The personal attacks on Assange ignore his achievement as founder of WikiLeaks in publishing US government cables that give people across the world insight into how their governments really behave.

Suleiman Abdallah was a victim of a bounty system that emerged in Somalia in 2002, whereby people were captured by local warlords and sold to the CIA as "terror suspects" in return for cash.

In Britain, where the propaganda of big capital also dominates, Tony Blair, a conspirator in the greatest crime of this century, is promoted as "a wasted talent".

After Afghanistan and Iraq 'humanitarian' wars might have run into the sand had the Arab Spring not opened up new possibilities for the West to 'intervene'.

The decision by the US and Israel to develop and then deploy the Stuxnet computer worm against an Iranian nuclear facility marked a dangerous turning point in the militarization of the Internet.

The most obviously false delusion is that the US is sternly opposed to repressive regimes and seeks to defend human rights and democratic freedoms in the Middle East and round the world.

Barack Obama personally selects the targets of his drone attacks across the world, firing Hellfire missiles that suck the air out of lungs and blow people to bits.

UN investigator says drone warfare violates 50 years of international law and attacks on rescuers who are helping the injured after an initial drone strike may constitute war crimes.

Prominent American figures in both the Republican and Democratic parties have demanded Assange's lifelong imprisonment, called him a terrorist, and even advocated his assassination.

For Americans, the value of an Afghan life (or more often Afghan lives) obliterated in the backlands of the planet, thousands of miles from home, is next to nil and of no meaning whatsoever.

What looks today like a formula for easy power projection that will further US imperial interests on the cheap could soon prove to be an unmitigated disaster.

Drone strikes are causing more and more Yemenis to hate America and join radical militants; they are not driven by ideology but rather by a sense of revenge and despair.

Facts that are inconvenient to the media narrative of the US as a positive, moral force needed to protect civilians throughout the world, they are simply left unreported.

The Nazi blitz on Britain during the whole of World War II killed 40,000 civilians. The US-led 'war on terror' has killed between 14,000 to 110,000 per year over the past eleven years.

Arms control groups and peace activists say it will not be long before the drones are used domestically: they will be dual use – meaning over there and back here at home.

Just imagine the impact continuous attacks over a full decade must have on those we've been invading, droning, cluster-bombing, occupying, detaining without charges.