Author: Gareth Porter
Paperback: 312 pages
Publisher: Just World Books (February 14, 2014)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1935982338
ISBN-13: 978-1935982333
Product Description
For several years now, Israel and U.S. officials and much of the mainstream media have maintained a steady drumbeat of allegations and accusations that the government of Iran has been pursuing a secret, "military" adjunct to its (quite legal, and regularly inspected) civilian nuclear program. Numerous western officials and commentators have warned that there will be a time coming very soon, beyond which this alleged military nuclear program will be unstoppable. Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli officials have warned that military action must be taken, if necessary, to prevent this from happening. Meantime, Washington has been leading a worldwide effort to impose punishing economic sanctions on Iran, in an effort to make it give up this alleged nuclear-weapons program.
But where is the evidence that this program even exists? Veteran investigative journalist Gareth Porter has been following this issue closely for over six years. In his book, Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare, he will show how Israel and the George W. Bush administration successfully portrayed the various actions taken by Western nations and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) as responses to a long history of Iranian covert work on militarization of its nuclear program. In reality, however, the United States had intervened aggressively as early as 1983 to prevent Iran from its open effort to pursue its legitimate right to peaceful nuclear power-- and it was that aggressive U.S. intervention that pushed Iran to resort to black market transactions in order to acquire the technology needed for its civilian nuclear power program.
At the center of the book will be the story of how documents alleged to have been stolen from an Iranian nuclear weapons research program became the primary driving force in building a consensus that Iran did have such a covert program. But it will detail the multiple indications that the documents were fraudulent, based on a series of contradictions between material in the documents themselves and well-established facts. Manufactured Crisis will reveal, on the basis of interviews with Iranian and former IAEA officials, how the IAEA has been manipulated to put out reports suggesting that Iran had such a covert weapons program-- based overwhelmingly on documents that originated in Israel. It will also document the fact that U.S. intelligence on the Iranian nuclear program has been systematically distorted by political hostility toward Iran as well as by the structure of CIA assessments on the subject.
Praise for Manufactured Crisis
Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare by Gareth Porter has received some well-deserved endorsements from public figures, as follows:
From JUAN COLE, Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History, University of Michigan:
Gareth Porter is among the last of that rare breed-- the independent investigative journalist who brings to bear long experience in foreign policy reporting with a keen and critical eye for K Street propaganda. He is essential.
From Hon. CHAS W. FREEMAN, Jr., former U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia and author of America’s Misadventures in the Middle East:
Want to understand why a peaceful U.S. modus vivendi with Iran has been so elusive? Read this exceptionally timely, gripping account of the Iranian nuclear program and the diplomacy surrounding it! Porter meticulously documents both Iranian misjudgments and American and Israeli diplomatic overreach based on willful self-deception and political, bureaucratic, and budget-motivated cherry-picking of intelligence to support unfounded preconceptions. He shows how these have combined to produce a steady escalation of both Iranian enrichment activities and Western sanctions. Manufactured Crisis is essential reading for anyone interested in the resolution by diplomacy of a confrontation that otherwise threatens a reprise of the delusional decision-making that led to the Iraq War of 2003–11 but with even more catastrophic consequences.
From GRAHAM E. FULLER, former vice-chair of the National Intelligence Council at CIA and author of A World Without Islam and Three Truths and a Lie (a memoir):
At a time of irrational hype and often irresponsible western journalism on the subject of a “nuclear Iran”—promoting heightened confrontation and even the possibility of war—this book provides disturbing and detailed insight into the manipulation—even invention—of “facts” marshaled to achieve dubious US and Israeli policy objectives. Gareth Porter, one of our most distinguished and dogged investigative journalists and historians, provides a striking and vital corrective on the geopolitically damaging course of our last decades of manufactured confrontations with an already prickly Iran.
From SHIREEN T. HUNTER, Georgetown University:
Those who regularly follow Iranian affairs and Iran's relations with the United States, always knew that Iran's nuclear dossier was closely linked with the broader problems of how to deal with Iran and what strategies to adopt towards the Islamic Republic. Now, Gareth Porter through extensive and meticulous research demonstrates these elaborate linkages. In understanding these linkages Iran watchers would be better able to predict the future trajectory of the Iran nuclear dossier.
From SEYMOUR M. HERSH, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist:
Gareth Porter has become a one-man truth squad for the American government and its acolytes in the mainstream press corps...His probing and digging is a reminder that those in power, and those who report on that power, must be held to the highest possible standard.
From OLIVER STONE and PETER KUZNICK, Co-authors The Untold History of the United States:
Manufactured Crisis is untold history at its finest! Gareth Porter systematically and masterfully debunks three decades of U.S. and allied lies and distortions about an Iranian nuclear weapons program that never really existed.
Table of Contents
Map of Iran
Diagram: Nuclear Power Cycle in Iran
Abbreviations and Acronyms
Introduction
1- The US Denial Policy and Its Consequences
2- The Politics of Iran’s Nuclear Secrecy
3- Iran’s Unknown Nuclear Politics
4- US Political Origins of the Nuclear Scare
5- Israeli Political Origins of the Nuclear Scare
6- Choosing Regime Change Over Diplomacy
7- The IAEA Comes Up Empty
8- The Mystery of the Laptop Documents
9- Intelligence Failure
10- The Phantom Bomb Test Chamber of Parchin
11- Phony War Crises
Epilogue
Dramatis Personae
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist and historian who specialises in U.S. national security policy. He writes regularly for IPS and has also published investigative articles on Salon.com, the Nation, the American Prospect, Truthout and The Raw Story. His blogs have been published on Huffington Post, Firedoglake, Counterpunch and many 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 U.S. 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 Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.
Link For Further Reading:
*A Manufactured Crisis: http://www.lobelog.com/a-manufactured-crisis/
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