Michael Hastings was a journalist who had a penchant for writing the stories no one else would touch.

His reporting shook things up, exemplified by his stories on General Petraeus and General McChrystal. His latest piece, “Why Democrats Love to Spy on Americans,” promised to be another important contribution to Americans’ growing understanding of how our government is destroying our civil liberties through the combined use of bad laws and technology.

If Michael Hastings had died without mystery, in his bed from a diagnosed illness, his journalistic fame, along with widespread public interest in him, would probably have died along with him. But Michael Hastings died in a way that ensures his life, work and death will be a matter of public interest for a long time to come.

This administration, along with most members of Congress in both parties, are clearly implicated in the worst spying and civil liberties violation scandal in the history of this Republic. They have been monitoring the private conversations and emails of millions upon millions of innocent American citizens who not only have committed no crime, they are not under any sort of suspicion of committing a crime.

The legal basis for this activity is the badly misnamed “Patriot” Act. The excuse given for this is that without spying on virtually the entire American populace, the dimwits in Washington would be unable “to keep Americans safe.” According to our leaders, the only way to “keep Americans safe” is to put the entire country under surveillance.

The official reaction to leaks that let the American people know that their civil liberties are being trampled by their government is to crank up the media machine in attacks against Edward Snowden, the man who made this public. The government is going at Mr Snowden with everything they have. This isn’t about “keeping Americans safe.” It’s about protecting their own selves.

Their rage at being exposed stems from one fact. These things needed to stay secret because it would get them in trouble if it didn’t. All this blab about “security agreements” and “national security” boils down to one thing: They didn’t want the American people to know they were spying on them; not because we needed to be in the dark to “keep Americans safe” but because members of Congress and overreaching bureaucrats needed our ignorance to keep themselves safe.

The reason I’m going through this background is to explain why the untimely death of a journalist named Michael Hastings is suddenly such big news.

Michael Hastings had his finger in the spying-on-the-American-people pot, and he was evidently stirring it a bit. Given his reportorial skills, it seems possible that he might well have been jangling a few official nerves that were already raw. Just as it is imperative for the government to make an example of Edward Snowden because he let us know they were spying on us, they need, for the sake of keeping their jobs, for the story to stop stirring.



As I said, if Michael Hastings had died in his bed of a diagnosed disease, things would be different. However, he did not.

He died in a car crash into a tree that caused the car to blow up, tossing what looks in the video below like the car’s transmission about a block down the road. A few moments before the crash, he was spotted and recorded on a news video going through an intersection at high speed.

An eyewitness to the whole thing has come forward to describe what happened.

The scene is familiar to all of us. We’ve seen similar car crashes in movies and they weren’t accidents. They were assassinations. We know our government has tortured people. We also know our government lies to us and that they do it a lot.

Did Michael Hastings die in an accidental car crash caused by too much speed on a city street? Or, was he murdered?

I don’t know the answer to that question. None of the commenters who are speaking with such certainty on one side of this story or the other knows, either. They are just taking the position which will most benefit the political party they push.

What is certain is that a significant number of Americans think it’s possible that he was assassinated because of what he was writing. No matter the facts of Michael Hasting’s death, that extraordinary level of distrust in our government is a serious matter, all by itself.

The question, What do we need to “keep us safe” from all those faceless people we’ve been told “want to kill us” must be juxtaposed with the question, What do we need to keep us safe from the loss of all our freedoms.

We have lived over two hundred years in freedom. It has become almost impossible for Americans to imagine any other way to live. But the price of freedom is, and always has been, eternal vigilance. We need to remember that at least some of this eternal vigilance needs to be focused on the excesses of our own government.

I do not know what happened to Michael Hastings beyond the fact that he died in a horrible car crash. But I do know that our government is spying on all of us and that the entire Congress took part in giving shadowy agencies a blank check to do this.

What I do know is reason enough for concern.

Here are two videos I found about Michael Hastings’ death.

The first is from the LoudLabs News who spotted him speeding and followed him. The second is an interview with an eye witness to the crash. They’re the best, unbiased information I could find.