By Michael Collins

(Washington, 2/30/2012) At the end of Monday's Leveson Inquiry with Tony Blair on the stand, Lord Justice Leveson sent the credibility of the effort's summary findings straight to Hell. After Blair's pressured presentation and an interruption by a protester who called Blair a war criminal, Leveson began an odd exchange with the former Prime Minister. It began with this request to Blair:
Lord Justice Leveson:
2 So whatever assistance you can give, who have
3 thought about how you change things for the future, I'd
4 be very interested. Let me give you some potential
5 issues. (May 28 transcript page 38)
If things had ended there, this could be seen as a modest invitation, one Leveson might have offered any number of witnesses as a general courtesy. But the justice was not finished. He outlined specific issues covering five pages of transcript.
This was no a casual request. We witnessed the supposedly objective judge of press excesses recruiting a former politician who had just spent several hours intermittently bemoaning to Queen's Counsel (QC) Robert Jay just how difficult it was for him to deal with the press.
Larry Pinkney

"Knowledge makes a man unfit to be a slave." - Frederick Douglass
The single most potent and effective form of slavery is mental. It is this slavery that suffocates the potential and the aspirations of everyday Black, White, Brown, Red and Yellow people in the United States. It is perpetuated by the most hypocritical and violent corporate government on the planet of Mother Earth - that of the de facto Empire of the United States.
The power elite of this nation is one, that under the obfuscated guise of progress; thwarts, disfigures, and subverts the very best in humankind both here and abroad. It is a manipulated and greedy form of insanity that systemically keeps ordinary people in a perpetual state of political, social, and economic slavery.