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San Diego Investigative Journalist Uncovers More Troubling Facts About Journalist Hastings’ Death (+video)

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Photo Credit: YouTubeIt’s been nearly three weeks since Michael Hastings was killed in a fiery car accident in West Los Angeles. The award-winning journalist earned his stripes as a wartime reporter and captured fame with his 2010 Rolling Stone story that forced General Stanley McChrystal to resign as commander of the US forces in Afghanistan.

According to City News Service Hastings, 33, “was driving south on Highland Avenue when he apparently lost control of the compact (2013 Mercedes Benz CLK250) near Melrose Avenue and crashed into palm trees in the median about 4:20 a.m. Tuesday (June 18). The car’s engine reportedly ended up about 200 feet away from the impact site.”

An eyewitness at the scene, Jose, employed at nearby business ALSCO Inc said, the car was travelling very fast and he heard a couple explosions shortly before the car crashed.

In fact, the explosion was so intense that it took the LA County assistant corner, Ed Winter, two days to identify the burned-beyond recognition body of Hastings. Officials confirm that an autopsy has been performed, but the cause of death is pending. LAPD media spokesperson Lieutenant Andrew Neiman said, “it will take several weeks to get the toxicology results.” By stark contrast, in Italy, ‘Sopranos’ star James Gandolfini’s family received the toxicology report within a few days.

…It quickly surfaced that Hastings reached out to Wikileaks attorney Jennifer Robinson just a few hours before his death claiming the FBI was investigating him…

[Former U.S. National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection, and Counter-terrorism Richard] Clarke told The Huffington Post that a single-vehicle crash is “consistent with a car cyber attack. There is reason to believe that intelligence agencies for major powers — including the United States — know how to remotely seize control of a car.”

Video:

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Journalist Shot in Head, Egyptian Christian Church Attacked, Muslim Brotherhood Posts Fake Photos of Dead ‘Egyptian’ Children (+videos)

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Photo Credit: Mohamed RashedBy MENA. Masked gunmen opened fire at Mar Mina Church in Port Said’s al-Manakh early Tuesday and managed to get away, according to state-run news agency MENA. No casualties were reported.

Army and police squads arrived at the scene of the attack and efforts are being undertaken to identify the perpetrators.

This is the third such attack in 24 hours. Yesterday, unknown attackers assaulted Port Said’s western seaport and the province’s traffic police department.

A priest was killed Saturday in Masaeed in North Sinai. Read more from this story HERE.

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BBC Reporter Shot in the Head

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Muslim Brotherhood Using Old Photo’s of Dead Syrian Children, Claiming Egyptian Army Killed Them

Fearing 2016: Slate Reporter Calls Sen. Rand Paul “White Supremacist”

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Photo Credit: YouTube

Photo Credit: YouTube

In the surest sign that the liberal/progressive journalist special forces aligned to protect President Obama and the prospective candidacy of Hillary Clinton are beginning to fear the rise of Sen. Rand Paul, founding member of Journ-o-list and darling of the “Juice Box Mafia” Matt Yglesias defamed the Kentucky Republican Senator as a “white supremacist” Thursday on Twitter:

@coner64

In an exchange with the Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf, Yglesias went further and called Paul’s father, Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) a white supremacist as well:

2 @coner64

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Reporter Michael Hastings Consulted With WikiLeaks Lawyer, Complained About FBI Surveillance, Prior to Deadly Fiery Crash (+videos)

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Hastings CrashBy 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 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. Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: wikileaks

Photo Credit: wikileaks

WikiLeaks says Michael Hastings contacted it just before his death. Are they implying he was murdered?

By Tim Stanley. WikiLeaks just threw some gasoline onto the conspiracy fire. On Wednesday night, they Tweeted: “Michael Hastings contacted WikiLeaks lawyer Jennifer Robinson just a few hours before he died, saying that the FBI was investigating him.”

What exactly are they trying to say?

Michael Hastings was a much admired freelance journalist who covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and helped to bring down General Stanley McChrystal. He was tragically killed this week in a car crash in Los Angeles, after his car hit a tree. Hastings is believed to have been alone in the vehicle. Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: D Dipasupil/Getty Images

Photo Credit: D Dipasupil/Getty Images

Michael Hastings: my friend and his enemies

My friend Michael Hastings died in Los Angeles on Tuesday. His death leaves a journalistic void, and not just the one created by the loss of a fearless reporter. Michael’s untimely death at 33 deprives Washington journalists and national security professionals of one of their favorite people to sneer at, condescend to, and ignorantly deride.

It occurred to me last night, as I stared into the drink I drank to toast my friend’s memory, that I spent more time defending Michael to colleagues, military officers, bureaucrats, tweeps and random people than I did actually talking to him in person.

You might think Michael’s track record needs no defending. He wrote an immortal Rolling Stone article that exposed a caustic military contempt for the Obama administration and which led within days to the resignation of the Afghanistan war’s commanding general, Stanley McChrystal. The coterie of national security journalists around Washington began to fear that there would be a before- and after-Hastings period in journalistic-military relations. Yet, a bit more than a month after the piece, I was in Afghanistan on an embed with the US military, without any evident post-Hastings professional reprisal.

I heard a lot about Hastings while in Afghanistan. Very little of it was from the soldiers and air force personnel I was with. Nearly all of it was from fellow journalists, and none of it was positive. How could Hastings publish off-the-record jibes made by officers who were trying to be welcoming to him, the complaints went; what kind of arrogance led him to want to make a name for himself like this? What was his problem with McChrystal, anyway? Didn’t he know McChrystal was trying to rein in the war?

As Michael would spend the rest of his life explaining – I can’t believe I’m writing those words – he didn’t publish anything that was explicitly off-the-record; but neither did he stop observing the boorish behavior of McChrystal’s senior aides while the beers flowed. There’s a reasonable professional journalistic debate to be had about what to do with material uttered by sources when they’re drunk. But I found few people were interested in chewing over that question. They simply wanted to feel superior to Hastings. Read more from this story HERE.

James O’Keefe Says He Was Harassed by Federal Agents

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Photo Credit: dsm012

Photo Credit: dsm012

Journalist James O’Keefe tells Newsmax that the Justice Department monitoring of Associated Press reporters is similar to what he faced when he was investigating voter fraud during the 2012 elections.

O’Keefe’s organization Project Veritas videotaped a man who nearly voted as Attorney General Eric Holder when a poll worker was about to hand over the attorney general’s ballot.

“This spying on reporters is exactly what I faced when I did these voter fraud investigations,” O’Keefe said in an exclusive interview with Newsmax TV. “I had agents showing up at the homes of my friends — and I don’t even know how they got their addresses and that’s a very interesting thought — we had our emails shared potentially with members of the media.

“Again this could have only come from the federal government,” said O’Keefe.

O’Keefe is the author of the new book “Breakthrough: Our Guerilla War to Expose Fraud and Save Democracy.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Journalist Who Broke Exclusive NSA Story Pushes Back Hard Against Calls for His Arrest and Prosecution (+video)

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Photo Credit: HowardLake

Guardian reporter Glen Grenwald is pushing back hard against those calling for his arrest and prosecution.

He singles out RINO Rep. Peter King (R-NY), who has repeatedly called for Grenwald’s incarceration, for special attention. Apparently, King has stated that Grenwald was disclosing the identities of agents for DC’s clandestine agencies, putting American lives at risk.

CBS Star Reporter: Feds Hacked My Computers, Too

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Photo Credit: WNDCBS News reporter Sharyl Attkisson has been a thorn in the Obama administration’s side for some time now.

The Emmy-award winning journalist has refused to let the president’s scandals be swept under the rug, interviewing “Fast & Furious” whistleblowers and chasing down Benghazi leads long after even her own network didn’t want to hear it anymore.

Now she says, however, her personal and work computers have been compromised, an intrusion that may be linked back to the White House.

“I can confirm that an intrusion of my computers has been under some investigation on my end for some months, but I’m not prepared to make an allegation against a specific entity today, as I’ve been patient and methodical about this matter,” Attkisson told Politico. “I need to check with my attorney and CBS to get their recommendations on info we make public.”

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Study: Desperate for Attention, White House Reporters Abandon Tough Questions of Obama

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Photo Credit: Pete SouzaA groundbreaking new study of White House press conferences over the past 23 years reveals that the events are in a death spiral, especially under President Obama. Reporters, desperate to keep the press conferences alive, have switched to asking easy questions in a bid to coax the president to host more of them, the study says.

Noting that the days when reporters like Sam Donaldson and Helen Thomas pestered President Reagan are long gone, the study in the authoritative journal American Politics Research said that adversarial questions have become rare as presidents have rebelled at them.

“The press want to encourage presidents to hold more of these direct exchanges to benefit their own reputations and media’s prestige,” said the study provided to Secrets. “The press will be less adversarial in these rare meetings to encourage more of them.”

The trend started with former President Clinton as he, former President George W. Bush and Obama curtailed press conferences and especially cut back on solo meetings with the press. Joint press conferences generally feature the president with a foreign leader and are considered easier to handle, said the study. In his first term, Obama held 38 joint and 27 solo press conferences, according to the study.

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Transparency Ends at the White House Door

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On his first day in office, President Obama vowed to create “a new level of transparency, accountability and participation for America’s citizens.” But the president has not lived up to his transparency rhetoric – and now even the left is taking note.

Liberal magazine Mother Jones laments this week that the Obama administration spent a record-high $12 billion in 2011 to keep government information classified. Since the process of classifying documents is itself classified, it’s impossible to determine the individual merits of those decisions. But it’s instructive to consider the government’s sweeping classification mandate with Obama’s initial pledge that transparency would be one of the “touchstones” of his administration. As he said back in January 2009:

The old rules said that if there was a defensible argument for not disclosing something to the American people, that it should not be disclosed. That era is now over.

Except, plainly, it’s not. And it’s not just the “American people” who are being denied access to government-related information. The president’s cheerleaders in the establishment media have been similarly rebuffed. In June, that frustration led Jill Abramson, the executive editor of the New York Times – hardly a right-wing tribune — to blast the administration for its hostility to media coverage and its tightfisted control over information, especially on national security. Abramson revealed that Times reporters who had covered national security issues for several decades had confided in her that “the environment has never been tougher or information harder to dislodge. One Times reporter told me, ‘The environment in Washington has never been more hostile to reporting.’” So much for a new era of accountability.

Obama’s broken promises on transparency are also evident in the administration’s aggressive pursuit of leakers, on whom journalists rely for scoops and inside information. That may seem unlikely, particularly in light of the recent spate of national security leaks from the administration. But those leaks, highlighting the administration’s national security successes — such as the drone program and the foiling of a terror plot through an audacious undercover operation — have largely served to bolster the administration’s public image. By contrast, the administration has come down hard on leakers it sees as damaging to its cause. In its first term, the administration has launched six prosecutions involving such whistleblowers – double the number under all previous administrations combined. Although most of these whistleblowers have leaked information to the media rather than to a foreign government, it speaks to the severity of the administration’s position on leaks that it has gone after them under the 1917 Espionage Act. The message is clear: Transparency ends at the White House door.

Read more from this story HERE.

Photo Credit: Saint_727