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Gareth Porter

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Gareth Porter (born 18 June 1942, Independence, Kansas[citation needed]) is an American historian, investigative journalist and policy analyst on U.S. foreign and military policy. A strong opponent of U.S. wars in Southeast Asia, and the Middle East, he has also written on the potential for diplomatic compromise to end or avoid wars in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, the Philippines, Iraq and Iran. He is the author of a history of the origins of the Vietnam War, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam.[1] In 2012 Porter was awarded the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism that "challenges secrecy and mendacity in public affairs."[2]

Career

Porter graduated from the University of Illinois, received a master's degree in international politics from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in Southeast Asian politics from Cornell University.[citation needed] During the Vietnam War, Porter served as Saigon Bureau Chief for Dispatch News Service International[citation needed] and later co-director of the Indochina Resource Center,[citation needed] an anti-war research and education organization based in Washington, D.C. He taught international studies at the City College of New York and the American University during the period 1982-90.[citation needed]

Vietnam and Cambodia

Gareth Porter challenged the main rationale offered by U.S. President Richard Nixon in 1969 for continuing the Vietnam War, and argued that there would not be a communist "bloodbath" in South Vietnam after the U.S. withdrew its forces from Vietnam. He wrote a series of articles and monographs on the bloodbath argument.

His first monograph was The Myth of the Bloodbath: North Vietnam’s Land Reform Reconsidered in 1973.[3] He challenged the account of mass killings in North Vietnam's land reform (see Land reform in Vietnam) by Hoang Van Chi, Bernard Fall and others. Instead of tens or hundreds of thousands killed, Gareth Porter suggested that 800 to 2,500 would be a more realistic estimate. His analysis was disputed by a non-academic critic, Daniel Teodoru, whose critique was entered into a hearing record and published by the Internal Security Subcommittee of the United States Senate.[4][5] Porter replied to Teodoru point by point, and his response was entered into a separate hearing record published by the subcommittee.[6] Porter was also criticized by historian Robert F. Turner[7] and Hoang Van Chi.[8]

Porter wrote a detailed exposé[9] in 1974 of an account by U.S. Information Agency official Douglas Pike on what has been called the "Huế Massacre" by Vietnamese communists during the Tet Offensive of 1968. Porter alleged that Pike manipulated the official figures for civilian deaths in the destruction of Huế during Tet, primarily by U.S. bombing and artillery, to arrive at his figure of nearly 4,000 civilians murdered by the Viet Cong, and that Pike’s hypothesis about the Communist policy during the occupation of Huế was contradicted by captured Communist documents and other evidence.

In 1976-77, continuing his challenge to the bloodbath argument, Gareth Porter rejected early accounts of the mass killings by the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia. With George Hildebrand he wrote a book, Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution, which documented the deaths from starvation of thousands of people in Phnom Penh in the last months of the war in Cambodia and argued that there was a legitimate basis for sending most of the population of Phnom Penh—much of which had been refugees from rural areas—back to rural areas. Critics have argued that the book's sources included official statements from Khmer Rouge media about the availability of food in rural areas. Testifying before Congress in May 1977, Gareth Porter said that "the notion that the leadership of Democratic Kampuchea adopted a policy of physically eliminating whole classes of people" was "a myth fostered primarily by the authors of a Readers Digest book."[10] Congressman Stephen J. Solarz compared Gareth Porter to those who denied the murder of 6 million Jews in the Nazi Holocaust. Gareth Porter rejected this comparison and cited reporting by reputable news outlets in support of this position.[11]

But in an appearance on The Today Show in August 1978, Porter agreed that the Khmer Rouge regime was guilty of mass killings and mass starvation.[citation needed] He reiterated that view in articles during the 1980s in The Guardian, The Nation, and Foreign Affairs among other publications.[citation needed] He also wrote articles and op-eds criticizing the Reagan administration[citation needed] and congressional supporters like Solarz[citation needed] for a U.S. policy of collaborating with Thailand and China[citation needed] to strengthen the military forces of Pol Pot in Cambodia.[citation needed]

Later career

Porter has written regular news reports and news analyses on political, diplomatic and military developments in regard to Middle East conflicts for Inter Press Service since 2005. He was the first journalist to provide a detailed account of the alleged secret Iranian diplomatic proposal to the United States in 2003,[12] and has published an in-depth analysis of an exit strategy for Iraq.[13]

In 2012, Porter was interviewed by Iran's Press TV on the United States' use of depleted uranium ammunition in Afghanistan, and he noted that while international coalitions have unsuccessfully tried to ban the use of uranium weapons, the United States is reportedly trying to find alternative weaponry for its armor-penetration needs.[14] He has written for Consortium News, repudiating a claim made by the International Atomic Energy Agency that Iran has built an explosives chamber to test components of a nuclear weapon.[15] His articles also appear on Counterpunch,[16] The Huffington Post,[17] Inter Press Service News Agency[18] and Antiwar.com.[19]

In 2012, Porter was awarded the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism.[20]

Bibliography

  • A Peace Denied (1975) – An analysis of the negotiation and implementation of the 1973 Paris Peace Agreement on Vietnam.
  • Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution (1976) - This book challenged claims that mass killings were being carried out by the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia.
  • Vietnam: A History in Documents (1981) – Porter originally edited this documentary history of the war in a two-volume hardcover edition published in 1979, and it was reissued in paperback under the above-mentioned title.
  • Vietnam: the Politics of Bureaucratic Socialism (1993)
  • Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam (2005) – This book challenges the liberal interpretation that the Vietnam war was the result of exaggeration of the Communist threat, and emphasizes the role of overconfidence that came with a decisive U.S. power advantage over the Soviet Union and China. Historian Andrew Bacevich, reviewing Perils of Dominance in The Nation, called it "without a doubt, the most important contribution to the history of U.S. national security policy to appear in the past decade."

References

  1. ^ Porter, Gareth. "Perils of Dominance", University of California Press.
  2. ^ "Truthout Contributor Gareth Porter Wins Prestigious Journalism Award"; The Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism, home page
  3. ^ Porter, Gareth. "The Myth of the Bloodbath", Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars. September 1973.
  4. ^ 0720213019a.pdf
  5. ^ 0720213019b.pdf
  6. ^ 2390718001.pdf
  7. ^ Turner, Robert F. "Expert Punctures 'No Bloodbath' Myth". Human Events, November 11, 1972.
  8. ^ Teodoru, Daniel and Hoang Van Chi, Response to Gareth Porter, National Student Coordinating Committee, December 20, 1972.
  9. ^ The 1968 'Hue Massacre', Indochina Chronicle 33 (June 24, 1974), 2-13
  10. ^ 2391202002B.pdf
  11. ^ Transcript
  12. ^ Porter, Gareth. "Burnt Offering", The American prospect. May 21, 2006.
  13. ^ Porter, Gareth. "The Third Option in Iraq: A Responsible Exit Strategy", Middle East Policy Council. V. XII, Fall 2005, Number 3.
  14. ^ US used depleted uranium in recent wars
  15. ^ Cracks Open in Iran Nuke Charges
  16. ^ Search results from Counterpunch website
  17. ^ "Huffington Post - Gareth Porter articles"
  18. ^ "IPS.org - Gareth Porter articles"
  19. ^ "Antiwar.com - Gareth Porter"
  20. ^ "Gareth Porter wins Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism". Inter Press Service. 2012-06-15. Retrieved 16 June 2012.

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