Gareth Porter (born June 18, 1942) is an American historian, investigative journalist, author and policy analyst specializing in U.S. national security issues.
[21] Since 2006, Porter has been investigating allegations made by the U.S. and Israel about Iran's nuclear program,[22][23][non-primary source needed] and has reported on U.S. diplomacy and military and intelligence operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.
[25] In a series of articles and academic papers, Porter challenged President Richard Nixon's statement that there would be a communist "bloodbath" in South Vietnam if the U.S. withdrew its forces.
[33] Porter stated that Pike manipulated official figures to make it appear that over 4,700 civilians were murdered by the Viet Cong, and the numbers and causes of death were different.
[32] In 1976, George C. Hildebrand and Porter, then directors of the antiwar Indochina Resource Center, published a study in September 1975 challenging claims that the evacuation of Phnom Penh had been an “atrocity” causing famine.
Instead they said it was a response to Cambodians’ “urgent and fundamental needs” and “it was carried out only after careful planning for provision of food, water, rest and medical care.”[34] In 1976, Hildebrand and Porter author a book titled Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution, which compared the ways the U.S.-backed Khmer Republic and the administration of the Chinese-backed Communist Party of Kampuchea.
[35] The authors denied the media accounts of ideological fanaticism and cruelty by the latter,[36] and argued instead that the Democratic Kampuchea program constituted a rational response to the serious problems confronting the Cambodian nation: disease, starvation, economic devastation, and cities swollen with millions of refugees after years of American bombing.
Testifying before Congress in May 1977, Porter read a prepared statement which began: The situation in postwar Cambodia has generated an unprecedented wave of emotional—and at times even hysterical—comment in the United States and Western Europe.
The result is the suggestion, now rapidly hardening into conviction, that 1 to 2 million Cambodians have been the victims of a regime led by genocidal maniacs....the notion that the leadership of Democratic Kampuchea adopted a policy of physically eliminating whole classes of people, of purging anyone who was connected with the Lon Nol government, or punishing the entire urban population by putting them to work in the countryside after the "death march" from the cities, is a myth."
He criticized the work of other writers with different views of the character of the Khmer Rouge, stating: "Both [François Ponchaud's and [John] Barron and [Anthony] Paul's books fail to measure up to even the minimum standards of journalism or scholarship, and their overall conclusions and general tone must be regarded as the product of overheated emotions and lack of caution.
"[38][non-primary source needed] Hildebrand and Porter were criticized in April 1978 by British author William Shawcross in The New York Review of Books, who wrote that their "use of evidence can be seriously questioned".
Shawcross commented that "their apparent faith in Khmer Rouge assertions and statistics is surprising in two men who have spent so long analyzing the lies that governments tell".
[46] In 2012, Porter was awarded the annual Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism at the Frontline Club in London to acknowledge reporting that exposes official propaganda for a series of articles about U.S. policies in Afghanistan and Pakistan.