Felicity Arbuthnot: Illegal Invasions, Rogue States,

Forgotten Victims and a Shaming Plea: The usual suspects have embarked on another mass butchery- sorry, training exercise, in mega resource rich Mali, and are meddling, with lethality, in Algeria. The UK, ever keen to kill, has gone from the Prime Minister's no boots on the ground assurances, to Operation Creep in barely over a week. The US, says a spokesman, assesses that intervention may last for years. He was talking Mali. Think Africa. The US plans a drone base on the Mali Niger border, as John Glaser has written, one of a constellation of secret drone bases in East Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, in Ethiopia, Djibouti, the Seychelles, and beyond, which bomb Yemen and Somalia, and most likely perform surveillance missions in East Africa and the Persian Gulf. The disaster of a recent African foray, the ruins of Libya, lives lost ranging from 30,000 to 100,000, the horror of the plight of the country's Leader, his children, grandchildren, the murder of the US Ambassador, torching of his Benghazi residence, and deaths of three US government employees, are seemingly forgotten. No lessons learned. The British Embassy in Tripoli has received credible threats with the Foreign Office, advising against travel to the country, with Westerners facing a high threat from terrorism. Yesterday's gift of democracy to Afghanistan, where US soldiers are being killed with relentless regularity by their Afghan colleagues who, of course, they have trained, has brought poverty and desperation such that the BBC, usually loyal to a fault, to any colonial invasion is reporting that some families resort to selling one child, in order to gain enough money to feed the others. In the horror of the country's prisons, the UN reports this month that torture is on the rise, and as Iraq, the unspeakable continues. In Iraq, the occupation abuses continue to haunt the invaders and the Iraqis. Today the tireless Phil Shiner, of the UK's Public Interest Lawyers, presents another case on behalf of one hundred and eighty Iraqis, in Britain's High Court, alleging they were systematically abused and tortured by British troops, using methods chillingly reminiscent of the Americans at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere. The claim is of a systematic policy between 2003 and 2008 of lawless torture and killing.