TFF Associates & Themes Blog

Gareth Porter became a TFF Associate in January 2015

Gareth Porter

Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist and historian who specialises in covering issues related to the U.S. national security state. His books on the Vietnam War and the Iran nuclear issue have reflected a new approach to understanding the outcomes of U.S. national security policy in terms of the institutional and personal interests of the decision-makers.

Porter was the winner of the 2012 Gellhorn Prize for Journalism, named after the renowned American foreign correspondent Martha Gellhorn, given annually by the UK-based Gellhorn Trust for journalism that uncovers government lies and propaganda.

He covered U.S. policy toward Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, and Syria for Inter Press Service from 2004 to 2014, and his stories were widely republished on news sites such as Huffington Post, Truthout, Antiwar.com and Counterpunch.

Since late 2014, Porter has been writing a weekly column of news analysis or Middle East Eye, a London-based news and analysis site. His longer investigative articles are published regularly at Truthout, and have also appeared on Foreign Policy, Salon, The Nation, the Huffington Post, Firedoglake, Counterpunch and many other websites.

Porter was Saigon bureau chief of Dispatch News Service International in 1971 while working on his Ph.D. in Southeast Asian studies and international politics at Cornell University. He later reported on trips to Southeast Asia for The London Observer, Asian Wall Street Journal and Pacific News Service.

He was Co-Director of the Indochina Resource Center in Washington, D.C., an anti-war education and lobbying organization, from 1973 to 1975, and helped write the last piece of legislation aimed at ending the U.S. war in Indochina definitely, which was filed in February 1975.

Porter’s books
Porter is the author of five books, including one of a widely-used college textbook on global environmental politics and three books on Vietnam and the U.S. war in Indochina. His latest book, Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare, published by Just World Books in February 2014, reveals the true story of the Iran nuclear issue that has been hidden and distorted by government propaganda and complete lack of media scrutiny.

In a review in The Nation historian Andrew Bacevich has called his book, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War (University of California Press in 2005), “without a doubt, the most important contribution to the history of U.S. national security policy to appear in the past decade.”

In the 1980s, Porter taught Southeast Asian politics and international studies at American University, City College of New York and the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

From 1990 to 2005, he worked for an environmental organization and then was a consultant on sustaining development and global environment.

Gareth Porter on Wikipedia.