterres as UN Secretary General in 2026. That would be a disaster for the world. Fortunately, there are many more qualified candidates to lead the world out of the crisis that Rafael Grossi has helped the U.S. and Israel to plunge it into.
Rafael Grossi should resign as IAEA Director before he further undermines nuclear non-proliferation and drags the world any closer to nuclear war. And he should also withdraw his name from consideration as a candidate for UN Secretary General.
Holtec: Criminality, Corruption, Incompetence, and Inexperience.
Below, brief introduction to the 2-page explanation at https://beyondnuclear.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/2-29-24-Holtec-two-pager.pdf
On June 16, an environmental coalition, including Beyond Nuclear, submitted an intervention petition against Holtec’s BAND-AID fixes on Michigan’s Palisades atomic reactor’s severe steam generator tube degradation, a pathway to catastrophic core meltdown. The generators have needed to be replaced for two decades, but Holtec’s two-year neglect of basic safety maintenance — a rookie error, by a company that has never operated a reactor — has made it dangerously worse. On June 18, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against our side, regarding highly radioactive waste dumps in Texas (ISP’s) and New Mexico (Holtec’s). But now, we can pursue our Holtec dump appeal in the D.C. Circuit. TX and NM state laws also stand in the way of the dumps.
After Iraq There’s No Excuse For Buying The War Lies About Iran
Caitlin Johnstone, Jun 17, 2025, https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/after-iraq-theres-no-excuse-for-buying?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=166146740&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
There is absolutely no excuse for buying into the war propaganda about Iran after what we all saw with Iraq.
“OMG nuclear weapons!” Shut up, idiot. If you’re a grown adult with internet access still swallowing this load of bull spunk in the year 2025 you’re either stupid or evil.
President Donald Trump is now saying he has no intention of seeking or facilitating a ceasefire with Iran, telling reporters that he’s after a “complete give-up” from Iran instead.
“I’m not too much in a mood to negotiate,” Trump said.
Asked by the press if he’s worried about US troops being targeted by Iran in the coming days, the president said “We’ll come down so hard if they do anything to our people. We’ll come down so hard. The gloves are off. I think they know not to touch our troops.”
This is a stupid, crazy lie. Iran has explicitly said it will strike US bases in the region if the US attacks Iranian territory. If you punch someone, you expect to be punched back.
If Trump orders US forces to bomb Iran, it will be because he wants to start a war and knowingly chose to do so.
One of the dumbest narratives we’re currently being fed about Iran is the claim that Israel is precision-striking high-level targets in Iran while Iran is just bombing civilians all over the place in Israel.
A casual glance at the death tolls shows this is clearly false. As of this writing the current official death count sits at 24 Israelis killed by Iran and 224 Iranians killed by Israel — most of whom are reportedly civilians. On Friday they bombed a residential building and killed 60 people, including 20 kids.
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz thumped his chest on Twitter about an IDF strike on an Iranian television station on Monday, saying “The Iranian regime’s propaganda and incitement broadcasting authority was attacked by the IDF after a widespread evacuation of residents in the area.”
I wonder how the western press who are currently deceiving the public to promote Israel’s information interests feel about this new rule that it’s okay to bomb media outlets if someone decides they’re propaganda?
People shouldn’t be so hard on Trump about all this. You’d probably start a war with Iran too if someone was threatening to leak your child molestation video.
The war on Iran isn’t really about nuclear weapons — if it was they would’ve kept the nuclear deal in place, which was working as intended. The Gaza holocaust isn’t really about Hamas or hostages — if it was they would’ve just targeted Hamas or negotiated a hostage deal.
It’s all lies. The war on Iran is about regional hegemony and the genocide in Gaza is about Israel’s longstanding desire to remove all Palestinians from a Palestinian territory. It’s not about self-defense, it’s about land and power, and it always has been.
This is one of the reasons antiwar people have been focusing so hard on Gaza, by the way. It wasn’t just because it’s a horrific genocide happening right in front of us, it was because it always risked blowing up into a regional war involving Israel’s western allies. We’ve been watching it expand into the West Bank, Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, and into Iran for a bit last year, and now it’s blown up into all-out war between Israel and Iran with the US poised to join in.
For 20 months I’ve been getting people asking me why I’ve been so laser-focused on Gaza while paying less attention to this or that conflict or foreign policy issue. This is why. It’s a waking nightmare in and of itself, but it’s also always been a powderkeg that could explode into something much, much worse.
We Are, Of Course, Being Lied To About Iran
The western political/media class have been dutifully promoting this line and uncritically parroting Israel’s claim that its unprovoked attack on Iran was “preemptive”, but there is absolutely no evidence that any of this is true.
Caitlin Johnstone, Jun 15, 2025, https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/we-are-of-course-being-lied-to-about?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=165951075&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
Iran and Israel are at war, with the US already intimately involved and likely to become more so. Which of course means we’ll be spending the foreseeable future getting bashed in the face with lies from the most powerful people in the world.
The most immediately obvious of these is the Netanyahu-promoted narrative that Israel initiated this conflict because Iran was on the brink of developing a nuclear weapon. With absolutely no self-consciousness or sense of irony, the Israeli prime minister followed the attacks with a statement accusing Iran of “genocidal rhetoric” which it has backed up “with a program to develop nuclear weapons.” Israel, as we all know, has an unacknowledged nuclear arsenal, and its leaders are presently committing genocide in Gaza while spouting genocidal rhetoric.
“And if not stopped, Iran could produce a nuclear weapon in a very short time,” Netanyahu claimed. “It could be a year. It could be within a few months — less than a year. This is a clear and present danger to Israel’s very survival.”
The western political/media class have been dutifully promoting this line and uncritically parroting Israel’s claim that its unprovoked attack on Iran was “preemptive”, but there is absolutely no evidence that any of this is true.
Benjamin Netanyahu has spent literally decades falsely claiming that Iran was a year or two away from developing a nuke, only to have the calendar prove him wrong with the passage of time over and over again.
US intelligence chief Tulsi Gabbard testified just weeks ago that “The IC [Intelligence Community] continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003.”
As journalist Séamus Malekafzali recently noted on Twitter, one of the strongest arguments that Iran had not reversed its decision to refrain from obtaining nuclear weapons is that Iranian nuclear scientists have been publicly expressing frustration about the fact that their government won’t allow them to construct a nuke. They want to do it, but Tehran won’t let them.
US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth helped pave the way for Netanyahu’s claims this past Wednesday when he told the Senate that “there have been plenty of indications” Iran has been “moving their way toward something that would look a lot like a nuclear weapon.”
This claim by Hegseth was swiftly scooped up and promoted by warmongers like Tom Cotton who said that Hegseth had “confirmed that Iran’s terrorist regime is actively working towards a nuclear weapon.”
Cotton’s claim was then picked up by war pundit Mark Levin, who has been personally lobbying Trump to green light an attack on Iran, sarcastically quipping on Twitter, “So, SecDef Hegseth must by lying, too. Everyone’s lying except the isolationists, Koch-heads, Islamists, Chatsworth Qatarlson and their media propagandists.”
But let’s back up and look at what Hegseth actually said. He did not say “Iran is building a nuclear weapon.” He said “there have been plenty of indications” Iran has been “moving their way toward something that would look a lot like a nuclear weapon.”
If the US had intelligence that Iran was building a nuke, Hegseth would have just said so. But instead he performed this freakish verbal gymnastics stunt muttering about indications of something that might kinda sorta look like a nuclear weapon, which his fellow Iran hawks then falsely took and ran with as a positive assertion that Iran was building a nuke.
There are other lies being circulated to help market this war as well. As Moon of Alabama notes, the Washington Post’s odious war propagandist David Ignatius is pushing the narrative that Iran has been cultivating a relationship with de-facto al-Qaeda leader Saif al-Adel. The lie that Saddam Hussein was in league with al-Qaeda was used two decades ago to sell the invasion of Iraq.
At the same time, Trumpian pundits are currently circulating the narrative that the United States is full of Iranian “sleeper cells” who could activate at any moment and begin attacking Americans. The most egregious of these is Laura Loomer’s repeated claims that there are “millions” of such cells awaiting Iran’s orders to strike — possibly the single most bat shit insane claim I have ever seen anyone with any major platform make, since it would mean a very sizable percentage of the US population is actually a secret Iranian proxy army.
The fountain of lies is just getting started. There will be more. Believe nothing unless it is substantiated by mountains of evidence. These freaks have been caught lying to sell wars to the public far too many times for any of their claims to be taken on faith.
Iran says it will release Israeli nuclear secrets as pressure grows to reimpose sanctions
Tehran threat comes as European powers press for vote that could lead to reimposition of UN sanctions
Guardian Patrick Wintour, 9 June 25
Iran has said it will soon start releasing information from a hoard of Israeli nuclear secrets it claims to have obtained, as European countries push for a vote this week on reimposing UN sanctions on Tehran over its nuclear programme.
The unverified claims by Iranian intelligence of a massive leak of Israeli secrets may be designed to turn the focus away from what Iran argues is its own excessively monitored civil nuclear programme.
On Sunday, Iran’s intelligence minister, Esmail Khatib, claimed Tehran had obtained “a vast collection of strategic and sensitive [Israeli] documents, including plans and data on the nuclear facilities”. He added evidence would be released shortly, and implied some of the documentation was linked to Israel’s arrest of two Israeli nationals, Roi Mizrahi and Almog Attias, over alleged spying for Iran………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/09/iran-says-it-will-release-israeli-nuclear-secrets-as-pressure-grows-to-reimpose-sanctions
Defence review dodges Britain’s nuclear blind spot.
THE UK’s nuclear enterprise is in crisis. Not just because of cost
overruns or ageing submarines, but because of the deepening secrecy and
silence that surrounds it. That silence should have been broken by the
Labour Government’s new Strategic Defence Review 2025.
Instead, it was quietly reinforced. Presented as a roadmap to “Make Britain Safer”, the
review promised clarity and accountability, but it fails to confront the
most pressing truths: that the UK’s nuclear programme is financially
unsustainable, strategically unbalanced, increasingly unaccountable and a
real and present danger to us all.
These concerns are not hypothetical. In
the final months of the last Parliament, I raised them on the floor of the
House of Commons, not out of party dogma, but in response to serious and
public allegations from Dominic Cummings, former chief adviser to the then
prime minister, remember him? He described Britain’s nuclear
infrastructure as a “dangerous disaster”, responsible for the secret
“cannibalisation” of other national security budgets and shielded from
meaningful scrutiny. Instead of confronting the truth, the review restates
familiar platitudes and leaves the public and Parliament no wiser about the
scale cost, or consequences of the UK’s nuclear commitment. The Defence
Secretary, who heard these warnings first-hand from the opposition bench,
is now in a position to act – he has chosen not to.
The National 8th June 2025,
https://www.thenational.scot/politics/25222635.defence-review-dodges-britains-nuclear-blind-spot/
Epstein, Israel, ISIS, Palantir
Caitlin Johnstone, Jun 06, 2025, https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/epstein-israel-isis-palantir?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=165336332&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
Amid the inevitable giant ego clash between Elon Musk and Donald Trump, Musk tweeted that the president “is in the Epstein files,” saying “That is the real reason they have not been made public.”
As we have discussed previously, it is a known fact that Trump is on the Epstein flight logs and has been obstructing the release of the Epstein files. It is also a known fact that Jeffrey Epstein worked with Israeli intelligence and was running a sexual blackmail operation, and that Trump has been bending over backwards to give Israel everything it wants while stomping out American free speech that is critical of Israel’s actions in Gaza.
“I’ve known Jeff [Epstein] for fifteen years. Terrific guy,” Trump said in 2002. “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”
There’s no reason to take seriously anything Elon Musk says during a textbook case of narcissistic collapse, but for the record if anyone in Washington is likely to have been blackmailed by Epstein it’s Donald John Trump.
Israel has admitted to arming ISIS-linked gangs as proxy forces in Gaza, throwing some cold water on the fuzzbrained narrative that the west is backing Israel to help defeat Islamic extremism. Israel is backing these forces in order to sow chaos and strife with the goal of advancing its ethnic cleansing objectives in the Palestinian territory.
❖
Lately whenever I talk about Israel’s ethnic cleansing agenda I get Israel supporters telling me “They’re not doing ethnic cleansing! They’re just making the Palestinians leave Gaza because they don’t want them there!” Which is yet another reminder of how stupid Israel apologists are, because the forced mass expulsion of an undesired ethnic group is precisely the definition of ethnic cleansing.
I have this conversation every single day:
Me: Here’s evidence of Israel doing something evil.
Israel supporter: All Hamas has to do is surrender and release the hostages and this ends immediately.
Me: No that’s false, Israel is openly saying the slaughter will continue until all Palestinians have been ethnically cleansed from Gaza regardless of whether Hamas surrenders or the hostages are released. Here’s a pile of evidence showing that this is the case.
Israel supporter: Yeah well that’s what happens when you start a war you can’t win. Next time don’t do terrorism.
Me: You were just claiming Hamas can end this at any time by making different decisions. Now that you know Hamas is powerless to stop Israel’s ethnic cleansing atrocities you have pivoted to saying all Palestinians deserve mass murder and ethnic cleansing. Sounds like you’ll just support Israel no matter what it does regardless of facts or morality.
Israel supporter: ANTISEMITE ANTISEMITE ANTISEMITE ANTISEMITE
❖
I keep meaning to talk about how the Trump administration is reportedly granting oligarch Peter Thiel’s odious company Palantir a central role in a massive authoritarian expansion in government surveillance powers which would see American data compiled and tracked across multiple government agencies.
For those who don’t know, Palantir is a CIA-backed surveillance and data mining tech company with longstanding ties to both the US intelligence cartel and to Israel, and has already been playing a crucial role in both the US empire’s sprawling surveillance network and Israeli atrocities against Palestinians.
This is being framed by the political/media class as a Trump policy, but it’s obviously a US empire policy. These sweeping surveillance powers are intended to remain in place long after Trump is gone, regardless of who happens to be in office.
We are being asked to believe that individuals becoming violently radicalized by the ongoing genocide in Gaza is of greater concern than the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
No. That isn’t going to happen.
Perhaps the best way to stop people from committing acts of violence in response to the genocide in Gaza would be to cease actively fucking facilitating the fucking genocide in Gaza.
Palestine supporters: Here’s a video that just came out showing Israel massacring Palestinian civilians again.
Israel supporters: Okay, so, two thousand years ago…
❖
The world waking up to Israel’s depravity reminds me of the moment I first saw how nasty and abusive my ex was. That first glimpse when I finally let myself see the sadism and ill will he had for me was the beginning of the end.
Maybe the world is beginning its own moment of clarity.
Watchdog probes Springbank baron over nuclear firm meeting
Herald Scotland, 29th May, Andrew Bowie, House of Lords,Politics
The House of Lords watchdog has launched an investigation into a Scottish Conservative peer over his role in arranging a meeting between a government minister and a Canadian nuclear technology firm he advises.
The probe into Ian Duncan by the House of Lords Commissioners for Standards’ Office, a former Scotland Office minister, follows a report published last month by the Guardian.
The paper stated that Lord Duncan of Springbank helped Terrestrial Energy secure a meeting in 2023 with Andrew Bowie, then the UK nuclear minister.
Lord Duncan, who has also served as a junior climate minister, has been an adviser to Terrestrial Energy since 2020.
The company is developing a new type of nuclear reactor it claims can be built more quickly and cheaply than traditional power stations.
Although Lord Duncan has not received a salary for the role, he has been granted share options—allowing him to buy company shares at a preferential rate if the business becomes profitable.
Documents released under freedom of information legislation show that, in 2023, Lord Duncan forwarded a letter from Terrestrial Energy’s chief executive, Simon Irish, to Mr Bowie.
In the letter, Mr Irish requested a meeting with the minister to introduce himself and brief him on the firm’s products. He noted that, alongside a partner, the company had “applied for a grant from [the] UK’s nuclear fuel fund programme”………………………………..
The House of Lords Commissioners for Standards’ website confirms that Lord Duncan is under investigation for a “potential breach” of paragraph 9(d) of the 12th edition of the House of Lords Code of Conduct, which states that “Members must not seek to profit from membership of the House by accepting or agreeing to accept payment or other incentive or reward in return for providing parliamentary advice or services.”………………………https://www.heraldscotland.com/politics/westminster/25198535.watchdog-probes-springbank-baron-nuclear-firm-meeting/
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