The revelation that Rolling Stone journalist Michael Hastings was working on a story about the CIA before his death and had contacted a Wikileaks lawyer about being under investigation by the FBI hours before his car exploded into flames has bolstered increasingly valid claims that the 33-year-old was assassinated.
Hastings died early Tuesday morning in Hollywood when his car allegedly hit a tree at high speed. The Los Angeles Coroner’s office has not yet been able to officially identify the body as Hastings because it is so badly burned.
Skeptics of the official narrative have highlighted eyewitness accounts which state that Hastings’ Mercedes “exploded”.
Images of the vehicle appear to show more damage to the rear, around the area of the fuel tank, than the front, leading to speculation that a car bomb which ignited the fuel could have been responsible for the incident.
“No matter how you slice this particular pie, a Mercedes is not just going to explode into flames without a little assistance,” writes freelance journalist Jim Stone. “Car fires in new cars happen for three main reasons — running the engine out of oil, or running the engine out of coolant, or after an absolutely huge car mangling accident, having the hot side of the battery short out against the frame before it reaches the fuse panel. And for all 3 of those normal reasons, which account for virtually all car fires in modern cars, the fire would have started in the engine compartment, progressed slowly, and scorched the hell out of the paint before ever reaching the gas tank. That clean paint is the be all tell all, Michael Hastings was murdered, and the rest is detail.”
Stone also questions why a white sheet has been draped over the vehicle in the image below.
The questions surrounding the precise nature of the “accident” that killed Hastings are given more weight by the fact that the journalist had made enemies within both the FBI and the CIA.
“Michael Hastings contacted WikiLeaks lawyer Jennifer Robinson just a few hours before he died, saying that the FBI was investigating him,” the official Wikileaks Twitter account announced yesterday.
Hastings “had the Central Intelligence Agency in his sights” and was set to release an article exposing the agency, according to L.A. Weekly.
The Obama administration and the Justice Department have openly claimed the authority to assassinate American citizens anywhere in the world if they are deemed a national security threat. A number of American citizens have already been killed as a result of this policy. Is it really that crazy to suggest that Michael Hastings was merely the latest victim of this doctrine?
The New York Daily News highlights the fact that Hastings had received multiple death threats before his demise.
Following his role in bringing down Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, Hastings was told by a McChrystal staffer, “We’ll hunt you down and kill you if we don’t like what you write.”
“Whenever I’d been reporting around groups of dudes whose job it was to kill people, one of them would usually mention that they were going to kill me,” said Hastings.
Hastings was renowned for being “only interested in writing stories someone didn’t want him to write — often his subjects,” according to Buzzflash editor Ben Smith, adding, “He knew that there are certain truths that nobody has an interest in speaking, ones that will make you both your subjects and their enemies uncomfortable. They’re stories that don’t get told because nobody in power has much of an interest in telling them.”
The fact that Hastings had made a plethora of enemies as a result of his hard-hitting investigative journalism has prompted a deluge of online comment speculating that the writer’s “car crash” was no accident.
“Hastings’ wreck might make sense on the freeway, but I doubt he’d be dumb enough to go 100 mph on Highland. He’s not some dumb college kid,” said one commenter on a local news site.
“A warning to other journalists to not dig too deep,” another Reddit user wrote. “Stick with the party line if you want a long, happy life.”
If this was an isolated incident then there wouldn’t be so many questions swirling about Hastings’ death. However, he’s certainly not the first individual to go up against the military-industrial complex and wind up in a coffin.
Other journalists who have proven to be a thorn in the side of the establishment have met the same fate, from Andrew Breitbart who was about to release damaging pre-election information about Barack Obama before he collapsed and died in strange circumstances, to Gary Webb, the Pullitzer prize-winning author who exposed the CIA’s involvement in the drug trade and subsequently committed “suicide” after apparently shooting himself in the head – twice.
More recently, Ibragim Todashev, friend of accused Boston bomber Tamerlan Tsarnev, was shot in the head six times by the FBI, who initially claimed Todashev was armed but later had to admit this was a lie. Speculation has raged that Todashev was assassinated because he had knowledge about the Boston bombings which the feds didn’t want to see the light of public scrutiny.
Despite his actions, the murder of Christopher Dorner, who was burned to death by LAPD officers while hiding inside a cabin, shows that authorities will not hesitate to resort to such methods.
It’s virtually inevitable that the true cause of Michael Hastings death will never be known and that the mainstream media will demonize anyone who questions the official narrative as a conspiracy theorist. Meanwhile, journalists and others who pose a threat to the military-industrial complex will continue to die in bizarre “accidents” that stink of foul play. Read more via Infowars...
http://redflagnews.com/headlines/alert-evidence-indicates-michael-hastings-was-assassinated
Michael Hastings researching Jill Kelley case before death
LATimes ^ | June 20, 2013 | Brian Bennett
Posted on Thursday, June 20, 2013 12:29:44 PM by maggief
WASHINGTON – During the weeks before he was killed in a car crash in Los Angeles, reporter Michael Hastings was researching a story about a privacy lawsuit brought by Florida socialite Jill Kelley against the Department of Defense and the FBI.
Hastings, 33, was scheduled to meet with a representative of Kelley next week in Los Angeles to discuss the case, according to a person close to Kelley. Hastings wrote for Rolling Stone and the website BuzzFeed.
Kelley alleges that military officials and the FBI leaked her name to the media to discredit her after she reported receiving a stream of emails that were traced to Paula Broadwell, a biographer of former CIA director David H. Petraeus, according to a lawsuit filed in Federal District Court in Washington, D.C., on June 3
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3033683/posts
Michael Hastings Assassinated for Work Uncovering Surveillance State
June 20, 2013
The journalist Michael Hastings, who died in what authorities have described as a high-speed car crash, was an active member of Project PM, a crowd-sourced research effort to expose government intelligence contractors.
“If you care that the surveillance state is expanding in capabilities and intent without being effectively opposed by the population of the West, you can assist in making this an actionable resource for journalists, activists, and other interested parties,” the Project PM wiki states. “Consider doing a bit of research on the companies and government agencies listed on this wiki, or even adding new topic for investigation by our participants.”
Barrett Brown, the founder of the initiative, was arrested by the FBI and faces up to 105 years in prison. Brown is described as the “brain trust” for the hacktivist group Anonymous.
Two indictments against Brown are for allegedly “threatening of an FBI officer in a YouTube video and the concealing of evidence,” writes Patrick McGuire for Vice.com, and “do not seem worthy of such a harsh sentence, considering a man in Houston recieved only 42 months for threatening to blow up an FBI building, and a former dentist got 18 months for threatening to kill an FBI agent. The third, however, pertains to Barrett Brown’s pasting of a link in an Anonymous IRC chat room to a document full of credit card numbers and their authentication codes that was stolen from the security company Stratfor, in the midst of a hack that released over five million internal emails. Those emails were published to Wikileaks.”
Brown’s Stratfor hack revealed the inner workings of Trapwire software. It purportedly acquires video from far-flung surveillance cameras located in stores, casinos and other businesses around the country and uses sophisticated facial recognition software to identify people of interest captured by ubiquitous cameras numbering in the millions.
Trapwire software is a significant breakthrough for the surveillance state. It was uncovered by security researcher Justin Ferguson. He delved into the massive pile of emails hacked by Brown from Stratfor – the Austin-based firm regarded as a shadow CIA – on Christmas of 2011. In response to Ferguson’s discovery and the Trapwire revelation, Wikileaks was hit with a large scale distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.
Brown discovered the software produced by Trapwire is owned by Cubic, a San Diego company acquired by Abraxas Corporation. Barrett also uncovered tax returns calling into question Cubic’s denial that it is not affiliated with Trapwire and the software.
Abraxas is run by a former CIA spook, Richard Helms (not to be confused with the CIA director under Nixon). He was also one of the original assignees to its Counter Terrorism Center in the mid-1980s.
Moreover, according to Florida State’s records of corporations, Helms is the director of Ntrepid, a company that won a $2.76 million dollar contract from Centcom, the U.S. Central Command. Ntrepid innovated a product called Tartan, a program that can “analyze illicit organizations and less structured social networks by identifying: Ranks of influence within human networks… [and can] end the use of [online] aliases.”
“Clearly they are looking to dismantle the smoke and mirrors that groups like Anonymous maintain, by hanging out in chatrooms where they do not need to identify themselves officially, with many private communications happening at once,” writes McGuire. “This creates a difficult-to-penetrate den, where people can easily hide online. Evidently, Ntrepid is seeking to pull all of that apart with Tartan.”
Michael Hastings’ association with Barrett Brown and his work on Project PM, in addition to his outing a top U.S. general responsible for conducting the war in Afghanistan – a key mantlepiece in the manufactured war on terror – undoubtedly put him at risk and resulted in his assassination.
It can no longer be claimed that Hastings was merely the victim of a car accident. He was specifically targeted for his investigative journalism, most recently stories he was developing on the FBI and the CIA, as we noted earlier today.
Obviously, the intelligence and surveillance state is intimately involved in an effort to eliminate whistleblowers and journalists who get too close to the truth. The murder of Michael Hastings should send a chill down the spine of journalists everywhere, especially those in the alternative media. http://www.infowars.com/michael-hastings-assassinated-for-work-uncovering-surveillance-state/
