Barack Obama not only defended Manning's treatment but also, as commander-in-chief of the court martial judges, improperly decreed Manning's guilt when he asserted that he "broke the law".

Apparently, the president spends a good deal of time being prosecutor, judge, jury, executioner and concealer. But he does so quietly; this is no dramatic “thumbs-down” emperor.

The EU is not seeking to realize Nobel's demilitarized global peace order, and condones security based on military force and waging wars rather than insisting on an alternative approach.

Bradley Manning's abusive pre-trial treatment is a clear violation of the Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendments to the US Constitution, the UN Convention Against Torture, and US military law.

In line with its unprecedented persecution of whistleblowers generally, the US government is exploiting the law to entrench its own power and shield its actions from scrutiny.

The reputations of the men who were intimately involved in torture, armed death squads, assassinations, the killing of innocents, and corruption on an unbelievable scale, lie in tatters.

Barack Obama gets his "mandate" for four more years of unconstitutional war, an expanding secret drone program, codification of indefinite detention, and widespread government secrecy.

Whatever Romney's accusation that Obama is 'soft' on foreign policy, over the past four years he has played the same role as previous presidents, talking of peace but promoting war.

One of the most important changes in world politics is that the US has failed to win two wars, one in Iraq, the other in Afghanistan, despite deploying large and vastly expensive land armies.

The more the US kills and kills and kills, the more people there are who "want to harm us" - that's the logic that has resulted in a permanent war on terror.

Official who monitors counter-terrorism for the UN says US drone strikes in Pakistan – where those helping victims of earlier attacks or attending funerals were killed – may amount to war crimes.

Whatever the views of the politician at the top, the US empire is a system, not a policy, underpinned by corporate and military interests and almost every president has sanctioned military action.

What enables one of America's most celebrated pundits to go on the most mainstream of TV programs and coldly justify the killing of 4-year-olds, without so much as batting an eyelash?

Why, you may well ask, should politicians, military men and corporations make these decisions in such secrecy when we will all live with them in the decades to come?

How to justify continuing a war going nowhere and the pointless 'sacrifice' of UK soldiers. Simple: confine the troops to barracks and use 'risk-free' unmanned drones to kill Afghans.

Those who push the buttons to fire the missiles call these strikes "bug-splats": bereaved relatives are forced to gather their loved ones' dismembered body parts in the aftermath.