The British foreign secretary, William Hague, claims "the law-abiding citizen has nothing to fear." It is the cliche of the police state throughout history.

Bradley Manning has done us a service by encouraging us to scrutinise the hidden realities of US power, and consider the dire consequences of decisions shrouded in secrecy.

It's not just about Manning: it's about wars in which the resistance to, and exposure of, crimes and abuses has been criminalised while the criminals and abusers go free.

If you deny your enemy any shred of rationality, you come perilously close to excusing him. To be bereft of reason, like a baby or a squirrel, is to be morally innocent.

Security service harassment is part of a wider story, not just in the Woolwich killing, but in other cases where torture, rendition and death have been the result, reports John Rees

Billions spent, hundreds of British soldiers dead and hundreds of thousands of people all over the region slaughtered. For what? asks MP Jeremy Corbyn

The politicians who have waged endless wars in Muslim countries are exactly the people who now want to deny any connection between their policy and the rise of terrorism.

In essence, is state killing not terrorism? Would the bloody outcomes of Nato strikes ever appear so graphically on front pages the way they have for the Woolwich killing?

After Woolwich, says former soldier Joe Glenton, we must make our government end the UK's involvement in vicious foreign occupations that have again created bloodshed in London.

"Terrorism" seems to have no function other than legitimizing the violence of western states against Muslims while delegitimizing all violence done in return to those states.

Any rational balance sheet of the last decade would show that the 'war on terror' has been a failure in its own terms: it has not prevented terrorism but caused it to spread.

It is hard to resist the conclusion that this war has no purpose other than its own eternal perpetuation. This war is not a means to any end but rather is the end in itself.

There is something fundamentally wrong with a system where not being charged with a war crime keeps you locked away indefinitely and a war crime conviction is your ticket home

Today the US military is involved in scores of countries across all five continents, and its global military facilities make it the world's largest landlord.

Human rights groups like Amnesty International should target war and militarism itself, rather than just some of its symptoms, and should oppose escalation of war on Syria.

In 2001, the US Congress passed a law for the so-called "war on terror" that allows the US government to wage war at anytime, any place and on anyone deemed a threat to national security.