speaktruthseries — Gareth Porter is an independent, investigative journalist and historian who specializes in US national security policy and is a visiting scholar at the George Mason University’s Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution for the 2010-2011 academic year.
He writes regularly for Inter Press Service, but has also published investigative articles on Salon.com, The Nation, The American Prospect and The Raw Story. His opinion pieces have been published on Huffington Post, Firedoglake, Truthout, Counterpunch and other websites.
Porter was Saigon Bureau Chief of Dispatch News Service International in 1971 and later reported on trips to Southeast Asia for The Guardian, Asian Wall Street Journal and Pacific News Service. He is the author of four books on the Vietnam War and the political system of Vietnam. Historian Andrew Bacevich called his latest book, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War, published by University of California Press in 2005, “without a doubt, the most important contribution to the history of US national security policy to appear in the past decade.”
He has taught Southeast Asian politics and international studies at American University, City College of New York and the School of Advanced International Studies.
Gareth can be reached at:
703-600-9057
porter.gareth50@gmail.com
Additional video segments of the other speakers (Ray McGovern, David LaMotte, Josh Stieber, Conor Curran, Brock McIntosh and Mike Prysner) are available on YouTube and the 2-disc DVD is available for purchase at: www.speakingtruthtopowerseries.wordpress.com.
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as much as I respected Gareth Porter when I was a teenager, I and every other one of the people who read Porter were lied to by the man.
he betrayed his readers with lies and disgraced himself with his terribly biased and untrue reporting on Hue as well as becoming a scabrous liar and camp follower for the Khmer Rouge with “Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution”.
you call him an investigative journalist and historian, but he certainly lost all claim to being an historian by publishing claims from the Khmer Rouge without ever attempting to verify those lies.
in this video report, he spouts nonsense more than once.
there’s no reason to believe anything that Porter says unless he presents hard fact to back his words….and he rarely does.
he flatly declares that bin Laden was driven (poor fellow) to extremism by the stationing of American troops in Saudi Arabia, but, in bin Laden’s own words his primary complaint about Saudi Arabia is withthe Saudi’s
” (1) Suspension of the Islamic Shari’ah law and exchanging it with man made civil law…”
How funny, fuster, that you didn’t quote Number 2 from OBL’s fatwa:
Gareth Porter is right on in this video.
Jeremy—-number 2, in every list that I’ve ever read, follows number 1.
first things are put first.
and, as usual, Porter ignores first things and instead highlights secondary things, for no good reason. all his stuff is warped to fit his preconceptions and truth and accuracy rendered “number 2”.
Yes, first things first. The US isn’t responsible for what Saudi Arabia does, but it is responsible for what the US does. So, insofar as we want to assess how OUR actions are a threat to OUR security, Gareth Porter is absolutely right on in pointing out the fact that the presence of US troops in Saudia Arabia was among the primary motivations for OBL to commit terrorist attacks against the US.
Just as the US isn’t responsible for what Saudi Arabia does, the US is also not responsible for bin Laden’s bullshirt.
His dead, tired and demented act was a product of his owned warped society and not ours.
We owed him no consideration and no respect and we certainly had little reason to change any of our actions to appease him and his cohort. The world of his dreams and its laws and regulations is not compatible with that of the United States or any other democratic and pluralistic society.
Porter is an ass to even suggest that we should have acted differently to suit bin Laden … but Porter isn’t the type of guy who thinks deeply about the implications of things. He mostly has a very, very narrow range of preformed responses to things that bypass real analysis.
He disgraced himself as a reporter and historian long ago and should have attempted a different career rather than clinging to his failures.
Sorry, was there an actual argument in there somewhere? I mean, apart from the asinine strawman that Porter wished “to suit bin Laden”?
Jeremy, I’m sure that you’re sorry if you can’t recognize that Porter’s silly argument that our sending troops to Saudi Arabia is something that requires the US to bear some responsibility for having “caused” bun Laden’s actions against the US is equivalent to suggesting that we should not have sent those(infidel) troops to a place that bin Laden thought unsuitable for them.
Porter is not arguing that the U.S. shouldn’t have had troops in Saudi Arabia because bin Laden didn’t like them there. He is merely observing the common sense fact that such foreign policy actions have consequences.
Jeremy, the observation is banal and pointless without the implication that they should not have been there…. but, as Porter does often confuse distantly related things and try to present them as closely related, and as he often pointedly offers the pointless, you could be right.
The question is the reason they should not have been there, and you falsely attribute to Porter his reason as being that, well, Osama doesn’t want us there so we should go. It’s a dishonest strawman argument, and you know it.