Gareth Porter

After initially insisting that Syria give United Nations investigators unimpeded access to the site of an alleged nerve gas attack, the administration of President Barack Obama reversed its position on Sunday and tried unsuccessfully to get the UN to call off its investigation. The administration’s reversal, which came within hours of the deal reached between … Continue reading “In Rush to Strike Syria, U.S. Tried to Derail U.N. Probe”

Argentine prosecutor Alberto Nisman based his 2006 warrant for the arrest of top Iranian officials in the bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires in 1994 on the claims of representatives of the armed Iranian opposition Mujahedin E Khalq (MEK), the full text of the document reveals. The central piece of evidence cited … Continue reading “Indictment of Iran for ’94 Terror Bombing Relied on MEK”

Newly published recollections by the former French ambassador to Iran suggest that Iran was not running a covert nuclear weapons programme that it then decided to halt in late 2003, as concluded by U.S. intelligence in 2007. Ambassador Francois Nicoullaud recounted conversations with high-ranking Iranian officials indicating that Tehran’s then nuclear policy chief – and … Continue reading “Ex-Envoy’s Account Clarifies Iran’s 2003 Nuclear Decision”

Alberto Nisman, the Argentine prosecutor who was prevented by Argentine President Cristina Kirchner from testifying before a U.S. House subcommittee investigating alleged Iranian terrorist networks in the Americas here this week, claimed in a recent report that Tehran was involved in a 2007 plot to blow up fuel tanks at New York’s John F. Kennedy … Continue reading “No Evidence for Charge Iran Linked to JFK Terror Plot”

“Going to Tehran” arguably represents the most important work on the subject of U.S.-Iran relations to be published thus far. Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett tackle not only U.S. policy toward Iran but the broader context of Middle East policy with a systematic analytical perspective informed by personal experience, as well as very extensive … Continue reading “Former Insiders Criticize Iran Policy as US Hegemony”

The suspect graph of a nuclear explosion reportedly provided to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) as evidence of Iranian computer modeling of nuclear weapons yields appears to have been adapted from a very similar graph in a scholarly journal article published in January 2009 and available on the internet. Graph published by the scholarly … Continue reading “Iranian Bomb Graph Appears Adapted from One on Internet”

Paula Broadwell, whose affair with Gen. David Petraeus brought his career to a sudden end last week, had sought to help defend his decision in 2010 to allow village destruction in Afghanistan that not only violated his own previous guidance but the international laws of war. But her efforts had the opposite effect. The new … Continue reading “Broadwell Defended Petraeus’ Village Destruction Policy”