Michael Hastings was a war correspondent. He knew he was at war with the American government. He said the following before he was murdered:
‘The Obama administration has clearly declared war on the press. Has declared war on investigative journalists (and) our sources. The only recourse to this kind of behavior by the government is to say back to the government we declare war on you. And from this point forward we should no longer as the media on the whole no longer cooperate in any manner with the government in terms of when we are doing National Security stories. We should withdraw all our cooperation and publish everything we know because it is a Free Press not a Free Press except when the government tells me what to do. And we’ve been way too easy going with these guys. We let them get away with this for years. We let them tell us what to print and what not to print. I say everybody get together and say we are done with it and fire back. No one else is going to defend the press.”
That was his 55 second opening in one of the last interviews he ever gave. I hope that if we survive and do take over the government that the Joseph Pulitzer prize for journalism would be renamed the Michael Hastings award.
Michael Hastings also criticized NSA spying. The violation of the Fourth Amendment against illegal searches and seizures allows the NSA to record all of our emails and all of our phone calls. When you combine this with the criminalization of investigative reporting and the application of the Espionage Act to whistleblowers, you will end First Amendment protections for the Free Press. The next step is to end Free Speech.
Before he was murdered, Hastings did contact his friends and Jennifer Robinson, a lawyer for Wikileaks, saying the FBI was investigating him. He told his friends they needed to get a lawyer before they talked to the FBI.
His friends said he drove like a grandmother and never saw him drive fast or erratically. He had given up drinking alcohol five years earlier. Experts at universities have demonstrated that cars can be remotely hacked. They can accelerate the car, make it stop and deploy the airbag without the driver’s cooperation. Michael’s car was seen driving through a red light at an intersection at a high speed. Sparks were seen coming out of the car before it impacted the tree. A loud explosion strong enough to shake a house was heard before the car hit the tree. His car engine and drive train were seen 50 and 70 yards distant from the car. The car had been going south but the engine and drive train were found north or behind the car. That is not possible unless the engine had been separated before the car hit the tree. None of this normally happens to a new Mercedes.
Military veterans said the intense heat of the fire was beyond that of a car fire. The car’s paint should have been burned but it was not suggesting a bomb rather than a normal car fire.
Contrary to the family’s wishes his body was cremated and sent home in an urn. His family had wanted his body returned. Gone would be any evidence that he had been drugged.
Michael Hastings’ friend Staff Sergeant Joe Biggs said Michael told him he was working on the biggest story of his career. It was on the CIA. This would have been a very big story indeed because his article Runaway General on Stanley McChrystal in Rolling Stone got the general fired.
I wrote this because I do not want the fact that Michael Hastings was murdered for the crime of practicing journalism to be forgotten. There are two videos below. The first has Michael’s declaration of war on the Obama administration in the first 55 seconds of the tape. The second video gives an overview of his murder. It is ten minutes long.
Last year I wrote an article on Hastings after his murder. It has another video interview with Michael. The Link is below:
In Memory of Michael Hastings: His CSPAN Interview
.(This CSPAN interview is about his book The Operators. He points out the Pentagon has 27,000 public relations people. One general in Kabul has more PR people than there are reporters covering the war. He hits General Petraeus very hard both in this video and in the book.)
http://vidrebel.wordpress.com/2013/06/23/in-memory-of-michael-hastings-his-cspan-interview/
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