As the US national anthem began to play, Smith and Carlos raised their arms in a gesture of solidarity with the victims of racism, violence, and injustice at home and across the world.

As Assange waits to hear if he will be granted asylum by Ecuador, what evidence exists to suggest he is right to consider himself a political target and not a common criminal?

Who in their right mind would give a powerful unmanned air force to the CIA -- a covert organisation with such a track record for unaccountable and illegal killing?

Weeks before the first atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan sent a telegram to the Soviet Union expressing its desire to surrender and end the war.

Why does the US -- which trails many poorer nations in education, health, security, etc -- pay such huge sums to create a global presence of representatives with guns.

Like Japan’s hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties, the drone killing of nameless, unarmed, undefended human beings is a warning to the world: “Don’t mess with us; we run things now.”

UK personnel controlled armed drones in Libya last year – despite the repeated government insistence that the UK has only ever operated armed drones in Afghanistan.

We send our lower classes off to do the killing, and the rest of us who don't have a loved one over there don't spend a single minute of any given day thinking about the carnage.

Historians will denounce Obama's shameful assassinations without trial, and his frightening drones murdering in some of the most poverty-stricken populations on earth.

The aim in seeking to convict Bradley Manning of a crime that carries the death penalty is to deter any future whistlebower from revealing wrongdoing by the US government or the military.

Julian Assange tried to protect the innocent by outing the perpetrators of war crimes and crimes against humanity. They are the ones who one day should be made accountable for their crimes.

If the proliferation of bases, special operations forces, and drone wars continues, the US is likely to be drawn into new conflicts and new wars and untold death and destruction.

Are drones the most 'moral' means of warfare because they kill fewer civilians? Or are they simply soulless killing machines that remove all risk from those who are doing the killing?

The US plans to deploy a new laser-based scanner that from 50 metres away will instantly reveal an astonishing level of detail about your body, clothes, luggage, even the contents of your wallet.

The whole point of drone warfare is to allow large numbers of human beings to be killed without the slightest physical risk to those doing the killing: it is the opposite of bravery.

Starting or fanning brushfire wars on several continents could lead to raging wildfires that spread unpredictably and prove difficult, if not impossible, to quench.