Bill Van Auken

Unnamed “senior US officials” have told the Associated Press that the Obama administration is

“wrestling with whether to kill [a US citizen] with a drone strike and how to do so legally under its new stricter targeting policy.”

This extraordinary AP report publicly announces and justifies a drone assassination of an American citizen before it takes place. It has all the hallmarks of a deliberately orchestrated leak. Its evident aim is to lend a veneer of “transparency” and legality to a conspiratorial and unconstitutional program of state murder, all the better to institutionalize it as a permanent arm of dictatorial presidential power.

The US officials who spoke to the AP laid out a scenario that fits neatly into the framework laid out by President Barack Obama in a speech delivered at the National Defense University last May, defending the program of extra-judicial assassinations, while promising a “high threshold” for ordering such a killing.

The individual being targeted for a drone strike was said to be suspected of being a terrorist and “in a country that refuses US military action on its soil and that has proved unable to go after him.”

Under Obama’s reported policy, such individuals must be killed by the US military’s Joint Special Operations Command, not by the CIA, which has been responsible for previous strikes.

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John Pilger

There will be a reckoning - not just for the Blairs, Straws and Campbells, but for those paid to keep the record straight.

The BBC's Today programme is enjoying high ratings, and the Mail and the Telegraph are, as usual, attacking the corporation as left-wing. Last month, a single edition of Today was edited by the artist and musician P.J. Harvey. What happened was illuminating.

Polly Harvey's guests caused panic from the moment she proposed the likes of Mark Curtis, an historian rarely heard on the BBC, who chronicles the crimes of the British state; and the lawyer Phil Shiner and journalist Ian Cobain, who reveal how the British kidnap and torture; and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange; and myself.

There were weeks of absurd negotiation at Broadcasting House about ways of "countering" us and whether or not we could be allowed to speak without interruption from Today's establishment choristers. What this brief insurrection demonstrated was the fear of a reckoning. The crimes of western states like Britain have made accessories of those in the media who suppress or minimise the carnage.

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Finian Cunningham

What is it about America's women diplomats? They seem so hard and cloned - bereft of any humanity or intelligence. Presumably, these women are supposed to represent social advance for the female gender. But, far from displaying female independence, they are just a pathetic copy of the worst traits in American male politicians - aggressive, arrogant and completely errant in their views.

Take Victoria Nuland - the US Assistant Secretary of State - who was caught using obscene language in a phone call about the European Union and the political affairs of Ukraine. In her previous posting as a spokeswoman for the US State Department, Nuland had the demeanor of a robotic matron with a swivel eye.

Now in her new role of covertly rallying anti-government protesters in Ukraine, Nuland has emerged to sound like a bubblegum-chewing Mafia doll. In her leaked private conversation with the US ambassador to Kiev, the American female diplomat is heard laying down in imperious tones how a new government in Ukraine should be constituted. Nuland talks about "gluing together" a sovereign country as if it is a mere plaything, and she stipulates which members of the US-backed street rabble in Kiev should or should not be included in any Washington-approved new government in the former Soviet republic.

We don't know who actually tapped and leaked Nuland's private call to the US ambassador in Kiev, Geoffrey Pyatt. It could have been the Ukrainian or Russian secret services, but, regardless, it was an inspired move to reveal it. For the disclosure, which has been posted on the internet, lays bare the subversive meddling agenda of Washington in Ukrainian internal affairs. Up to now, the Americans have been piously pretending that their involvement is one of a bystander supporting democracy from afar.

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