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Rebecca Gordon, Birding in Gaza

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Let me say that, in some strange way, I’m awed. A little background here: I grew up in New York City and, while still quite young, became a “birder.” Watching birds in the 1950s was not an activity a teenage boy was eager to advertise, and yet, however quietly, with my best friend (and his uncle’s borrowed binoculars), I did it in what remains a spectacular spot for birds in the spring migration season: Central Park. And sixty-odd years later, I’m about to do it again (just as I have in almost all the years between). So, think of me as a birder for life.

But speaking of life, I certainly haven’t been spending my time reading about birds lately. How could I in this world of ours? I’ve been focused on the never-ending nightmare in Gaza (and the growing campus protests over it). And after all these months, it’s still strangely hard to take in. Let me put it this way: when, in response to a devastating assault, one country invades — you can’t even say another country — a tiny strip of land 25 miles long and packed with people, housing, hospitals, life — and begins dropping 2,000-pound bombs (many provided by my own country), capable of destroying whole city blocks, on it; when it destroys at least 62% of all housing in the area (with more to come); when it kills at least 13,000 children (and that’s undoubtedly an undercount, given all the bodies left in the rubble); when it wipes out almost all the hospitals in the area, uproots 75% of its inhabitants, cuts off food, water, and electricity to many of them, and… well, why should I even go on? You know the story, too, right? And even worse, the leaders of that country don’t faintly consider themselves done.

And yet, in the last few days, I’ve also been living with the latest piece by TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon on Gaza — and, yes, almost miraculously, on birdwatching, too. How strangely wondrous and deeply sad it is, especially for me! But let me say no more. Read it yourself. Tom

Celebrating Links Across Species

Amid a Nightmare of War

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He’s a funny little chap: a sharp dresser with a sleek grey jacket, a white waistcoat, red shorts, and a small grey crest for a hat. With his shiny black eyes and stubby black beak, he’s quite the looker. Like the chihuahua of the bird world, the tufted titmouse has no idea he’s tiny. He swaggers right up to the feeder, shouldering bigger birds out of the way.

A few weeks ago, I wouldn’t have known a tufted titmouse from a downy woodpecker. (We have those, too, along with red-bellied woodpeckers, who really should have been named for their bright orange mohawks). This spring I decided to get to know my feathered neighbors with whom I’m sharing an island off Cape Cod, Massachusetts. So I turned up last Saturday for a Birding 101 class, where I learned, among other things, how to make binoculars work effectively while still wearing glasses.

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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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