Michael Hastings
1980 - 2013
Cause of Death:
Every Single one of Petraeus' Friends
General David Petreaus DID NOT Speak Truth to Power;
He Told LIES to Power...
See Also:
It Got Them Killed: Mae Brussell
It Got Them Killed: John Belushi
It Got Them Killed: Paul Foot
Before his death Michael Hastings [ALLEGEDLY] wrote the following article called
“Why Democrats Love To Spy On Americans”.
Michael Hastings (January 28, 1980 – June 18, 2013)
By Micahel Hastings
Buzzfeed
June 20, 2013
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: “[I] 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 Congress—records, 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.
I personally have severe doubts that Hastings (a professional journalist investigating National Security matters) actually wrote this piece;
For one thing, the piece never provided the answer promised in the title: Why do Democrats love to spy on Americans, exactly...?
For another thing, he must know, if he's writing this piece, that the NSA program did NOT examine content.
Just Metadata. And Metadata is fair game.
Hence James Clapper's statement clarification, quoted in the piece that the NSA does not monitor "voyueristically".
Which is true.
Second, he makes aboslutely no mention of Snowden by name - and yet he HAS to know (or at least realise) that Snowden is an obvious and transparent fraud.
Third: John Kerry is Secretary of State - what on earth has his job got to do with any question of domestic wiretapping, other than a blanket partisan smear?
Fourth: He's interviewed Assange - again, he must realise that the guy is a complete fraud and an agency of Modified Limited Hangout;
Fifth: The Article appears to be datelined on BuzzFeed AFTER his death. Some forensic hacking may be in order, on this one.
Sixth: I know exactly why Michael Rosen of FoxNews was made the target of leak enquiry; it wasn't because he was leaking or in receipt of classified material from inside the National Security establishment.
It's because he was in receipt of INCORRECT Classified National Security Information, specifically related to the Yemeni Printer Cartridge plot in 2011 - someone with the CIA or other agency was briefing Rosen that this was a barely avoided Al-Quaeda bomb plot, that it was a serious threat and the Obama White House was trying to hush it up because it was
"embarrassing"
This is the same crap, the same Right Wing talking points that characterised the Benghazi Media Blitz - that the White House was "denying" a link to "terrorism" because it was "embarrassing".
I didn't and still don't see how being the victim of, or perhaps rather subject to a terrorist attack is to be thought of as "embarrassing";
Obama is living proof of one thing - if they're trying to destroy you, you must be doing something right...
Rosen was a disinformation conduit for political Black Propaganda and someone, plenty of someones within CIA were helping him and feeding him false leads and fraudulent scoops to undermine the Administration's authority.
That is legitimately to be considered treasonous and responded to as such.
If an intelligence service is briefing against their Commander in Chief and lying about it, that needs to prompt a full-on, gloves-off, no-holds-barred response.
Hastings would have known that.
He was no rookie, and he was connected.
http://www.fromthetrenchesworldreport.com/questions-about-the-death-of-michael-hastings/48069
Questions about the Death of Michael Hastings
According to the following article from the Los Angeles Times, Buzzfeed and Rolling Stone announced Hastings’ death on Tuesday:
Yet, as the very URL of that article makes clear, the coroner had yet to identify the body. Absent a positive identification, how were Buzzfeed and Rolling Stone confident enough to make that official announcement?
The rest of this article will focus on a single newscast, which yields enough incoherent information to indicate that Hastings’ death was not the result of an accident. All subsequent still shots are taken from it, except for those from Google Maps.
First, according to all accounts, the car was a brand-new Mercedes.
No car will blow up from getting run into a tree, least of all a Mercedes. And yet:
An eyewitness claims the blast was so intense that it shook her house and rattled her windows.
Those L.A. palm trees must be made of something more than wood. Hell, everything in Hollywood is fake anyway. Maybe those palm trees are made of some kind of plastic. Like C4.
Moving on, our next eyewitness is Hollywood producer Gary Grossman, whom we can thank for America’s Funniest Home Videos (1989):
He says the engine flew 50 or 60 yards and landed near a telephone pole. Other accounts say 100 feet. Who’s counting? How does any car, much less a Mercedes, hit a palm tree and explode with enough force to throw the engine ANYWHERE???
Vin Diesel would blush at a script like that. Not even a hack like Gary Grossman could conceive of writing it. What does that tell you?
For the record, here is Grossman’s address from the Hollywood White Pages:
546 North Highland Avenue. I decided to plop myself down there on Google Maps. Here is the scene of the “accident”, from left to right.
Do you see how SPACIOUS it is? LOOK at all that SPACE! And yet they say Hastings, in the darkness at 4:30 a.m., smashed his Mercedes into one of those toothpick palm trees with enough force to cause an explosion that sent the engine flying some distance, any distance at all. Impossible. Even in Hollyweird.
Even if a collision took place, was he blind drunk? If so, what are the odds he’d hit one of those trees? If he wasn’t blind drunk, then he was suicidal. Why would a suicidal man pick a palm tree in the middle of a residential neighborhood?
After Grossman’s testimony, we get this chilling eulogy from the talking head:
Hastings will, likely, partially be remembered? That is very deliberately worded. Whoever had the bomb put in Hastings’ car hated him with the passion of a billion white-hot suns, and wanted to crap all over his accomplishments by delivering that insult unto his legacy.
And who has the power to make sure that the slight is worded just so, via the mainstream news?
I’ll give you a hint: the answer rhymes with “news”.
Still stumped? Oh well, take a look at who was first on the scene, except for Grossman:
Here’s the first responders’ website:
Make sure to turn your speakers down before you click, or they will offend your eardrums as well as every other atom of your being.
For more on how cars do not turn into bombs upon impact with trees:
_____________
Tinfoil Hat Addendum:
They waited until Hastings was 33.
http://www.fromthetrenchesworldreport.com/michael-hastings-obviously-murdered-by-bomb-on-gas-tank/48071
Michael Hastings OBVIOUSLY murdered by bomb on gas tank
“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.”
UPDATE: Accident scenes switched. They swapped cars and locations to hide explosive damage, PROOF IS BELOW
UPDATE: It seems to me that Hastings may have been dead, his car parked there, and then blown up with him in it. This is because the flames are way too fresh for the car to have been there long, there is no impact damage where the car “struck the tree” to cause a gas tank explosion, and there are no flames on the road behind the car to indicate it was blown up while it was moving.
This appears to be a classic mafia hit, where you are killed and then burned in a car to hide the evidence. In this case, they obviously used a bomb to blow the gas tank as evidenced by the fact that the rear portion of the car is blown open and shredded with the rest of the car nicely intact, read the initial analysis below. And obviously, there was no high speed crash as reported by the lie factory. I will be working on this throughout the day.
It was perfect to have this happen on a late late Tuesday night, the quietest night of the week, one so quiet that many restaurants will not open. This would have helped ensure a proper setup with few witnesses.
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 BLOWN OUT in the back, not smashed in the front and it obviously missed the tree as it rolled to a stop. The front bumper is obscured by the tree, all the way to the tire, OOPS! .
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 FRONT PASSENGER DOOR. The paint is PERFECT yet the entire car is ablaze. This means that whoever photographed this was on scene right away, with a camera ready to film this in the wee hours of the morning, and nail it before the fire scorched the paint. HMMMMMM . . . . . .
4. Unlike what the so called single “eyewitness” report says about a high speed crash, the car did not impact a tree. The car did not impact ANYTHING. Look at where the car stopped. The car went off the road at a few miles an hour and missed the tree as it rolled to a stop.
5. There is no damage to the front of the car, it has no frontal impact damage AT ALL, it is blown out in the back and not crunched in from the front. HOW ON EARTH DID THAT BLOWN OUT BACK END HAPPEN?
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 the flame went from the back of the car to the front of the car instantaneously, at the same time it breached the floor and engulfed the passenger compartment 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. Only a bomb could have blown gas through the floor to the inside of the passenger compartment and under the car all the way to the front of the engine compartment and lit the whole thing up at once. That’s the only explanation for the shiny paint while it sits completely engulfed in flames. 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?
I’d like to also mention something here – Sheriff Larry Dever was most likely killed by an ECM hack, because he was driving something big and needed a serious high speed accident. With me, when they tried, the incident was with a semi because I was driving a Geo Metro. And in the case of Michael Hastings, his car was such a safe one that you could not guarantee a death in an incident with a semi, and also could not guarantee a death in a high speed crash. I’d bet Hastings wore his seat belt all the time, and Dever did not, and the murderers would know these details before doing it. So to have Hastings definitely dead, kill him first, put him in his car, and blow the gas tank. It may have been possible to remote control the car to where it is with the engine computer via an ECU hack with the oh so convenient Federally mandated always on 3g cell connection to the heart of the car’s control computer with Hastings dead the entire time, and just blow the bomb when the car was where they wanted it. Mercedes are extremely advanced, and it is possible Hasting’s car was full drive by wire.
No matter how you slice this particular pie, a Mercedes is not just going to explode into flames without a little assistance. 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.
Update: LOCATIONS CHANGED AND PHONY WRECK USED TO HIDE EXPLOSIVE DAMAGE FOR DAY TIME PHOTO OP
Here is what they want you to believe
But that is not consistent with this: And notice the trees.
All of these photos are from the same news video. One question – Why is there a sheet on the front of the car in the photo below? Why are the trees not the same as in the original photo above? Where is the blown out section at the rear of the car, which is CLEARLY visible in the original photo above?
The answer is obvious. THEY SWITCHED CARS AND LOCATIONS FOR THE DAY TIME PHOTO OP. Look at both of these pictures, you can clearly see the car is not the same. The location is not the same. On top of that, why is the car still there the NEXT DAY, 10 hours after the crash, when wrecks always get towed away within a couple hours, as soon as the flames are out? Why is the front end not mangled in the original photo, or even the tree for that matter?
For the day time photo op which should not have been possible anyway (it would have been towed long before) they used a different location with different trees, and interspersed the night time fire photos and the daytime shots with those of a different wreck to show pictures of a car that was not destroyed by a bomb. Just look and think, it is OBVIOUS.
This is so far out there that I had to double and triple confirm I did not screw this up, and indeed I did not, ALL of the photos are frame captures from the exact same news video. They TOTALLY blew it with this one.
This is as messed up as Woolwich.
A note to the setup crew: When you produce your garbage, it is going to be analyzed by a LOT of brilliant people, and if you are not careful your efforts won’t cut it. I am ashamed of you, surely the old world Russia or maybe East Berlin would have done this A LOT BETTER.
A note to the world: Take a look at what is here, and remember this the next time you see a bunch of hype about what a great free country America is. They do this to journalists and whistleblowers here.
For those of you who do not know, Michael Hastings was the Rolling Stone reporter who interviewed Assange, brought down General McChrystal, and did several other high level exposures of government corruption.
Jim Stone Freelance