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"monitoring" mapped for war....

Ever since Israel launched its illegal war of aggression against Iran on 13 June, speculation has swirled around the role played by MOSAIC – a tool created by shadowy spy-tech firm Palantir. 

This software has been deeply embedded within the International Atomic Energy Agency's (IAEA) operations, particularly its “safeguarding” mission: inspections and monitoring state compliance with non-proliferation agreements. 

 

The IAEA's MOSAIC weapon: Predictive espionage and the war on Iran
Backed by US funding and Palantir’s AI tools, the IAEA turned its Iran inspections into a surveillance regime that blurred the line between monitoring and military targeting.

Kit Klarenberg

 

MOSAIC has been central to this work for a decade and was quietly integrated by former US president Barack Obama's administration into the July 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear deal with Iran.

Espionage disguised as oversight

The deal granted IAEA inspectors unfettered access to Iran's nuclear facilities to confirm the absence of a nuclear weapons program. In the process, the agency accumulated an immense trove of data: surveillance imagery, sensor measurements, facility documents – all of which were fed into MOSAIC's predictive system.

Yet the software's pivotal role in the deal remained concealed until a Bloomberg exposé in May 2018, just days before US President Donald Trump, during his first term, unilaterally tore up the agreement and launched Washington's so-called “maximum pressure” campaign against Tehran.

Despite Trump tearing up the deal, inspections of Iranian nuclear facilities continued, as did MOSAIC's monitoring of Tehran’s nuclear program. As Bloomberg noted, Palantir’s technology helped the IAEA scrutinize vast swaths of information from disparate sources, including 400 million “digital objects” globally, such as “social media feeds and satellite photographs inside Iran” – a capability that “raised concern the IAEA may overstep the boundary between nuclear monitoring and intelligence-gathering." 

The Bloomberg piece also provided fodder for an oft-stated Iranian concern that Mosaic was helping Israelis track Iranian scientists for assassination:

"The tool is at the analytical core of the agency’s new $50 million MOSAIC platform, turning databases of classified information into maps that help inspectors visualize ties between the people, places and material involved in nuclear activities, IAEA documents show."

Bloomberg quoted the head of a British company that “advises governments on verification issues” on the hazards of false data being fed into MOSAIC, “either by accident or design”:

“You will generate a false return if you add a false assumption into the system without making the appropriate qualifier …You’ll end up convincing yourself that shadows are real.”

The underlying and ongoing concern for Tehran is that MOSAIC is heavily influenced by Palantir’s “predictive-policing software.” Employed by many law enforcement agencies across the western world at enormous expense, this technology is highly controversial and has been found to exhibit dangerous, misleading biases, leading to erroneous “pre-crime” interventions. 

Indeed, MIT Technology Review has flat-out called for the dismantlement of predictive tech in a report that looks at how dangerous the technology has been in analyzing even domestic criminal data: 

“Lack of transparency and biased training data mean these tools are not fit for purpose. If we can’t fix them, we should ditch them.”

Given the inclusion of dubious intelligence – such as the Mossad-stolen Iranian nuclear archive, openly celebrated by the Israeli agency for its deception – it is highly probable that such corrupted data triggered unjustified inspections. Bloomberg quoted a negotiator who helped craft the 2015 deal, expressing concern over how “dirty or unstructured data” could lead to “a flurry of unnecessary snap inspections.” 

Palantir’s software specifically helped the IAEA “plan and justify unscheduled probes” – at least 60 of these conducted until US-Israeli strikes put an end to inspections. 

Data as a weapon 

On 31 May, the IAEA released a report suggesting Iran may still be developing nuclear weapons. Although it presented no new evidence, its dubious charges related “to activities dating back decades” at three sites where, purportedly, until the early 2000s, “undeclared nuclear material” was handled. 

Its findings prompted the UN nuclear watchdog's Board of Governors to charge Iran as “in breach of its non-proliferation obligations” on 12 June, providing Tel Aviv with a propaganda pretext for its illegal attack the next day.

On 17 June, IAEA chief Rafael Grossi conceded that the agency had “no proof of a systematic effort to move into a nuclear weapon” by Tehran. Still, the damage was done. Iranian lawmakers, citing the IAEA's secret sharing of sensitive data with Tel Aviv and Grossi's covert collusion with Israeli officials, suspended all cooperation with the agency.

This may be the wisest course for other states under IAEA scrutiny. MOSAIC is now so entwined with the agency's daily function that any country targeted for regime change could find itself accused of nuclear ambitions based on manufactured evidence. 

A 2017 IAEA document reveals MOSAIC is comprised of “over 20 different software development projects.” Launched in May 2015, it was hoped to revolutionize “safeguarding” the world over.

The report described MOSAIC as providing inspectors with “a suite of tools with which to face the challenges of tomorrow.” For instance, the Electronic Verification Package (EVP) enables field data – including planning, reporting, and review – to be automatically collected and processed. When inspectors visit a facility, they record vast amounts of information – instantly analyzed at headquarters via EVP.

Elsewhere, the Collaborative Analysis Platform (CAP) enables deep cross-referencing of internal and open-source data, including overhead imagery. It supports the IAEA's core safeguarding processes: “planning, information collection and analysis, verification, and evaluation.”

CAP gives the IAEA “the capability to search, collect, and integrate multiple data and information sources to enable comprehensive analysis.” An IAEA official quoted in the document declared the platform represented “a major leap forward in analytics” and “a game changer”, allowing the IAEA to collect “a much greater amount of information, and also analyze that information in greater depth than before.”

Such analytical capacity grants inspectors “the ability to establish relationships between information from multiple sources, across time,” and “make sense out of huge amounts of data.”

CAP also assists in the collection and evaluation of open-source information. The document noted the platform could “process much more open-source information than the Department currently has capacity for,” and lets staff “search information across the entire repository; carefully cross-check different types of information; and utilize information in visual formats,” such as “overhead imagery.”

‘Extra-budgetary contributions’ from the US government

All of this intelligence is highly sensitive and would be a treasure trove for states intent on military action against nations in the IAEA's crosshairs. According to the 2017 report, inspectors spent 13,248 days in the field in 2015 and inspected 709 nuclear facilities. Those figures have since grown. All the while, MOSAIC – a little-known tool for the “early detection of the misuse of nuclear material or technology” – has remained operational.

The report noted that MOSAIC was financed through the IAEA's regular budget, the Major Capital Investment Fund, and “extra-budgetary contributions.” Its cost at the time was around €41 million (approximately $44.15 million) – almost 10 percent of the agency's total annual budget. The source and size of those extra-budgetary contributions remain vague, perhaps deliberately, but a Congressional Research Service briefing note indicates Washington formally funds the IAEA to the tune of over $100 million annually.

Moreover, the US consistently provides in excess of $90 million in extra-budgetary contributions every year. In other words, almost half of the IAEA’s budget flows from Stateside, suggesting MOSAIC was created wholly on Washington’s dime. 

The timing of its rollout – two months prior to the Obama administration’s nuclear deal being agreed – could further indicate it was explicitly funded with Iran in mind. As then-IAEA director general Yukiya Amano revealed in March 2018, the association’s penetration of Tehran was unprecedented.

At a press conference, Amano referred to the IAEA’s nuclear “verification regime” in Iran as “the world’s most robust.” The organization’s inspectors spent “3,000 calendar days per year on the ground” in the country, capturing “hundreds of thousands of images captured daily by our sophisticated surveillance cameras,” which was “about half of the total number of such images that we collect throughout the world.” 

In all, “over one million pieces of open source information” were collected by the IAEA monthly.

The IAEA’s fixation on Iran, coupled with suspicions that it provided the names of nuclear scientists – later assassinated by Israel – raises the question: Was the 2015 deal always an industrial-scale espionage operation designed to prepare for war?

A wave of assassinations of nuclear scientists and IRGC commanders in the early stages of Tel Aviv's failed war on Iran appears to support that conclusion.

Iranian officials not only suspended cooperation with the IAEA and ordered the dismantlement of inspection cameras, but also rejected Grossi’s request to visit bombed nuclear sites. Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi branded the IAEA chief's insistence on visiting under the pretext of safeguards "meaningless and possibly even malign in intent."

What is clear is that any state still cooperating with the IAEA must now reckon with the possibility that it is not being monitored – it is being mapped for war.

https://thecradle.co/articles/the-iaeas-mosaic-weapon-predictive-espionage-and-the-war-on-iran

 

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

rubber hammer....

Behind the "12-Day War"
by Thierry Meyssan
Operations "The Rising Lion" and "Midnight Hammer" were demonstrations of force mobilizing considerable resources. They lasted no more than 12 days in total. Their results are unknown, but much has been learned about those who planned them. The International Atomic Energy Agency, which relied on AI software rather than the observations of its inspectors, is now demonetized. The damage committed at Iranian nuclear research sites is questionable. Only the assassinations of military leaders and civilian scientists have been established.

 

Several elements of the "12-Day War" remain unexplained, which doesn’t stop each major player (Israel, the United States, and Iran) from claiming to have won it. Above all, the questions raised about fundamental elements make it difficult to establish with certainty whether Washington deliberately violated international law or whether it believed it had to do so to avoid much worse.

THE IRANIAN NUCLEAR RESEARCH PROGRAM

We have, in these columns, explained at length the conflict surrounding Iranian nuclear research [1]. It began in 1981 when the Islamic Republic of Iran demanded the enriched uranium to which it was entitled under the Iranian-French nuclear program, proposed by President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and Prime Minister Jacques Chirac to Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, as part of the US "Atoms for Peace" program. It was in this context, and in the face of France’s refusal to give the Islamic Republic what it had intended for imperial Iran, that attacks by the Lebanese Revolutionary Armed Factions, linked to Iran, eliminated US and Israeli diplomats in France.

This conflict developed following the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Iraq (2003). Washington and London, which had invented the fabrication of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, extended it to that of Iran’s weapons of mass destruction. They succeeded in having the United Nations Security Council adopt Resolutions 1737 (December 23, 2006) and 1747 (March 24, 2007), which were intended to pave the way for war against Iran. However, following the Iraq Study Group, known as the "Baker-Hamilton Commission," these fantasies were abandoned by Washington, and the conflict with France was resolved.

The conflict flared up again when Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad launched a vast research program on nuclear fusion; a project that was inherently dual, meaning it could have both civilian and military applications. [2] Supported by a majority of UN member states, he then rightly refused to allow the Security Council to demand that Iran surrender one of its rights in order to "restore the confidence" of others in it (resolution 1696 of 31 July 2006); a polemic exemplary of the drift that the West has influenced in the United Nations following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Iran, which had already experienced the overthrow of Mohammad Mossadegh, when he attempted to nationalise Iranian oil, could not fail to resist this Western attempt to prevent it from finding an inexhaustible source of energy. The controversy worsened with the adoption, again by the Security Council against the General Assembly, of resolution 1929 of 9 June 2010,

The "revisionist Zionists" (i.e., the disciples of the fascist Vladimir Jabotinsky)—not to be confused with the "Zionists" tout court, i.e., the disciples of Theodor Hertzl—seized on the issue. Fifteen years later, they succeeded in infiltrating the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), of which Israel is not a member, and influencing its director, the Argentinian Rafael Grossi [3].

On April 2, 2025, Jean-Noël Barrot, French Minister of Foreign Affairs, declared before the Foreign Affairs Committee of the National Assembly: "We only have a few months before the expiration of this agreement [the JCPOA, from which the United States withdrew]. If it fails, a military confrontation seems almost inevitable." » [4] He added that the new EU "sanctions" against Iran related to the detention of foreign citizens would be approved in the coming weeks.

On April 28, 2025, the United Nations Security Council held two closed-door meetings on the "Non-Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction." We do not know precisely what was discussed, but the meeting was stormy, as evidenced by the publication the following day of a letter of protest from the Islamic Republic of Iran (S/2025/261 [5]). According to this document, Jean-Noël Barrot, the French Minister of Foreign Affairs, who had flown in from Paris specially for the occasion, allegedly claimed that "Iran [is] on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons."

Jean-Noël Barrot and his Minister Delegate for Europe, Benjamin Haddad, took office in Michel Barnier’s government and were reappointed in François Bayrou’s. While Jean-Noël Barrot’s thinking is not well known, that of his Minister Delegate is. Benjamin Haddad is not simply a former senior official in the European Union’s foreign service; he was also a long-time employee of the Tikvah Fund of the "revisionist Zionist" Elliott Abrams [6]. It was he who defined Benjamin Netanyahu’s strategy to convince Europeans to support Israel against the Palestinians [7].

A month later, the IAEA asserted, in its two quarterly reports on Verification and Monitoring in the Islamic Republic of Iran in Light of UN Security Council Resolution 2231 (2015) [8] and on the NPT Safeguards Agreement with the Islamic Republic of Iran, that Iran [9] and Tehran were hiding something. However, these documents were not based on objective observations, but on the conclusions of the artificial intelligence software Mosaic. However, this software, designed to detect terrorist plots from an infinite amount of data, did not simply analyze them, but presented alerts as certainties. For the first time, an AI, designed to detect anomalies, was used to describe reality. As a result, the anomalies detected in Iran were interpreted as the preparation of an atomic bomb. On this grotesque and expensive basis, Rafael Grossi alerted the Agency’s Board of Governors on June 12. 

The Mosaic software is produced by Palantir Technologies, a company whose main clients include the CIA, the Pentagon, the IDF, and the Mossad, as well as the French Directorate General for Internal Security (DGSI). It is owned by the South African-American-New Zealander Peter Thiel, director of the Bilderberg Group.

During a particularly heated meeting on June 12, the IAEA Board of Governors adopted a resolution [10] stating that "the Director General, as stated in document GOV/2025/25, cannot provide assurance that Iran’s nuclear program is exclusively peaceful." Despite China and Russia’s protests, the IAEA referred the matter to the United Nations Security Council. The Russian delegation to the UN then urgently distributed an analysis (S/2025/377) denouncing the duplicity of Germany, France, and the United Kingdom and their misleading interpretation of IAEA data [11]. Reading this document, it is clear that these three countries were not fooled by Rafael Grossi, but participated in its staging.

OPERATION "RISING LION"

Without waiting, Israel launched Operation "Rising Lion." At this point, it is unclear whether the three European countries conspired to pave the way for this operation. They may simply have been manipulated into supporting it. However, previous episodes, such as that of June 2024 [12], attest that these states and their allies were no longer respecting their obligation to lift their "sanctions" against Iran, particularly as signatories to the Vienna Agreement (JCPoA). Just as in the 1980s, they no longer considered themselves bound by their signature of the nuclear agreement with Iran after the Islamic Republic succeeded the Iranian Empire, so today, they no longer consider themselves bound by their signature of the JCPoA after the United States denounced it. The first hypothesis is therefore the most likely.

Officially, US President Donald Trump was also reportedly convinced that Iran was preparing to build a nuclear bomb within two weeks. At least, that’s what he said, shutting up his National Intelligence Director, Tulsi Gabbard, who claimed that Iran had no military nuclear program [13].

In any case, informed by Tulsi Gabbard of the imminence of an Israeli nuclear attack on Iran ("Samson Option") against its nuclear research centers, President Trump proposed supporting a conventional Israeli attack on Iran, rather than allowing it to carry out a nuclear bombing. The Israeli Air Force therefore launched a massive attack against Iranian nuclear research centers, its ballistic missile system, and several of its military leaders and nuclear scientists. All this was based on intelligence from US radars at Camp al-Udeid (Qatar), as Israeli radars do not cover Iran.

According to the presentation that Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar made to the Security Council (S/2025/390 [14]), Israel claims to have sought to "neutralize the existential and imminent threat posed by Iran’s nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs." It relies on IAEA discussions (based not on observations, but on the artificial intelligence of the Mosaic software) to falsely claim that Iran is not complying with its obligations to the IAEA and has "accelerated its clandestine efforts to develop nuclear weapons." However, even assuming that Israeli leaders believed that Iran would soon acquire an atomic bomb and use it against them, "The Lion Rising" also targeted the ballistic missile system, several of the military leaders and nuclear scientists. The Israeli attack therefore does not aim at the stated objective, but at the destruction of Iranian defense and research resources.

The question of the violation of international commitments by Israel and the United States, that is, international law [15], arises once again. Israel’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Ambassador Danny Danon, spoke of a "preventive and preemptive" war. Thus, Israel would have acted without being provoked (preventively) and in the interest of the international community (preemption). In this game, anyone could assassinate their neighbor at any time. It has already been noted, even before Operation Iron Swords in Gaza, that Israel behaves without regard for the human lives of civilians, that is, to use the words of the 1899 Hague Conference (foundation of international law), not "like a civilized nation, but like barbarians." The military participation of the United States, with the radars at the al-Udeid base, allows us to make the same judgment about Washington’s behavior.

Israel has not limited itself to bombings from its planes. The IDF has also used drones, present in Iran, to assassinate military leaders and nuclear scientists in their homes. This is the second time this method has been used, the first being the attack on Ukraine by Russian strategic bombers (Operation "Spider’s Web") on June 1, 2025. How can we not draw parallels between the two operations, especially since it was noted at the time that this action had been coordinated with a foreign secret service, whether American or Israeli? Besides the fact that we should reconsider the possibility that Israel could have declared war on Russia, we must remember that the "integral nationalist" General Vasyl Maliuk, director of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), is a great admirer of SS officer Otto Skorzeny [16]. However, after World War II, Skorzeny, protected by the CIA and MI6, founded an agency, the "Paladin Group," which worked for Israel, among other things. Of course, Israel did not bomb the Bushehr nuclear power plant, where many Russian engineers work.

Moreover, the day before the Israeli attack, the Iranian press published the first nuclear documents stolen by Iranian intelligence from Israel. One of these is a list of nuclear scientists provided to Tel Aviv by Rafael Grossi. It turns out that this is the exact list of scientists assassinated during Operation "The Rising Lion." This does not mean that the IAEA director himself designated the men to be killed, but it does make him complicit in their deaths.

OPERATION MIDNIGHT HAMMER

President Donald Trump launched Operation Midnight Hammer on the night of June 21-22. The goal was to destroy three Iranian nuclear research sites. According to the official version, the GBU-57 bombs could be launched one after the other into the same hole, penetrating 80 meters of granite. Maybe, maybe not. In any case, by assuring that the mission was accomplished, the US president intended to deprive West Jerusalem of any justification for continuing its attack on Iran. Benjamin Netanyahu made no secret of the fact that he was also working to overthrow the "regime," and Donald Trump appeared not to be opposed to it.

While a controversy erupted in Washington with the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the IDF continued to bomb Iran, destroying fuel stocks and various infrastructure. This was a far cry from the stated objectives, just as in Gaza, starving the civilian population has no connection with the sole stated objective of defeating Hamas.

President Trump then banged his fist on the table, and the Israeli planes still heading towards Iran were forced to halt their mission and return to their bases.

Thierry Meyssan
Translation
Roger Lagassé

 

https://www.voltairenet.org/article222580.html

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.