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Saturday, July 31, 2010 9:50 GMT

Stories by Gareth Porter

Gareth Porter is an historian with a PhD in South-east Asian studies from Cornell University in New York state. He was Saigon Bureau Chief for Dispatch News Service in 1970 and 1971. Porter has taught international studies at City College of New York and American University and has written several books on Vietnam, the most recent being "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War", published by the University of California Press in 2005. He has also written on war and diplomacy in Cambodia, Korea and the Philippines. Porter has been a news analyst for IPS focusing on U.S. policy and developments in Iraq and Iran since September 2005.

Leaked Reports Make Afghan War Policy More Vulnerable
Analysis by Gareth Porter*
The 92,000 reports on the war in Afghanistan made public by the whistleblower organisation WikiLeaks, and reported Monday by the Guardian, The New York Times and Der Spiegel, offer no major revelations that are entirely new, as did the Pentagon Papers to which they are inevitably being compared.

Amiri Told CIA Iran Has No Nuclear Bomb Programme
by Gareth Porter
Contrary to a news media narrative that Iranian scientist Shahram Amiri has provided intelligence on covert Iranian nuclear weapons work, CIA sources familiar with the Amiri case say he told his CIA handlers that there is no such Iranian nuclear weapons programme, according to a former CIA officer.

Amiri Told CIA Iran Has No Nuclear Bomb Programme
Analysis by Gareth Porter
Contrary to a news media narrative that Iranian scientist Shahram Amiri has provided intelligence on covert Iranian nuclear weapons work, CIA sources familiar with the Amiri case say he told his CIA handlers that there is no such Iranian nuclear weapons programme, according to a former CIA officer.

Clues Suggest Amiri Defection Was an Iranian Plant
by Gareth Porter*
U.S. officials are explaining Iranian scientist Shahram Amiri's return to Iran as the result of a defector having a change of heart because of his concern about Iranian government threats to his family. Iran and Amiri himself have insisted that it is a simple case of a victim of abduction escaping his captors.

McChrystal Probe of SOF Killings Excluded Key Eyewitnesses
by Gareth Porter and Ahmad Walid Fazly*
The follow-up investigation of a botched Special Operations Forces (SOF) raid in Gardez Feb. 12 that killed two government officials and three women, ordered by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal Apr. 5, was ostensibly aimed at reconciling divergent Afghan and U.S. accounts of what happened during and after the raid.

Heinonen Pushed Dubious Iran Nuclear Weapons Intel
Analysis by Gareth Porter*
Olli Heinonen, the Finnish nuclear engineer who resigned Thursday after five years as deputy director for safeguards of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), was the driving force in turning that agency into a mechanism to support U.N. Security Council sanctions against Iran.

Switch to Petraeus Betrays Afghan Policy Crisis
Analysis by Gareth Porter*
Despite President Barack Obama's denial that his decision to fire Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal as commander in Afghanistan and replace him with Gen. David Petraeus signified any differences with McChrystal over war strategy, the decision obviously reflects a desire by Obama to find a way out of a deepening policy crisis in Afghanistan.

McChrystal Faces "Iraq 2006 Moment" in Coming Months
Analysis by Gareth Porter*
Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal confronts the spectre of a collapse of U.S. political support for the war in Afghanistan in coming months comparable to the one that occurred in the Iraq War in late 2006.

CIA Drone Operators Oppose Strikes as Helping al Qaeda
by Gareth Porter*
Some CIA officers involved in the agency's drone strikes programme in Pakistan and elsewhere are privately expressing their opposition to the programme within the agency, because it is helping al Qaeda and its allies recruit, according to a retired military officer in contact with them.

Fuel Swap Shakes Sanctions Draft, Prods U.S. on New Iran Talks
Analysis by Gareth Porter*
Although the Barack Obama administration continued to dismiss the May 17 Iranian fuel swap agreement Friday, there are indications that Iran's move has shaken the agreement among U.N. Security Council members on sanctions, and is bringing Russian diplomatic pressure on the United States to participate in new talks with Iran on the swap arrangement - something the administration clearly wished to avoid.

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