Stephen Kinzer

Stephen Kinzer (born August 4, 1951) is an American author, historian, and journalist. A former New York Times correspondent, he has published several books and writes for several newspapers and news agencies.

Reporting career

During the 1980s, Kinzer covered revolutions and social upheaval in Central America and wrote his first book, Bitter Fruit, about military coups and destabilization in Guatemala during the 1950s. In 1990, The New York Times appointed Kinzer to head its Berlin bureau, from which he covered Eastern and Central Europe as they emerged from the Soviet bloc. Kinzer was The New York Times chief in the newly established Istanbul bureau from 1996 to 2000.

Upon returning to the U.S., Kinzer became the newspaper's culture correspondent, based in Chicago, as well as teaching at Northwestern University. He then took up residence in Boston and began teaching journalism and U.S. foreign policy at Boston University. He has written several nonfiction books about Turkey, Central America, Iran, and the U.S. overthrow of foreign governments from the late 19th century to the present, as well as Rwanda's recovery from genocide.

Kinzer also contributes columns to The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, and The Boston Globe. He is a Senior Fellow in International and Public Affairs at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University.

In June 2026 Kinzer testified before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee's Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets on the subject of Project MKULTRA.

Views

Kinzer's reporting on Central America was criticized by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky in their book Manufacturing Consent (1988), which cited Edgar Chamorro ("selected by the CIA as press spokesman for the contras") in his interview by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting describing Kinzer as "just responding to what the White House is saying". In chapter 2 of Manufacturing Consent, Kinzer is criticized for deploying no skepticism in his coverage of the murders of GAM leaders in Guatemala and for "generally employing an apologetic framework" for the Guatemalan military state.

Kinzer has since that time criticized interventionist U.S. foreign policy toward Latin America and more recently, the Middle East. In Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change From Hawaii to Iraq (2006), he critiqued U.S. foreign policy as overly interventionist. In a 2010 interview with Imagineer Magazine, he said:

The effects of U.S. intervention in Latin America have been overwhelmingly negative. They have had the effect of reinforcing brutal and unjust social systems and crushing people who are fighting for what we would actually call "American values." In many cases, if you take Chile, Guatemala, or Honduras for examples, we actually overthrew governments that had principles similar to ours and replaced those democratic, quasi-democratic, or nationalist leaders with people who detest everything the United States stands for.

In his 2008 book A Thousand Hills: Rwanda's Rebirth and the Man who Dreamed It, Kinzer credits President Paul Kagame for what he calls the peace, development, and stability in Rwanda in the years after the Rwandan genocide, and criticizes Rwanda's leaders before the genocide, such as Juvenal Habyarimana.[citation needed] According to Susan M. Thomson, the "book is an exercise in public relations, aimed at further enhancing Kagame's stature in the eyes of the west", is one-sided due to heavy reliance on interviews with Kagame and even apologist.

In a 2016 opinion piece, Kinzer wrote that Aleppo had been liberated by Bashar al-Assad's forces from the violent militants who had ruled it for three years, but that the American public had been told "convoluted nonsense" about the war. He added: "At the recent debate in Milwaukee, Hillary Clinton claimed that United Nations peace efforts in Syria were based on 'an agreement I negotiated in June of 2012 in Geneva.' The precise opposite is true. In 2012 Secretary of State Clinton joined Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Israel in a successful effort to kill Kofi Annan's UN peace plan because it would have accommodated Iran and kept Assad in power, at least temporarily. No one on the Milwaukee stage knew enough to challenge her."

In April 2018, he added:

According to the logic behind American strategy in the Middle East—and the rest of the world—one of our principal goals should be to prevent peace or prosperity from breaking out in countries whose governments are unfriendly to us. That outcome in Syria would have results we consider intolerable.

Kinzer wrote that the 2018 Syrian Gas Attacks on Civilians in the Douma region was a "false flag" attack, suggesting the event was staged by either al-Qaeda, NATO, or Syrian Civil Defense.

Bibliography

See also

• Timeline of United States military operations

External links

• for Guernica Magazine
• onC-SPAN
• , on WNYC's The Brian Lehrer Show, April 26, 2006
• February 10, 2008