Michael Hastings Dies in Suspicious Car 'Crash'.....

[Peter Lemkin]

The investigative journalist Michael Hastings has died at the age of 33 in a Los Angeles car crash. Reporting extensively from Iraq and Afghanistan, Hastings' widely read stories showed the grim realities of war. His 2010 Rolling Stone article on General Stanley McChrystal, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, sparked a political controversy after McChrystal and his aides were quoted making disparaging remarks about top administration officials. The article exposed longstanding disagreements between civilian and military officials over the war's direction and led to McChrystal's firing. In a statement provided to Democracy Now!, the film director Oliver Stone said: "Michael Hastings went far in the span he had. One of our finest young investigative journalists, high stakes reporting in a sense cost him his life. We desperately need more and more young men and women such as Michael, willing to protest the intolerable war crimes and arrogance of our supremacy-seeking society." Rolling Stone issued this statement: "Hastings' hallmark as a reporter was his refusal to cozy up to power. He leaves behind a remarkable legacy of reporting." We look back on two of of Hastings' appearances on Democracy Now! in 2010 and 2012.

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: And the journalist Michael Hastings has died at the age of 33. Hastings was killed in a car crash in Los Angeles early Tuesday morning. Reporting extensively from Iraq and Afghanistan, Hastings' widely read stories showed the grim realities of war. His 2010 Rolling Stone article on General Stanley McChrystal, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, sparked a political controversy after McChrystal and his aides were quoted making disparaging remarks about top administration officials. The article exposed longstanding disagreements between civilian and military officials over the war's direction and led to General McChrystal's firing.
Speaking to Democracy Now! in 2012, Michael Hastings said the Afghan War, like the invasion of Iraq, was based on a false premise.

MICHAEL HASTINGS: If WMDs were the big lie of the Iraq War, the safe haven myth is the big lie of the Afghan War. And what I mean by thatand this was true in Iraq, as wellbut 99 percent of the people, maybe even higher, honestly, the people we're fighting, whether it was Sunni insurgents in Iraq or Shiite militias in Iraq or in Afghanistan, the Taliban never actually posed a threat to the United States homeland. So the question one has to ask oneself is that if everything we're doing and everyone we're fighting is not actually a threat to the United Statescertainly not a direct threat, by any means, by any meansthen why are we expending so many resources, $120 billion a year, you know, with all the lives lost, to do it? And that'sand again, this is the big lie of counterinsurgency, which I know we've discussed on your show. To justify this tremendous outlay of resources, they have to say, "Oh, no, we're killing terrorists." But everybody knows that that's not true.

AMY GOODMAN: At the time of that interview, Michael Hastings had just come out with his book, The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America's War in Afghanistan.
Tributes began spreading across the Internet Tuesday evening after news broke of Michael Hastings' death. His former magazine, Rolling Stone, said, quote, "Hastings' hallmark as reporter was his refusal to cozy up to power. He leaves behind a remarkable legacy of reporting," they wrote. In a statement provided to Democracy Now!, the film director Oliver Stone said, quote, "Michael Hastings went far in the span he had. One of our finest young investigative journalists, high stakes reporting in a sense cost him his life. We desperately need more and more young men and women such as Michael, willing to protest the intolerable war crimes and arrogance of our supremacy-seeking society," Stone wrote.
In his first interview with Democracy Now! in 2010, Michael Hastings discussed the foundation he established to honor the memory of his former fiancée, Andrea Parhamovich, who was killed by an IED in Iraq in 2007.

MICHAEL HASTINGS: It's called the Andi Foundation. It's a fund that helpsthere's domestic sort of scholarships we give out, but we've also, along with the National Democratic Institute, have an annual fellowship where we bring a young woman from a developing nation over to Washington, D.C., to learn about human rights and democracy, and so then they can go back to their own home countries and try to institute these rule-of-law programs. We brought over one woman last year from Iraq. It was really incredible. She was even able to spend Christmas with the Parhamovich family. And this year we have another candidate who came over from, I believe, Burma. So, you know, the war has been pretty tough on a lot of people. But you've got to just figure out a way to sort of take what happens and go forward and try to do the best you can.

Michael Hastings Conspiracy Theories: Car Accident And Dead Body Fuel Speculation On Reddit, Twitter

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By Christopher Zara | June 19 2013 12:24 PM

Photo: YouTubeLos Angeles police are still investigating a fiery car crash that reportedly ended the life of journalist Michael Hastings.

The apparent death of Michael Hastings, the young investigative journalist known for ruffling feathers among the nation's power elite, has brought with it a wave of unanswered questions and speculation. Best known for a Rolling Stone article that led to the firing of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the 33-year-old BuzzFeed reporter died in a car accident in Los Angeles early Tuesday morning, according to a statement released by Ben Smith, BuzzFeed's editor-in-chief.
While the journalistic community has largely reacted to the news with an outpouring of grief, online forums have been running wild with conspiracy theories, and why wouldn't they? Some of the details surrounding the story read like a poorly written political thriller. As of Wednesday morning, the Los Angeles County coroner's office had still not determined that an "unrecognizable" body pulled from a fiery solo car crash was actually Hastings, according to the Los Angeles Times. (The body is identified only as "John Doe 117.")

Meanwhile, LA Weekly reports that Hastings was reporting extensively on the CIA at the time of his death, and the Guardian's Glenn Greenwald pointed out that Hastings' last article for BuzzFeed was on the NSA and the Democrats' love for spying on Americans.
In Hastings' 2012 book, "The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America's War in Afghanistan," Hastings

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Wednesday, June 19, 2013

Michael Hastings murdered by bomb on gas tank




This story is not complete and will receive edits

The mainstream press is trying to front this as a high speed car crash, and IT WAS NOT. Take a look at the following screen capture of this "crash" and observe a few things:
1. There is no impact damage to this car. The only damage there is is BLOWN OUT, not smashed in.


2. This was a Mercedes, not a Pinto, which means it did not burst into flames on its own. One (seldom quoted) eyewitness said the car "exploded". Interesting stuff.


3. Here is where it starts to get REALLY damning - LOOK AT THE DOOR. The paint is PERFECT yet the car is ablaze. This means that whoever photographed this was expecting it to happen, and was on scene with a camera ready to film this in the wee hours of the morning, and nail it before the fire scorched the paint.

4. Unlike what the so called single "eyewitness" report says, the car did not impact a tree. The car did not impact ANYTHING. Look at where the car stopped. See much damage there? The front only touched the tree as the car rolled to a stop.


5. The car was not speeding, as said in the "eyewitness" report. The level of damage to that car is that of a 25 mile an hour impact AT MOST. On top of that, it does not appear to have impact damage, it is blown out and not crunched in. It sure looks like an explosion pushed that door out, and nothing crunched it in.


AND FINALLY, THE MOST DAMNING THING OF ALL -
Here we have a car FULLY, and I mean FULLY in flames, from front to back, with NO SCORCHED PAINT because the flame is too new, which means it went from the back of the car to the front of the car instantaneously, before it had a chance to scorch anything, which means ONE THING - A BOMB ON THE GAS TANK, and a PHOTOGRAPHER READY TO SNAP THE PHOTO VERY EARLY ON. Even rapid car fires take time to progress through the car, and totally scorch the paint as they progress. This flame was blasted into the entire car instantly. That's the only explanation for the shiny paint while it sits completely engulfed in flames. Gasoline had to have been blown under the car, all the way to the front. That flame did not progress through that car, it was blown through it with force and the photographer was on the scene the moment it happened and bagged a perfect shot. I'd like to know how that happened - early morning walk?

http://www.jimstonefreelance.com/hastingsmurdered.html


Michael Hastings, 'Rolling Stone' Contributor, Dead at 33

The bold journalist died in a car accident in Los Angeles

Michael Hastings, the fearless journalist whose reporting brought down the career of General Stanley McChrystal, has died in a car accident in Los Angeles, Rolling Stone has learned. He was 33.

Hastings' unvarnished 2010 profile of McChrystal in the pages of Rolling Stone, "The Runaway General," captured the then-supreme commander of the U.S.-led war effort in Afghanistan openly mocking his civilian commanders in the White House. The maelstrom sparked by its publication concluded with President Obama recalling McChrystal to Washington and the general resigning his post. "The conduct represented in the recently published article does not meet the standard that should be met by set by a commanding general," Obama said, announcing McChrystal's departure. "It undermines the civilian control of the military that is at the core of our democratic system."

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/new...3-20130618

[Peter Lemkin]

Michael Hastings Probed the CIA Before Fatal Hollywood Crash

By Dennis Romero / LA WeeklyJune 19th, 2013

See also: Michael Hastings, Noted Journalist, Dies in Fiery Hollywood Crash (VIDEO)

June 18, 2013

Michael Hastings, the Buzzfeed writer who appeared to have died in a fiery Hollywood crash early today, had reported extensively on the CIA and was rumored to be continuing work on that beat at the time of his demise.
That Hastings had the Central Intelligence Agency in his sights is no surprise to those who knew his work. In March he gave what could now be seen as an eerie interview to Current TV about his recent Rolling Stone coverage of a CIA operative, Andrew Warren, who grew to believe he was being followed:

He started drinking heavily. He started abusing these drugs, Xanax and Valium, he started hearing voices. He believed he was being followed. He might have actually been being followed. Maybe, probably not, you don't know. It gets into this very strange …

"Well, he's CIA, he might have been followed," says host Cenk Uygur.
Hastings: "He might have been followed for sure. For sure."
The subject "starts leading this double life," Hastings said. "No one knows he undercover."
Leon Panetta was asked about Warren at his Senate confirmation as CIA director and said he should be fired. Warren was soon fired.
Hastings said that Warren's career unraveled, in part, because he was the only black officer in the agency. "If he was a white guy from Yale or Harvard," he told Current, "he would not be in jail right now."
Indeed, Hastings suggests in his April 7 Rolling Stone piece about Warren that it was his knowledge of "severe" interrogation techniques used by the CIA in the war on terror that helped lead to his demise.
In 2008 the agent was recalled to the United States to face allegations that he "drugged and raped an Algerian woman while serving there as station chief," reads the piece.
He was fired and jailed, but not without controversy.
Buzzfeed announced in October that Hastings "will bring his hard-hitting reporting on national security and politics to the BuzzFeed Los Angeles Bureau while contributing to entertainment coverage as a Correspondent-at-Large."
Indeed, the shadowy world of intelligence and off-the-record American aggression was a favorite topic of the journalist. Last year he wrote this Rolling Stone story "killer drones" in Afghanistan.
In a tribute to the late writer tonight that says Hastings died in a "high-speed wreck," Buzzfeed Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith notes that he lost his fiance while they were in Baghdad; he was there as a Newsweek correspondent:

His fiancée was killed in Baghdad in January of 2007, when he was a Newsweek reporter there, and her death was still utterly raw to him when he published his first book, I Lost My Love In Baghdad.

This morning's single car crash on North Highland Avenue near Melrose Avenue was reported at 4:25 a.m., police said. Positive ID had yet to be made because the body had been so badly charred, LAPD Officer Christopher No told us. He added:

The vehicle crossed over a median and collided into a tree. The impact caused the vehicle to catch on fire.

That stretch of Highland Avenue is notorious for its late-night crashes involving DUI drivers, though Tuesday at 4:25 a.m. would probably stick out as an unusual time for such a case.
The cause of this fatal accident was still under investigation.


Send feedback and tips to the author. Follow Dennis Romero on Twitter at @dennisjromero.

[Dawn Meredith]

When I first learned two days ago Michael Hastings had died in an auto accident I wondered if there had been more to it. I looked at the press accounts before court yesterday and asked my husband to keep an eye out as well.
This link is from a forum he reads. Another important voice goes quiet. Sometimes a car accident is simply that. And sometimes it is an effective way to silence a true investigative reporter, given that we have so very few of those. Of course those on MSNBC who are mourning his loss are not even asking questions such as these. Their minds never cross that threshold. However if true this is very suspicious. FBI kills again???

http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/showthrea...re-He-Died

Dawn

[Peter Lemkin]

In another disclosure from WikiLeaks, the group is claiming the late journalist Michael Hastings said he was under FBI investigation just before he died. Hastings was killed in an early morning car wreck Tuesday in Los Angeles. In a Twitter message on Wednesday, WikiLeaks said: "Michael Hastings contacted WikiLeaks lawyer Jennifer Robinson just a few hours before he died, saying that the FBI was investigating him."

Begins to look like just another [ho-hum] FBI hit....of which there have been so many...and look what happens....

A new look at the FBI's internal investigations has found the bureau has cleared its agents in every single shooting incident dating back two decades. According to The New York Times, from 1993 until today, FBI shootings were deemed justified in the fatal shootings of 70 people and the wounding of 80 others. Out of 289 shootings that were found to be deliberate, no agent was disciplined except for letters of censure in five cases. The issue of FBI accountability has recently re-emerged following last month's fatal shooting of Ibragim Todashev during questioning by agents in Orlando. A Chechen native, Todashev was interrogated over his ties to one of the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing. The FBI later admitted he was unarmed.

[Kara Dellacioppa]

Willy Loman's blog includes some interesting videos about the incident....

http://willyloman.wordpress.com/2013/06/...am-is-bad/

[Magda Hassan]

Willy Loman's blog includes some interesting videos about the incident....

http://willyloman.wordpress.com/2013/06/...am-is-bad/

Thanks for that Kara. Not sure at all about the Sorcha Faal drone talk because it is short on detail etc but interesting that Obama does have the 'right' to murder pesky nuisances who are US citizens now. But is that what happened here? Or is it just a reckless speeding driver? The DARPA woman talking about vehicle computers being accessed and compromised is very interesting though.

[Lauren Johnson]

I would argue that we no longer have to "prove" that the deaths of people such as Michael Hastings were at the hands of darkness as the deaths of these persons becomes a pattern in itself and it becomes the proof.

Besides Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, most Democrats abandoned their civil liberty positions during the age of Obama. With a new leak investigation looming, the Democrat leadership are now being forced to confront all the secrets they've tried to hide.

For most bigwig Democrats in Washington, D.C., the last 48 hours has delivered news of the worst kind a flood of new information that has washed away any lingering doubts about where President Obama and his party stand on civil liberties, full stop.
Glenn Greenwald's exposure of the NSA's massive domestic spy program has revealed the entire caste of current Democratic leaders as a gang of civil liberty opportunists, whose true passion, it seems, was in trolling George W. Bush for eight years on matters of national security.

"Everyone should just calm down," Senator Harry Reid said yesterday, inhaling slowly.

That's right: don't panic.

The very topic of Democratic two-facedness on civil liberties is one of the most important issues that Greenwald has covered. Many of those Dems including the sitting President Barack Obama, Senator Carl Levin, and Sec. State John Kerry have now become the stewards and enhancers of programs that appear to dwarf any of the spying scandals that broke during the Bush years, the very same scandals they used as wedge issues to win elections in the Congressional elections 2006 and the presidential primary of 2007-2008.

Recall what Senator Levin told CNN in 2005, demanding to "urgently hold an inquiry" into what was supposedly President Bush's domestic wiretap program.

Levin continued, at length: "It means that there's some growing concern on Capitol Hill about a program which seems to be so totally unauthorized and unexplained…The president wraps himself in the law, saying that it is totally legal, but he doesn't give what the legal basis is for this. He avoided using the law, which we provided to the president, where even when there is an emergency and there's a need for urgent action can first tap the wire and then go to a court."

There are two notable exception to this rule are Senator Ron Wyden, from Oregon, and Sen. Mark Udall from Colorado, who had seemed to be fighting a largely lonely, frustrating battle against Obama's national security state.

As Mark Udall told the Denver Post yesterday: " did everything short of leaking classified information" to stop it.

His ally in Oregon, Ron Wyden, was one of the first to seize on the Guardian's news break: "I will tell you from a policy standpoint, when a law-abiding citizen makes a call, they expect that who they call, when they call and where they call from will be kept private," Wyden said to Politico, noting "there's going to be a big debate about this." The Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, admitted he'd mislead Senator Wyden at a hearing earlier this year, revising his statement yesterday to state that the NSA didn't do "voyerustic" surveillance.

The state of affairs, in other words, is so grave that two sitting Senators went as close as they could to violating their unconstitutional security oaths in order to warn the country of information that otherwise would not have been declassified until April of 2038, according to the Verizon court order obtained by Greenwald.

Now, we're about to see if the Obama administration's version of the national security state will begin to eat itself.

Unsurprisingly, the White House has dug in, calling their North Korea-esque tools "essential" to stop terrorism, and loathe to give up the political edge they've seized for Democrats on national security issues under Obama's leadership. The AP spying scandal which the administration attempted to downplay at the time, even appointing Eric Holder to lead his own investigation into himself was one of the unexpected consequences of one of two leak investigations that Obama ordered during the 2012 campaign.

It's unclear where a possible third leak investigation would lead. However, judging by the DOJ's and FBI's recent history, it would seem that any new leak case would involve obtaining the phone records of reporters at the Guardian, the Washington Post, employees at various agencies who would have had access to the leaked material, as well as politicians and staffers in Congressrecords, we now can safely posit, they already have unchecked and full access to.

In short: any so-called credible DOJ/FBI leak investigation, by its very nature, would have to involve the Obama administration invasively using the very surveillance and data techniques it is attempting to hide in order to snoop on a few Democratic Senators and more media outlets, including one based overseas.

Outside of Washington, D.C., the frustration that Wyden and Udall have felt has been exponentially magnified. Transparency supporters, whistleblowers, and investigative reporters, especially those writers who have aggressively pursued the connections between the corporate defense industry and federal and local authorities involved in domestic surveillance, have been viciously attacked by the Obama administration and its allies in the FBI and DOJ.

Jacob Appplebaum, a transparency activist and computer savant, has been repeatedly harassed at American borders, having his laptop seized. Barrett Brown, another investigative journalist who has written for Vanity Fair, among others publications, exposed the connections between the private contracting firm HB Gary (a government contracting firm that, incidentally, proposed a plan to spy on and ruin the reputation of the Guardian's Greenwald) and who is currently sitting in a Texas prison on trumped up FBI charges regarding his legitimate reportorial inquiry into the political collective known sometimes as Anonymous.

That's not to mention former NSA official Thomas Drake (the Feds tried to destroys his life because he blew the whistle ); Fox News reporter James Rosen (named a "co-conspirator" by Holder's DOJ); John Kirakou, formerly in the CIA, who raised concerns about the agency's torture program, is also in prison for leaking "harmful" (read: embarrassing) classified info; and of course Wikileaks (under U.S. financial embargo); WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange (locked up in Ecuador's London embassy) and, of course, Bradley Manning, the young, idealistic, soldier who provided the public with perhaps the most critical trove of government documents ever released.
The attitude the Obama administration has toward Manning is revealing. What do they think of him? "Fuck Bradely Manning," as one White House official put it to me last year during the campaign.

Screw Manning? Lol, screw us.

Perhaps more information will soon be forthcoming.

--Michael Hastings

http://www.buzzfeed.com/mhastings/why-de...-americans

[Phil Dragoo]

After a half hour going from link to link (thank you, Peter, Dawn, and Kara), it is not clear how the vehicle executed a high-speed ninety-degree turn into a tree producing a spectacular fireball and shooting the engine so far.

Diana deja vu: the long line of vertical posts at the left--suddenly the tragic impact.

The rapid fire isn't consistent with my only experience with such accidents. The muscle car which screamed past us fratbros in the 'sixties in the rain only to meet that immoveable object in the form of a concrete bridge abutment at the river did burn--

--but beginning at the rear, allowing us time to extract the driver and take him, bleeding from nose and ears, to the hospital.

A witness reported an explosion. A witness said the car "jacknifed." Surely the trade practice of Boston Brakes is continually refined.

Mercedes is renowned for its structural engineering--why then the tremendous fire.

Since the advent of the fuel inertia switch, is it due to the explosion pre-crash.

CIA has come a long way from Letelier Washington 1976.

A long, long way.

[Keith Millea]

Published on Sunday, June 23, 2013 by Common Dreams

Journalist Hastings Sent Out Mysterious Email Hours Before Death

'I'm onto a big story, and need to go off the radar for a bit'

- Common Dreams staff



Journalist Michael Hastings sent an e-mail to his friends and colleagues just hours before he died last week in which he said his "close friends and associates" were being interviewed by the FBI and that Hastings needed to "go off the radar for a bit."

KTLA-TV in Los Angeles reported Saturday that Hastings said in the email he was "onto a big story." Hastings sent the email around 1 p.m. Monday June 17, 15 hours before he died in an early Tuesday morning car crash in Hollywood.

Staff Sgt. Joseph Biggs, who had known Hastings since 2008 when the journalist was embedded in his unit in Afghanistan, told KTLA that he received the email from Hastings on Monday:

"On Monday morning, I woke up and I got an email, and it's very panicked," Biggs said.

He was blind-copied on the email, which was sent to Hastings' colleagues.

In part, it said that the feds were interviewing his close friends and associates, and that he was onto a big story and needed to get off the radar.

The FBI has denied that Hastings was ever under investigation.

"It alarmed me very much," Biggs said. "I just said it doesn't seem like him. I don't know, I just had this gut feeling and it just really bothered me," he said.

[Jan Klimkowski]

Resonant echoes of Danny Casolaro....