Michael Hastings, the journalist who effectively ended Stanley McChrystal’s career, died in a car crash early this week. What makes this story even more interesting is that Mr. Hastings had supposedly contacted WikiLeaks shortly before his death and was concerned that the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) was stalking him:
CULVER CITY (CBSLA.com) — Questions persist following the death of Michael Hastings Tuesday, after reports that the award-winning journalist told WikiLeaks the government was watching him.
WikiLeaks tweeted a message to their millions of followers Wednesday stating that the 33-year-old author and war correspondent had contacted the organization’s lawyer to say he was being watched by the FBI.
Michael Hastings contacted WikiLeaks lawyer Jennifer Robinson just a few hours before he died, saying that the FBI was investigating him.—
WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) June 19, 2013“Michael Hastings was a journalist who definitely gave the government trouble, the Pentagon trouble, so if they were surveilling him it wouldn’t be that surprising,” said friend and fellow journalist Cenk Uygur.
Had this occurred last year I would have likely written Mr. Hastings’s death off as a coincidence. I was more ignorant of the federal government’s corruption back then. Things have obviously changed since then. We now know that the National Security Agency (NSA) have worked in cooperation with private corporations to intercept our communications, actively listen to our phone conversations, and exploiting flaws in at least one operating system before patches are released. We also know that the FBI has been creating terrorists for years, arming Mexican drug cartels, and spying on Americans with drones. In other words, the federal government is completely out of control and currently accountable to nobody.
Today I take the whispers that Mr. Hastings was murdered by the federal government seriously. If the federal government is willing to go so far as to develop an advanced surveillance state and create terrorists in order to drum up fear then it’s no small stretch to believe it would also knock off people who became inconvenient. We live in dark, albeit interesting, times.