Historian and journalist Gareth Porter discusses the new Iran NIE, it’s dual role as verifying the peaceful nature of the Iranian’s nuclear program while also pretending to verify that Iran had a nuclear weapons program in the first place (which remains unproven, confirmation in the NIE that the Iranians can in fact be negotiated with, the deterrent value in simply being able to get their centrifuges working right, the lowered standard of their “possessing the knowledge,” to make a nuke as casus belli and his view that the NIE has greatly reduced the possibility of war.
MP3 here. (19:19)
Dr. Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist on U.S. national security policy who has been independent since a brief period of university teaching in the 1980s. Dr. Porter is the author of four books, the latest of which is Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam (University of California Press, 2005). He has written regularly for Inter Press Service on U.S. policy toward Iraq and Iran since 2005.
Dr. Porter was both a Vietnam specialist and an anti-war activist during the Vietnam War and was Co-Director of Indochina Resource Center in Washington. Dr. Porter taught international studies at City College of New York and American University. He was the first Academic Director for Peace and Conflict Resolution in the Washington Semester program at American University.
