“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 e ..read more

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 ..read more

Let one old man deal with two others. I turn 80 in July, which makes me just over a year-and-a-half younger than Joe Biden and almost two years older than Donald Trump. And, honestly, I know my limits. Yes, I still walk — no small thing — six miles a day. And I work constantly. But I’m also aware that, on my second walk of the day and then as night approaches, I feel significantly more tired than I once did. I’m also aware that my brain, still active indeed, does forget more than it once did. And all of this is painfully normal. Nothing to be ashamed of, nothing whatsoever. I also know from ol ..read more

Haiti has descended into chaos. It’s had no president or parliament — and no elections either –for eight long years. Its unelected prime minister Ariel Henry resigned recently when gang violence at the airport in Port-au-Prince made it impossible for him to return to the country after a trip to Guyana. Haiti is the poorest country in the region, its riches leached out by colonial overlords, American occupying forces, corporate predators, and home-grown autocrats. As if that weren’t enough, it’s also suffered an almost Biblical succession of plagues in recent years. A coup deposed its first dem ..read more

Last September witnessed what used to be a truly rare weather phenomenon: a Mediterranean hurricane, or “medicane.” Once upon a time, the Mediterranean Sea simply didn’t get hot enough to produce hurricanes more than every few hundred (yes, few hundred!) years. In this case, however, Storm Daniel assaulted Libya with a biblical-style deluge for four straight days. It was enough to overwhelm the al-Bilad and Abu Mansour dams near the city of Derna, built in the 1970s to old cool-earth specifications. The resulting flood destroyed nearly 1,000 buildings, washing thousands of people out to sea, a ..read more

When I was in the U.S. military, I learned a saying (often wrongly attributed to the Greek philosopher Plato) that only the dead have seen the end of war. Its persistence through history to this very moment should indeed be sobering. What would it take for us humans to stop killing each other with such vigor and in such numbers? Song lyrics tell me to be proud to be an American, yet war and profligate preparations for more of the same are omnipresent here. My government spends more on its military than the next 10 countries combined (and most of them are allies). In this century, our leaders h ..read more

Recently, you may have noticed that the hot weather is getting ever hotter. Every year the United States swelters under warmer temperatures and longer periods of sustained heat. In fact, each of the last nine months — May 2023 through February 2024 — set a world record for heat. As I’m writing this, March still has a couple of days to go, but likely as not, it, too, will set a record. Such heat poses increasing health hazards for many groups: the old, the very young, those of us who don’t have access to air conditioning. One group, however, is at particular risk: people whose jobs require leng ..read more

Last weekend my father, Larry Greenberg, passed away at the age of 93. Several days later, I received an email from the French film director Phillippe Diaz who sent me a link to his soon-to-be-released I am Gitmo, a feature movie about the now-infamous Guantánamo Bay detention facility. As I was soon to discover, those two disparate events in my life spoke to one another with cosmic overtones. Mind you, I’ve been covering Guantánamo since President George W. Bush and his team, having responded to the 9/11 attacks by launching their disastrous “Global War on Terror,” set up that offshore prison ..read more

“Say her name!” Marjorie Taylor Greene shouted from the House floor during President Biden’s State of the Union Address. The same slogan was on the T-shirt she wore under her red jacket, which had a pin with a picture of the person whose name she was referring to — a pin she’d also handed out to colleagues before that session as well as to the president as he passed her on his way to the rostrum. The name was Laken Riley, a 22-year-old nursing student murdered in Georgia, Greene’s home state, on February 22nd. The man accused of killing her, Jose Antonio Ibarra, had been identified as an ..read more

In politics, as in medicine, a cure based on a false diagnosis is almost always worthless, often worsening the condition that is supposed to be healed. The United States, today, suffers from a plethora of public ills. Most of them can be traced to the militarism and imperialism that have led to the near-collapse of our Constitutional system of checks and balances. Unfortunately, none of the remedies proposed so far by American politicians or analysts addresses the root causes of the problem. According to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, released on April 26, 2007, some 78% of Americans be ..read more