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Gareth Porter

By Gareth Porter, TFF Associate*

The framework agreement reached on Thursday night clearly gives the P5+1 a combination of constraints on Iran’s nuclear programme that should reassure all but the most bellicose opponents of diplomacy. It also provides the basis for at least a minimum of sanctions relief in the early phase of its implementation that Iran required, but some of the conditions on that relief are likely create new issue between Iran and the Western powers over the process.

The agreement’s dependence on decisions by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the penchant of Israeli intelligence for discovering new evidence of illicit Iranian activities will encourage moves to delay or obstruct relief of sanctions.

US and European officials had been telling reporters that they would phase out their sanctions on oil and banking in return for Iranian actions to modify its programme only gradually over several years, and made it clear that the purpose of this strategy was to maintain “leverage” on Iran.

Iran, however, was demanding that those sanctions be lifted immediately upon delivering on their commitments under agreement. Read the rest of this entry »

Gareth Porter, investigative reporter, author of the book, Manufactured Crisis,and new TFF Associate shares his formidable knowledge about the problems and what might happen in caase the U.S. is not willing to lift the sanctions as soon as possible after a deal has been signed.

Gareth Porter

By Gareth Porter

The “open letter” from Senator Tom Cotton and 46 other Republican Senators to the leadership of Iran, which even Republicans themselves admit was aimed at encouraging Iranian opponents of the nuclear negotiations to argue that the United States cannot be counted on to keep the bargain, has created a new political firestorm. It has been harshly denounced by Democratic loyalists as “stunning” and “appalling”, and critics have accused the signers of the letter of being “treasonous” for allegedly violating a law forbidding citizens from negotiating with a foreign power.

But the response to the letter has primarily distracted public attention from the real issue it raises: how the big funders of the Likud Party in Israel control Congressional actions on Iran.

The infamous letter is a ham-handed effort by Republican supporters of the Netanyahu government to blow up the nuclear negotiations between the United States and Iran. The idea was to encourage Iranians to conclude that the United States would not actually carry out its obligations under the agreement – i.e. the lifting of sanctions against Iran. Read the rest of this entry »

Gareth Porter

By Gareth Porter

Western news media has feasted on Prime Minister Netanyahu’s talk and the reactions to it as a rare political spectacle rich in personalities in conflict. But the real story of Netanyahu’s speech is that he is continuing a long tradition in Israeli politics of demonising Iran to advance domestic and foreign policy interests.

The history of that practice, in which Netanyahu has played a central role going back nearly two decades, shows that it has been based on a conscious strategy of vastly exaggerating the threat from Iran.

In conjuring the spectre of Iranian genocide against Israelis, Netanyahu was playing two political games simultaneously. He was exploiting the fears of the Israeli population associated with the Holocaust to boost his electoral prospects while at the same time exploiting the readiness of most members of US Congress to support whatever Netanyahu orders on Iran policy. Read the rest of this entry »

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.