The sheer cynicism is breathtaking. We're expected to believe that the leaders with bloody hands in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan are defending the people in Libya.

The west wildly overstated the reach and capability of al-Qaida to create myths on the back of which we've had the phoney "war on terror", mass slaughter in Afghanistan and Iraq, and attacks on our civil liberties.

Bahrain's ambassador to UK was previously in charge of the Bahraini agency accused of electric shocks and beatings, but being a torturer-in-chief is no bar to a royal wedding invitation. And of course Saudi Arabia was there to keep him company.

Why then were the invitations for other tyrannies like Libya and Syria withdrawn?

The proper outcome is that prisoners should either be charged or released, and the abomination that is Guantánamo should be closed as soon as possible.

There is no future for Israel in a fortified country in which non-Jews live as a majority either as second-class citizens or not as citizens at all, writes Gary Younge.

BBC news works to recalibrate public opinion, drag it back to blind faith in our nation’s good intent. There is simply no amount of arming and bombing and invading that BBC news cannot explain away as well meant.

What we are witnessing is a power struggle between two wings of a repressive, dictatorial regime, and not a struggle for democracy, human rights and the Libyan people's prosperity, writes Abdel al-Bari Atwan.

The US is deeply complicit in almost every action the Israeli military takes to entrench its illegal 43-year military occupation of the Palestinian West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza Strip.

The fierce Iraqi and Afghan resistance didn't fit the neocons plan at all, says David Swanson. Neither did the nonviolent revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt. But taking over Libya still makes perfect sense in the neoconservative worldview.

Humanitarian imperialism is an ideology which aims to justify military interference against sovereign countries in the name of democracy and human rights. The motive is always the same : a population is the victim of a dictator, so we must act.