Progressive Commentary Hour – 10.20.15

Dr. Gareth Porter is an award-winning historian, an independent investigative journalist and policy analyst who specializes in US geopolitics and national security issues.  During the Vietnam war, he was Dispatch News Services Bureau Chief in Saigon and later a co-director for the Indochina Resource Center.  In addition to being a specialist in Vietnamese and Cambodian affairs, he has been reporting on the Middle East, including the chemical gas attacks reported in Syria, for the past decade. His numerous articles can found in Foreign Affairs, Al-Jazeera, Huffington, Counterpunch, Truthout, The Nation and others. For the past 9 years he has been investigating US and Israeli tensions with Iran and US intelligence operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Gareth has an MA in international relations from the University of Chicago and a doctorate in Southeast Asian Studies from Cornell University.  He has published five major books dealing with Vietnam and Cambodia. His most recent is “Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare” published last year, which debunks the myths regarding Iran as a nuclear threat.

Prof.  Stephen Zunes (Zoo-ness) is a Professor of Politics and International Studies at the University of San Francisco, where he chairs the program in Middle Eastern Studies. He is recognized as one the country’s leading scholars of U.S. Middle East policy and of strategic nonviolent action, Professor Zunes received his PhD. from Cornell University and previously served on the faculty of Ithaca College, the University of Puget Sound, and Whitman College. He serves as a senior policy analyst for the Foreign Policy in Focus project of the Institute for Policy Studies, an associate editor of Peace Review, a contributing editor of Tikkun, and chair of the academic advisory committee for the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict.

Among his publications, the most recent is “Western Sahara: War, Nationalism and Conflict Irresolution”  and earlier “Tinderbox: US Foreign Policy and the Roots of Terrorism” co-written with Richard Falk.  His website is StephenZunes.org which has over 400 of his articles.