Gareth Porter

A new article on CENTCOM commander Adm. William Fallon confirms that his public statements last fall ruling out war against Iran last fall were not coordinated with the White House and landed him in trouble more than once with President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. In an admiring article on Fallon in … Continue reading “Fallon’s ‘No Iran War’ Line Angered White House”

For months, U.S. President George W. Bush and Gen. David Petraeus have been touting the program of recruiting tens of thousands of Sunnis into U.S.-financed "Awakening Councils" as a master stroke of Iraq strategy which has weakened al-Qaeda in Iraq and helps reduce sectarian conflict through "bottom-up reconciliation." But the mainstream Sunni insurgents who have … Continue reading “Sunni Insurgents Exploit US-Sponsored Militias”

The George W. Bush administration has long pushed the "laptop documents" – 1,000 pages of technical documents supposedly from a stolen Iranian laptop – as hard evidence of Iranian intentions to build a nuclear weapon. Now charges based on those documents pose the only remaining obstacles to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) declaring that … Continue reading “Iran Nuke Laptop Data Came from Terror Group”

In a sharp departure from U.S. policy, a leading French diplomat has called on the international coalition sponsoring UN sanctions against Iran to support a larger Iranian role in the Middle East. Ambassador to the United States Pierre Vimont told a conference on Iran at the Middle East Institute in Washington Friday that one reason … Continue reading “Accept Iran’s Regional Role, Says French Envoy”

The Iranian defector who was the source of Argentina’s allegation that Iranian officials began planning the Jul. 18, 1994 terror bombing of a Jewish community center at a meeting nearly a year earlier had been dismissed as unreliable by US officials, according to the FBI agent who led the US team assisting the investigation in … Continue reading “US Officials Rejected Key Source on ’94 Argentina Bombing”

Senior Pentagon officials, evidently reflecting a broader administration policy decision, used an off-the-record Pentagon briefing to turn the Jan. 6 U.S.-Iranian incident in the Strait of Hormuz into a sensational story demonstrating Iran’s military aggressiveness, a reconstruction of the events following the incident shows. The initial press stories on the incident, all of which can … Continue reading “How the Pentagon Planted a False Story”

Despite the official and media portrayal of the incident in the Strait of Hormuz early Monday morning as a serious threat to US ships from Iranian speedboats that nearly resulted in a "battle at sea," new information over the past three days suggests that the incident did not involve such a threat and that no … Continue reading “Official Version of Naval Incident Starts to Unravel”

A State Department official’s assertion in late December that Iran had exerted a restraining influence on Iraqi Shi’ite militia violence signaled a major divergence of views between Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates over how to portray Iran’s role in Iraq. In an interview with the Washington Post published Dec. … Continue reading “Rice and Gates Divided over Iran’s Role in Iraq”

White House officials have now admitted that George W. Bush was told that the intelligence assessment on a covert Iranian nuclear program might change last August, but they have avoided answering the question of when the president was first informed about the new intelligence that led to that revised assessment. That evasion is necessary, it … Continue reading “Did Bush Get New Iran Intel Last Winter?”

The reported White House resistance to the National Intelligence Estimate’s conclusion that Iran had abandoned a nuclear weapons program in 2003 was an effort to save a political tactic the George W. Bush administration had been using since early 2004, despite the absence of an intelligence analysis to support it. The charge that Iran had … Continue reading “White House Fought NIE Over an Old Charge”