Not all the Americans in Iraq are those who torture and murder, or course they’re not, I don’t know how many are doing it, I know it is systematic throughout the United States military I think that’s been revealed.

We have an extreme rightwing government in this country, although it’s called the Labour government.

Watch how the propaganda unfolds once the bombing is over and the Americans are running Baghdad and their spin machine. There will be the discovery of Saddam’s secret arsenal, probably in the basement of one his palaces.

Orwell is almost our litmus test. Some of his satirical writing looks like reality these days.

Classic nineteenth century European imperialists believed they were literally on a mission. I don’t believe that the imperialists these days have that same sense of public service. They are simply pirates.

An elite group of less than a billion people now take more than 80 per cent of the world’s wealth.

Private Manning is the world’s pre-eminent prisoner of conscience, having remained true to the Nuremberg principle that every soldier has the right to ‘a moral choice.’ His suffering mocks the notion of the land of the free.

I’m absolutely convinced of that. Israel is the representative of the United States in that part of the world. Its policies are so integrated with American policies that they use the same language.

Iraq has been successfully demonized as if everybody who lives there is Saddam Hussein. In the build-up to this attack on Iraq, journalists have almost universally excluded the prospect of civilian deaths, the numbers of people who would die, because those people don’t matter.

The major western democracies are moving towards corporatism. Democracy has become a business plan, with a bottom line for every human activity, every dream, every decency, every hope. The main parliamentary parties are now devoted to the same economic policies – socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor – and the same foreign policy of servility to endless war. This is not democracy. It is to politics what McDonalds is to food.