Dear Dirty America

To celebrate the one year anniversary of Rolling Stone writer and author Michael Hastings, wife Elise Jordan released his nearly finished satirical novel The Last Magazine. Hastings was, as every other article about him will mention, the journalist responsible for outing General Stanley McChrystal with his 2010 article “The Runaway General“. Hastings died June 18th, 2013, in the early hours of the morning when his Mercedes ended up against a tree on Highland Avenue in Los Angeles, California.

“Let’s kill the f–ker”

There are many unsettling questions that remain over why Hastings’ car crashed. He had sent an emergency email to his friends hours before his death warning them they might be questioned by the FBI over the latest controversial scoop he was working on. Whether that scoop was information about the CIA director John Brennan, an explosive report about the NSA, or about how top brass is shipping opium in the caskets of dead American soldiers into the United States, many have speculated.

Many will point to a passage in Hasting’s book The Operators where Gen McChrystal’s aides say they will hunt down Hastings and kill him if he reports anything negative. I’m sure the good journalist included that bit for a laugh. But how vicious are these people? And what can they get away with?

While anybody who has questioned the Mercedes car crash has been relegated into the conspiracy theory realm, there are questions that will not go away. Why was the rear of the vehicle so beaten up, crunched, and the back end torn apart if Hastings simply lost control and ran into a tree head on? Why did the engine and drive-train rip out of the vehicle and fly around one hundred yards away, and land on the side of the road near Clinton street? Is that typically the shoddy work of Mercedes-Benz? Why did the fire burn so bright and so intensely in the front of the vehicle?

The LAPD relieved the chaotic speculation by claiming there was no foul play. Hastings’ wife, who at first launched a private investigation, later decided the whole event was just an accident. In a Rolling Stone article coinciding with Hasting’s posthumous fiction release, the widowed Jordan wiped away the controversy by saying:

the Internet was full of conspiracy theories explaining the accident, including an insinuation that he’d been the victim of a cyberattack by the Obama administration. “I worked for the U.S. government,” says Jordan, a former director of communications for the National Security Council. “We’re not that sophisticated.” (Michael Hastings’ Life After Death)

We are not that sophisticated. Either Jordan is lying, or she’s not that smart. Car cyber attacks are not sophisticated in today’s 2014 reality. In fact, all vehicles produced in the United States since 2008 are able to be remote controlled, or cyber attacked. As is demonstrated in this video on how to hack a car:

If Hastings’ car had been hacked that day, the LAPD and their grunt force would not be able to trace it or uncover it, said the former US National Coordinator for Security, Richard Clarke. “But my rule has always been you don’t knock down a conspiracy theory until you can prove it . And in the case of Michael Hastings, what evidence is available publicly is consistent with a car cyber attack. And the problem with that is you can’t prove it.”

If all of that is disturbing in any way, you might have taken heart in the FBI’s statement shortly after Hastings’ car turned into a fireball that they were not investigating the wily journalist. Except the FBI lied. Why would they lie if the goal is to deliver the truth and not fuel more insane theories and speculation on high level operatives assassinating Hastings?

So, if you’re like the FBI, you might celebrate the late journalist who quite literally burned out too early, by reading his work. Particularly the telling article about Sgt Bowe Bergdahl, before he was rescued by the Obama administration, called “America’s Last Prisoner of War”.

If the FBI wasn’t investigating Hastings, then they were at least writing reports just for the fun of it. They must have enjoyed his Bergdahl piece so much they whipped up a ‘non-investigative’ investigative report. Here’s 22 pages of it.