With the upcoming first anniversary of investigative journalist’s Michael Hastings untimely death last June 18th, so much circumstantial evidence surrounding his so called fatal accident points more to yet another inside government job that has become notorious for murdering those who speak the shameful truth about the US government. More than any other government entity especially since 9/11, US intelligence services have enjoyed carte blanche immunity from any actual oversight (by Congress, the president, and least of all the American people) and continue to lie and get away with murder both here in the US as well as all around the world because that is how they make their living.

The very day 33-year old Michael Hastings died last year, he was busily contacting friends and associates including WikiLeaks to report that he was under an FBI investigation. He feared that his car had been tampered with, and even went so far as to ask a neighbor friend if he could borrow her car just hours before his death. Hastings also announced that he was about to release a major bombshell of a news story involving covert operations deployed by US intelligence agencies, specifically targeting current CIA Director John Brennan. The UK’s Daily Mirror published an August 15, 2013 article stating the CIA contractor Stratfor’s president claimed that Brennan was on a “witch hunt” for investigative journalists, which of course is consistent with the Obama administration.

Though the FBI has consistently lied in denying it was investigating Michael Hastings, in fact it had been tracking and bugging him and his every whereabouts for well over a year prior to his death. In June 2012 Hastings’ Rolling Stone article portraying former Prisoner of War (POW) Bowe Bergdahl and his family depicted a disillusioned soldier who was guilty and sick of fighting another immoral American war he wanted no part of. So he simply walked away from his unit in Afghanistan the end of June 2009 and within 24 hours was captured by the Taliban enemy. To write the article, Hastings went both to Idaho to talk to Bowe’s parents as well as to the Afghan battlefront. Despite a gag order that military command had placed on soldiers not to speak at all about the Bergdahl case, several peers in his unit did candidly talk to the reporter.

The Bergdahl affair shares some similarity with the Pat Tillman case. The patriot left a successful NFL career to voluntarily fight in Afghanistan, then once there suffered misgivings about the war and was becoming more vocal about his anti-war views. Afraid that Bush and Cheney’s poster boy for their imperialistic war might go public, speculation abounds that Pat’s death from friendly fire was actually murder to silence him for turning against the war. To make this tragedy worse, the US government proceeded to cover up and conceal the actual cause of Tillman’s death from both his family and the American public.

Several years later when the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were even more unpopular and clearly both losing causes, in its effort to avoid more bad publicity, the Obama administration did its best to once again squelch the truth behind the Bergdahl story. Prior to Hasting’s POW article, the reporter had been responsible for writing two Rolling Stone stories that resulted in the abrupt scandalous ending of one Afghanistan commander’s career in General Stanley McChrystal, and then a year later an unflattering reality check for the failed surge of the next Afghan War commander in General Petraeus, soon to be rushing off leaving his military career, war mission and losing warfront behind to become CIA Director.

As Michael Hastings was forging a very successful career in journalism, clearly he had become a painful thorn in the side of some very powerful men whose careers were damaged by the truth he revealed. On multiple occasions when Hastings interviewed military officers attached to the generals he was featuring in his articles, he heard the same comment more than once that he would be killed if they did not approve of what he wrote about them. By the time he was writing about a POW who in good conscience was ashamed to be an American refusing to participate in another immoral imperialistic war, the powerful US intelligence agencies had had enough. Already perceiving Hastings as a serious threat worthy of keeping tabs on, they launched an ongoing investigation. Then by the time the courageous young writer set his sights on investigating the very same agencies already investigating him as his next target to expose the unfavorable truth on, the US intelligence agencies most likely made the decision to silence him.

Then came the remote controlled hack job that most likely took control of Michael’s car once he was behind the wheel, speeding up and exploding into a fireball just before crashing into a tree burning his body beyond recognition with the ejected engine landing more than 30 yards from the wreckage. The message was clear. Tell the truth about the dirty lowdown US government, and you die.

Just weeks before Hastings’ demise a year ago, Obama had declared war on any journalists who dared to reveal the truth about the government’s criminal and unethical activity. AP reporters’ computers and phone records were confiscated and a number of journalists were under extensive covert surveillance. More journalists and whistleblowers under Obama’s reign of terror have been indicted under the Espionage Act for both refusing to disclose sources as well as exposing any governmental wrongdoing than any other prior administration in US history. Private Bradley/ Chelsea Manning saw US war atrocities in Afghanistan and Iraq and for releasing evidence to WikiLeaks, the Nobel Prize nominee is currently serving a 35-year prison sentence. Just over a year ago former NSA analyst and apparent spy Edward Snowden revealed the unconstitutional practices of the National Security Agency (NSA) invasively conducting pervasive surveillance and collection of private data on all Americans as well as many other nations and their leaders. While living in Russia with temporary asylum, the US government is determined to return Snowden to America to also try him on espionage charges and put him away for life after he lets the world know about the government’s unlawful surveillance.

During the present regime, more filed Freedom of Information Act requests have been denied than under any other presidency. After getting elected on the promise of open transparency and honesty, Obama has been the least transparent, most secretive and most dishonest president in US history, making it unsafe for both whistleblowers and reporters to do the right thing in telling the truth. Many who would come forth and speak with reporters simply don’t for fear of Obama’s recrimination and punishment that may include murder and lifetime imprisonment.

The FBI, CIA, National Security Council and NSA among a half dozen other federal agencies that work undercover cloaked in absolute secrecy is the world in which they live and operate. But when it comes to murdering innocent Americans whose only crime is possessing the courage and conviction of telling the truth, these rogue intelligence agencies have grossly overstepped their legal and ethical authority and boundaries by criminal leaps and bounds. Yet they continue getting away with murder.

The CIA has regularly engaged in killing and deposing democratically elected leaders from sovereign nations around the world, committed state sponsored terrorism on every continent, triggered wars killing millions of innocent people, executed false flag events resulting in mass murder (nearly 3000 of its own people on 9/11 alone), and have regularly gotten away with assassinating US Presidents (Kennedy), journalists (Hastings and former San Jose Mercury reporter Gary Webb) and government whistleblowers whenever threatened with public exposure. Running amok for nearly seven decades now, these hired gov assassins need to be exposed, finally reigned in and ultimately held accountable for the grave harm they have perpetrated on so many individuals both here in America and around the globe.

Evidence exists implicating the CIA and internal governmental agency guilt for the JFK, RFK and Martin Luther King assassinations. Prior to their murders both Kennedy’s were in the process of reeling in the wayward power of the CIA. A jury in Miami in February 1985 ruled that John Kennedy’s murder involved the CIA. A December 1999 Memphis jury found intelligence agencies within the US government responsible for MLK’s murder. America’s greatest leaders of our times have all been killed by an out of control intelligence community bent on having its way exercising at will the means to murder and get away with it, regardless of the influence and power of its high profile victims.

Moreover, we now have a US president who was literally born into the CIA. His mother worked for the CIA in Hawaii, Indonesia and India. She also married a man from Africa sent to study at the University of Hawaii by the CIA, and later married another man in Indonesia who also worked with the CIA. The president’s maternal grandparents saddled with mostly raising Barrack Hussein Obama in Hawaii also both were closely aligned with the CIA. His grandmother was employed for decades in a bank that money laundered for the CIA and his grandfather was not just a furniture factory owner but had close CIA ties himself. So we now have a “Manchurian Candidate” president who long ago was groomed to become the most powerful man in the so called “free” world. If anything, Obama’s shady roots reveal the story of how the rogue CIA answers more to the global oligarchs than the US president, who is but an oligarch created puppet himself, the front man in black face who preyed on America’s hopes and then turned around and showed his true colors by betraying the people and their Constitution that he swore an oath to protect.

The CIA used to be prior US presidents’ personal secret army at the cutting edge of their foreign policy. But in recent decades the CIA has become an autonomous force unto itself unleashed on the world without central control or oversight from either the president or Congress. It was recently discovered that for decades the CIA has been lying to the Congressional Intelligence Committee about its torture policy illegally carried out in illegal secret detainment centers located throughout Europe, Central Asia and the Middle East. Long before death squads in the Middle East, Central Asia and now Africa, the CIA and Special Operations were training, financing and arming Latin American death squad commandos Reagan affectionately called his “freedom fighters” that massacred thousands of its own citizens in Central America in the 1980’s. Those same American military and State Department perpetrators have been redeployed years later in places like Iraq and Syria. Their brutal policies only continue.

Speaking of brutal policies, in the face of increasing flack for his terrorist drone operations, in his insipid, self-aggrandizing foreign policy speech at West Point last month, Obama promised to transfer US drone deployment out of the hands of the CIA to military control. That feeble gesture is but token lip service to mounting criticism directed at his personal favorite warfare that he himself relishes pulling the cherry picked trigger on, targets that include Americans. Knowing how the CIA never relishes relinquishing its power, we will have to see who is really managing the US drone policy in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Somalia, Algeria, Mali, Sudan, Nigeria, the Congo and places we probably have yet to find out.

A handful of very brave American patriots who have spent long careers employed as CIA agents around the world motivated by their conscience have boldly come out of the shadows as CIA whistleblowers at incredible risk to themselves. Cold Warriors such as Ralph McGehee, John Stockwell, Phillip Agee and most recently imprisoned John Kiriakou for exposing the CIA torture practice of waterboarding have all gone public with disclosure of numerous atrocities violating every international law that the CIA has systematically been practicing since the early 1950’s. As a result, these true patriots have suffered horrendous harassment for their heroic choice to come clean with their part in revealing CIA wrongdoing over the years. Murder, assassination, coups, terrorism, propaganda, disinformation, torture and false flags are all typical CIA weapons in its arsenal. The CIA whistleblower consensus is that US intelligence agencies are all very self-serving, devoting unlimited time, energy and money to sealing the real truth at any cost from both the American government and its citizens in order to eliminate any chance of oversight and accountability.

Realizing its disconnect with Americans who are increasingly onto the destructive abuse of its power while attempting to keep up with the times, this last weekend the CIA officially launched its social media Facebook and Twitter pages in a pandering effort to reflect a more open and transparent positive image of itself to the American public. Projecting a superficial public profile cannot cover up its darkened sinister past nor its countless heinous acts of terrorism and murder regardless of the sugarcoated gloss from an internet makeover.

Joachim Hagopian is a West Point graduate and former US Army officer. He has written a manuscript based on his unique military experience entitled “Don’t Let The Bastards Getcha Down.” It examines and focuses on US international relations, leadership and national security issues. After the military, Joachim earned a masters degree in Clinical Psychology and worked as a licensed therapist in the mental health field for more than a quarter century. He now concentrates on his writing.