Another threat to the establishment gone...

Michael Hastings, ‘Rolling Stone’ Contributor, Dead at 33

The bold journalist died in a car accident in Los Angeles

By Tim Dickinson

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.”

Hastings’ hallmark as reporter was his refusal to cozy up to power. While other embedded reporters were charmed by McChrystal’s bad-boy bravado and might have excused his insubordination as a joke, Hastings was determined to expose the recklessness of a man leading what Hastings believed to be a reckless war. “Runaway General” was a finalist for a National Magazine Award, won the 2010 Polk award for magazine reporting, and was the basis for Hastings’ book, The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan.

Image: Courtesy of Blue Rider Press/Penguin

For Hastings, there was no romance to America’s misbegotten wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He had felt the horror of war first-hand: While covering the Iraq war for Newsweek in early 2007, his then-fianceé, an aide worker, was killed in a Baghdad car bombing. Hastings memorialized that relationship in his first book, I Lost My Love in Baghdad: A Modern War Story.

A contributing editor to Rolling Stone, Hastings leaves behind a remarkable legacy of reporting, including an exposé of America’s drone war, an exclusive interview with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange at his hideout in the English countryside, an investigation into the Army’s illicit use of “psychological operations” to influence sitting Senators and a profile of Taliban captive Bowe Bergdahl, “America’s Last Prisoner of War.”

“Great reporters exude a certain kind of electricity,” says Rolling Stone managing editor Will Dana, “the sense that there are stories burning inside them, and that there’s no higher calling or greater way to live life than to be always relentlessly trying to find and tell those stories. I’m sad that I’ll never get to publish all the great stories that he was going to write, and sad that he won’t be stopping by my office for any more short visits which would stretch for two or three completely engrossing hours. He will be missed.”

Hard-charging, unabashedly opinionated, Hastings was original and at times abrasive. He had little patience for flacks and spinmeisters and will be remembered for his enthusiastic breaches of the conventions of access journalism. In a memorable exchange with Hillary Clinton aide Philippe Reines in the aftermath of the Benghazi attacks, Hastings’ aggressive line of questioning angered Reines. “Why do you bother to ask questions you’ve already decided you know the answers to?” Reines asked. “Why don’t you give answers that aren’t bullshit for a change?” Hastings replied.

In addition to his work as a contributing editor for Rolling Stone, Hastings also reported for BuzzFeed. He leaves behind his wife, the writer Elise Jordan.

Matt Farwell is a veteran of the Afghanistan war who worked as a co-reporter with Hastings on some of his recent pieces. He sent this eulogy to Rolling Stone: ”My friend Michael Hastings died last night in a car crash in Los Angeles. Writing this feels almost ghoulish: I still haven’t processed the fact that he’s gone. Today we all feel that loss: whether we’re friends of Michael’s, or family, or colleagues or readers, the world has gotten a bit smaller. As a journalist, he specialized in speaking truth to power and laying it all out there. He was irascible in his reporting and sometimes/often/always infuriating in his writing: he lit a bright lamp for those who wanted to follow his example.

“Michael was no stranger to trying to make sense this kind of tragedy nor was he unfamiliar the emptiness felt in the wake of a senseless, random death. After all, he’d already learned about it the only way he ever deemed acceptable for a non hack: first-hand. In the course of his reporting he figured this lesson out again and again in Iraq, Afghanistan and in the United States, and part of his passion stemmed from a desire to make everyone else wake the fuck up and realize the value of the life we’re living.

“He did: He always sought out the hard stories, pushed for the truth, let it all hang out on the page. Looking back on the past ten years is tough for anyone, but looking back on Michael’s past ten years and you begin to understand how passionate and dedicated to this work he was, a passion that was only equaled by his dedication to his family and friends, and how much more he lived in thirty-three years than most people live in a lifetime. That’s part of what makes this all so tough: exiting, he leaves us all with little more than questions and a blank sheet of paper. Maybe that’s challenge to continue to use it to write the truth. I hope we can live up to that. He was a great friend and I will miss him terribly.”

Link:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/michael-hastings-rolling-stone-contributor-dead-at-33/5339688

RELATED ARTICLE:

Where Breitbart? - oh sorry - he's gone Where's the Coroner? Sorry, he's gone too. where the Witness to Breitbart's death? Sorry, we can't find him ...

Breitbart’s death needs to be investigated for the sake and safety of ALL journalists

Andrew Steele
March 8, 2012

A month ago, while speaking at CPAC, conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart bragged to his audience about having incriminating videos of Barack Obama that would sink the president’s reelection campaign. Later he told Lawrence Sinclair of Sinclair News “Wait til they see what happens March 1st.”

On March 1st, shortly after midnight, Andrew Breitbart was dead at the age of 43. Even before there was an autopsy the media was quick to assure the shocked public that Breitbart had died of “natural causes”. Conservative, and even some liberal, mouthpieces shared their fond memories of Breitbart on television and in opinion pieces, while others– like Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone– happily basked in the death of their ideological rival.

Breitbart’s final hours were described to The Hollywood Reporter by Arthur Sando, who is a publicity and marketing executive for the dietary supplement company MonaVie and has worked for several large television networks in the past. According to Sando, Breitbart walked into The Brentwood– a restaurant and bar in L.A.– and sat down next to him. Sando recognized Breitbart due to his fame and they engaged in a discussion for about two hours. Sando said that Breitbart was “friendly and engaging” and that he had stopped at the bar for a drink but hadn’t come there to meet anyone in particular. Breitbart didn’t drink excessively, according to Sando’s account, was on his blackberry a lot, and didn’t exhibit any signs of health or other problems. Before Breitbart left they exchanged contact information and planned on getting together.

Later that night (at about 12:30 or 1 a.m) Breitbart was found on the sidewalk near his Westwood home after having collapsed, according to his father-in-law, Orson Bean.

“He was walking near the house somewhere…. He was taken by paramedics to UCLA and they couldn’t revive him,” said Bean.

Other reports mention that a neighbor saw Breitbart collapse.

As of this writing the results of the autopsy are still pending.

Though Breitbart was no spring chicken, at 43 he was still young enough for his death to be considered untimely. It’s been reported that Breitbart had heart problems (I have yet to find any source detailing what specific heart problems he had, however). His editor in chief Joel Pollak spoke to Carol Felsenthal for a piece that was posted on The Hill. Though Felsenthal wrote that Pollak never said so specifically, she claimed he indicated that he thought Breitbart died of natural causes.

Yet in that piece Pollack was quoted as saying:

“Andrew was the picture of health. I had a conversation with someone who had been with Andrew on the day before he died and this person told me, ‘Andrew looked so good.’ He went to the gym the day he died, he was losing weight, he was healthy and robust.”

Since Andrew Breitbart was adopted and his birth parents’ identities have not been disclosed to the general public, it’s currently unknown whether or not he had a genetic predisposition to early death due to heart disease or any other kind of ailment.

As the first suspicions were being raised about the amazing timing of Breitbart’s death– taking place in the first hour of the very day he planned to release allegedly controversial video footage– mainstream media columnists began their usual attacks on those voicing their suspicions, with slurs and insults but very few facts to reassure a rightfully distrustful public that Breitbart couldn’t possibly have been the victim of an assassination. The nature of Breitbart’s death leads many to dismiss reasonable questions about the timing as “conspiracy theories” because indeed it is true that sometimes people unexpectedly die young of natural causes. What usually comes to most people’s minds when imagining political murders are violent scenes in which a person is shot or quietly strangled, or some kind of traceable poison is slipped into his or her drink. These kinds of scenes play out in movies and do little to inform the public of how terrifyingly simple it is for a person with the right resources to murder another and make it look like a natural death, leaving behind no trace of the crime whatsoever.

It is indeed possible to make somebody to have a heart attack.

As far back as 1975, during the Church Committee hearings, it was revealed that the CIA had developed a poison that could cause a person to have a sudden heart attack. They froze the poison into the shape of a dart and fired it at high speed from a pistol so that it would go right through the clothes of the person who was shot, melt, and be absorbed into the body and blood to initiate the heart attack, leaving nothing but a small red mark on the body. The poison was developed in such a way that it was undetectable by the autopsy procedures of the time.



Again, Breitbart’s official cause of death hasn’t been released yet, however a heart attack is the explanation that the media seems to be herding the public towards. This is just one example of a weapon that came to light many decades ago, reluctantly revealed to a committee investigating the activities of American intelligence services. It’s a testament to what the U.S. government was capable of in 1975, and says nothing of how that technology has been improved thirty-seven years later, or what nasty devices and poisons they managed to keep secret.

Of course, an order to kill Breitbart need not have even come directly from the White House. It could have come from parties interested in seeing that the President stay in office. Certainly if the CIA can figure out how to kill a person in a cleverly untraceable way, so can the organizations of powerful people who may have copied the CIA’s methods and technology or even had it directly given to them at one point or another.

It’s on record that in the past the U.S. government has worked with the mob.

Under “Operation Underworld” the U.S. government cooperated with organized crime figures during World War 2 to counter Axis spies and saboteurs along the U.S. northeastern seaboard ports, avoid labor union strikes, and fight theft by black-marketeers of war supplies.

The CIA also utilized members of the mob in plotting to kill Fidel Castro.

As the article “The Plots to Kill Castro” by Edward Jay Epstein, (published in the June 2000 issue of GEORGE) explains,investigations by the CIA’s Inspector General in 1967 and the Church Committee 1975 revealed that there were at least eight separate plots to kill the Cuban leaderstarting in 1960. Seeking to arrange less expensive ways to carry out the deed, the CIA saw an advantage in employing the mob because of its contacts in the Cuban underworld, and because if the assassins were killed or captured, Castro’s well known actions against the mob in closing down its enterprises in Cuba and the animosity created as a result would provide the CIA a degree of separation from the hit and plausible deniability.

For working with the CIA, the mob members involved in the plot got protection from FBI investigations into their criminal activities at home.

From that article:

“Rosselli proposed a simple plan: through its underworld connections in Cuba, the Mafia would recruit a Cuban in Castro’s entourage, such as a waiter or bodyguard, who would poison Castro. The CIA’s Technical Services Division, informally known as its “workshop,” was given the job of producing and testing on monkeys an untraceable poison. It came up with a botulinus toxin that the CIA’s Office of Medical Services then injected into Castro’s favorite brand cigars. It also produced simpler botulinus toxin pills that could be dissolved in his food or drink. But the deputized Mafia contacts failed to deliver any of the poisons to Castro. As Rosselli explained to the CIA, the first poisoner had been discharged from Castro’s employ before he could kill him, while a back-up agent got “cold feet.”

According to Mancow Muller– a conservative radio host and a friend of Breitbart– who spoke on the Alex Jones show, Breitbart had told him “The house of cards is coming down, I have information that will destroy Barack Obama, it’s over”.

Breitbart was ready to release his Obama college video on March 1st, yet it took his team until March 7th to get it out to the public. Though this might not be all that was on the video, Breitbart specifically mentioned during his CPAC speech that it would show that Obama met with a bunch of “silver ponytails” back in the 1980′s like Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn who said “One day we’re going to have the presidency”.
Read more here:
http://12160.info/page/where-breitbart-oh-sorry-he-s-gone-where-s-the-coroner-sorry-he-s