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Stan Cox, No Excuses — We’ve Been Warned

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You can hardly miss the news about climate change anymore, or perhaps what I mean is that you (yes, you!) can hardly miss feeling its effects. It’s been startling, to say the least. It doesn’t matter whether it was the month (the last 10 set global heat records, one after another) or the year (2023 was by far the hottest on record); whether it was the northern hemisphere (hottest summer ever), Canada (extreme fires), Europe (“extreme heat stress”), the Middle East (record rainfall), South Asia (massive rainfall and a potentially unprecedented monsoon season), or the United States (warming faster than the global average). Globally, there have been increasingly massive weather events like the recent unprecedented deluges in Dubai and Pakistan, record rainfall and massive floods in China, or — at the other extreme — record drought and “acute hunger” in southern Africa, it’s everywhere and getting worse in an all too tangible fashion.

In fact, last year, for the first time in recorded history, the planet broke the ominous global ceiling for a temperature rise of 1.5 degrees Celsius set at the Paris agreement. Oh, and so far I’ve only focused on land, but the world’s oceans have been setting their own startling heat records. As the New York Times reported recently, “The ocean has now broken temperature records every day for more than a year. And so far, 2024 has continued 2023’s trend of beating previous records by wide margins.” Yes, global waters are only getting ever hotter. And, of course, all of this is just to begin down a longer list of horrors that are clearly going to multiply in the years, not to speak of decades, to come.

With that in mind, let TomDispatch regular Stan Cox, author of The Green New Deal and Beyond, consider a world (ours!) in which no country — certainly not the United States, which has been a “drill, drill, drill” nation not just under Donald Trump but, all too sadly, under Joe Biden, too — seems to be moving in the right direction faintly fast enough (and not just when it comes to climate change either) to stop a hell of a future from descending on us all. Tom

Eco-Collapse Hasn’t Happened Yet, But You Can See It Coming

Degrowth Is the Only Sane Survival Plan

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Something must be up. Otherwise, why would scientists keep sending us those scary warnings? There has been a steady stream of them in the past few years, including "World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency" (signed by 15,000 of them), "Scientists’ Warning Against the Society of Waste," "Scientists’ Warning of an Imperiled Ocean," "Scientists’ Warning on Technology," "Scientists’ Warning on Affluence," "Climate Change and the Threat to Civilization," and even "The Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future."

Clearly, there's big trouble ahead and we won't be able to say that no one saw it coming. In fact, a warning of ecological calamity that made headlines more than 50 years ago is looking all too frighteningly prescient right now.

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Maha Hilal, The Torture That Just Won’t End

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Don’t for a second think that any of it was torture! Those acts committed on prisoners captured in the Global War on Terror and held at CIA “black sites” around the world included waterboarding, confinement in a small box, and “rectal feeding and rehydration” — and that’s just to begin a nightmarish list of them. But they weren’t torture at all, just “enhanced interrogation techniques.” At least, that was the term preferred by officials in the administration of President George W. Bush, who launched that war on terror and the remarkably widespread mistreatment of prisoners that went with it.

Perhaps the first prisoner of that “war” on whom the CIA tested its torture techniques, Abu Zubaydah (who turned out never to have been a member of al-Qaeda), was “enhanced” in truly grim ways he later recorded in drawings while confined at the Guantánamo Bay detention center. He would, for instance, be “waterboarded” 83 times (no, that’s not a misprint!) while held at a CIA black site in Thailand as part of the global interrogation program authorized by President Bush and his administration. As Zubaydah described it: “They kept pouring water and concentrating on my nose and my mouth until I really felt I was drowning and my chest was just about to explode from the lack of oxygen.” And that was only one part of his ongoing nightmare, which, as Carol Rosenberg of the New York Times would report, involved sleep deprivation, being held in a small containment box, and “walling” (having his head repeatedly smashed against a wall while his neck was in a chokehold from a towel). And keep in mind that, as Karen Greenberg has pointed out at TomDispatch, the Justice Department would greenlight such “techniques” as “lawful” rather than classifying them as acts of torture.

Now, as it happens, we’re approaching the 20th anniversary of the revelation of yet another set of all-American interrogation techniques, photos of horrifying kinds of torture committed by U.S. military personnel at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in the wake of the 2003 invasion of that country. And with that in mind, let TomDispatch regular Maha Hilal take you deep into the world of what she calls “carceral imperialism” that went hand in hand (so to speak) with the nightmarish post-9/11 Global War on Terror. Even so many years later, it’s both a hell of a story and a story from hell. Tom

Carceral Imperialism

Torture, Abu Ghraib, and the Legacy of the U.S. War on Iraq

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"To this day I feel humiliation for what was done to me… The time I spent in Abu Ghraib -- it ended my life. I'm only half a human now.” That's what Abu Ghraib survivor Talib al-Majli had to say about the 16 months he spent at that notorious prison in Iraq after being captured and detained by American troops on October 31, 2003. In the wake of his release, al-Majli has continued to suffer a myriad of difficulties, including an inability to hold a job thanks to physical and mental-health deficits and a family life that remains in shambles.

He was never even charged with a crime -- not exactly surprising, given the Red Cross’s estimate that 70% to 90% of those arrested and detained in Iraq after the 2003 American invasion of that country were guilty of nothing. But like other survivors, his time at Abu Ghraib continues to haunt him, even though, nearly 20 years later in America, the lack of justice and accountability for war crimes at that prison has been relegated to the distant past and is considered a long-closed chapter in this country's War on Terror.

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Bob Dreyfuss, Going to Hell in a Handbasket in Iran

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[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Let me offer my deep thanks to those of you who came through for TD in response to my recent plea for donations. It couldn’t have been more appreciated! Still, as always, it wasn’t enough and I urge any of you preparing to read TD‘s latest piece by Bob Dreyfuss to consider visiting our donation page and helping ensure that we keep doing what we’ve done these last 23 years. Think of it this way: you’ll also be helping ensure that Dreyfuss’s series of pieces — the first today on Iran — comparing the potential policies of Joe Biden and Donald Trump on Russia/Ukraine, Israel/Gaza, and China in the coming months will be a reality. And many, many thanks in advance for your generosity! Tom]

What is it about Iranian generals when it comes to the U.S. and Israel? While president, Donald Trump (who once implicitly suggested that, were his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton to win the 2016 election campaign, she might be taken out by one of his gun-rights supporters) ordered the drone assassination of Iran’s most important general, Qasem Soleimani, as his plane landed in Baghdad, Iraq.

That was in January 2020. Recently, the Israelis topped him by killing two key Iranian generals in a missile attack on that country’s consulate in Syria. The Iranians responded by sending more than 300 missiles and drones toward Israel in an operation that seemed “designed to fail” (the “only” casualty being a young Arab Bedouin girl). Trump’s reaction? He reposted a tweet of his from 2018. It caught the Trumpian spirit of that moment and this one perfectly: “To Iranian President Rouhani: NEVER, EVER THREATEN THE UNITED STATES AGAIN OR YOU WILL SUFFER THE CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE. WE ARE NO LONGER A COUNTRY THAT WILL STAND FOR YOUR DEMENTED WORDS OF VIOLENCE & DEATH. BE CAUTIOUS!”

By comparison, Joe Biden, whose record on Gaza has been anything but thrilling, while congratulating Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on largely stopping the Iranian attack (with much help from American forces in the region), also urged him to “slow things down and think through” how to respond. More important yet, he reportedly insisted “that the U.S. won’t support any Israeli counterattack against Iran.”

Today, in the first of a series of pieces over the coming months on key foreign policy issues and the 2024 election, TomDispatch regular Bob Dreyfuss considers the two aging men running for president this year and what to make of them when it comes to Iran. Tom

Handling — and Mishandling — the Iran Nuclear Program

Trump Blew Up the Deal, Can Biden Still Fix It?

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One, erratic and often unhinged, blew up the U.S.-Iran accord that was the landmark foreign policy achievement of President Obama’s second term. He then ordered the assassination of a top Iranian general visiting Iraq, dramatically raising tensions in the region. The other is a traditional advocate of American exceptionalism, a supporter of the U.S.-Iran agreement who promised to restore it upon taking office, only to ham-handedly bungle the job, while placating Israel.

In November, of course, American voters get to choose which of the two they’d trust with handling ongoing explosive tensions with Tehran across a Middle East now in crisis. The war in Gaza has already intensified the danger of an Iran-Israel conflict -- with the recent devastating Israeli strike on an Iranian consulate in Syria and the Iranian response of drones and missiles dispatched against Israel only upping the odds. In addition, Iran’s “axis of resistance” -- including Hamas, Lebanon’s Hezbollah, the Houthis in Yemen, and militias in Iraq and Syria -- has been challenging American hegemony throughout the Middle East, while drawing lethal U.S. counterstrikes in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen.

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