Journalist Michael Hastings is dead at 33

[elfismiles]

http://www.ronpaulchannel.com/video/eli ... -hastings/

Elise Jordan: The Legacy of War Journalist Michael Hastings
Ron discusses an American filmmaker who unexplainably is on a terror watch list.
Then guest Elise Jordan. Her husband Michael Hastings died in a car crash in June. His Rolling Stone article led to the resignation of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, commander of NATO’s International Security Assistance Force and U.S. Forces-Afghanistan.

Categories: First Ammendment Military Surveillance State
tags: #Afghanistan #Enemy of the State #Greenwald #Hastings #Iraq #Journalism #McChrystal #NSA #Poitras #Rolling Stone #Snowden

[wallflower]

http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/08 ... y-debunked

Coroner's Report Rules Michael Hastings' Death an Accident
—By Gavin Aronsen| Tue Aug. 20, 2013 1:36 PM PDT

The report ruled the cause of Hastings' death to be "massive blunt force trauma consistent with a high speed front-end impact to the sole of the right foot and to the front of the torso" after he lost control of his Mercedes. According to interviews conducted by the coroner's department, family members had been attempting to get Hastings to enter detox after he began using drugs including DMT in the month prior to the accident. Traces of THC and methamphetamine were found in Hastings' blood, but are not believed to have been a factor in his death.

[8bitagent]

Wait wait wait...did that article say Hastings was taking DMT???

Also LOL @ the headline "michael-hastings-coroner-report-conspiracy-theory-debunked"

How is that? The conspiracy theory is that the car was hacked, this report would confirm injuries consistent with that.
But this DMT shit...a whole other enchilada now

[barracuda]

Pot, meth, DMT. Typical investigative reporter diet. But hey - he wasn't drunk.

[Forgetting2]

Hopefully we'll get to hear from his brothers on this. Was he hiding drug use from his wife? Could she have found out about it after his memorial service? DMT?

[fruhmenschen]

see link for full story


Michael Hastings may have suffered PTSD from work as war journalist


http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-m ... 6009.story

August 20, 2013, 4:22 p.m.

Journalist Michael Hastings, who was killed in a fiery single-vehicle crash in Los Angeles in June, may have suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder as the result of his work as a war journalist, according to a coroner's report released Tuesday.

Although there has been speculation and conspiracy theories about the cause of Hastings' crash, the autopsy report suggested that high speeds were to blame. He lost control of his vehicle and slammed head-on into a tree, dying within seconds of blunt-force trauma. His body was charred in the fire, but investigators said he probably lost consciousness immediately after crashing and that the burns occurred after he died.

Although drugs were found in his system, they weren't considered a factor.

DOCUMENT: Read the autopsy report

Toxicology reports found traces of amphetamine — an indicator of methamphetamine, and marijuana. His family told investigators he used medical marijuana, which was prescribed for treatment of PTSD, which resulted from assignments in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Hastings, according to the report, had struggled with substance abuse. His family said he had kicked an alcohol problem about 14 years earlier and had remained sober until about a month before the crash, when he had begun using drugs.

They believed he was using DMT, a hallucinogenic. One person told an investigator he wouldn't be surprised if cocaine was found in Hastings' system; it was not.

His family was about to stage an intervention to try to get the reporter into “detox” on the same day of the crash, coroner's officials said.

Hastings, according to the coroner’s report, had previously been institutionalized for rehabilitative care in 1999. A witness told investigators that Hastings had been abusing Ritalin.

His family told detectives that Hastings had been in a past traffic incident in which he crashed into a pole several years ago, and that he may have been abusing Ritalin at the time.

Hastings was not known to be suicidal, but did consider himself "'invincible,' believing he could jump from a balcony and would be OK," according to the report.

Hours before the crash, Hastings had last been seen by a relative "passed out" sometime between 12:30 a.m. and 1 a.m. The crash occurred just before 5 a.m.

[Luther Blissett]

Who said he was on DMT? Does one need to detox from that? Has anyone ever been addicted to it?

[elfismiles]

Biggs is gonna be on with AJ today to talk about all this

[8bitagent]

Hastings did seem like he was getting a little more manic and loose cannon-ish on tv when he was put against MIC talking heads; but perhaps he was just utterly frustrated at the crap going on.

[Forgetting2]

WhoWhatWhy appears to have contacted a family member about the report.

But a Hastings family member had a surprising reaction when contacted by WhoWhatWhy, calling the coroner’s report “irresponsible.”

“I can honestly say with absolute certainty that he wasn’t doing meth,” the family member, requesting anonymity, told WhoWhatWhy in an email. “‘Methamphetamine’ can be nasal spray, Sudafed, one of those upper drinks at the gas station, prescription amphetamines, etc.”

The family member continued, “The LAPD has done a really sloppy job investigating his case, and they were hoping for a mother lode of drugs in his system. When they didn’t get it in the toxicology lab results (science!), they had to insert speculation throughout their field report to compensate for their lack of an investigation. It’s so irresponsible.”

[barracuda]

“I can honestly say with absolute certainty that he wasn’t doing meth,” the family member, requesting anonymity, told WhoWhatWhy in an email. “‘Methamphetamine’ can be nasal spray, Sudafed, one of those upper drinks at the gas station, prescription amphetamines, etc.”

Gas chromatography–mass spectrometry testing differentiates between pseudoephedrine and other false positives for amphetamine in samples. So that doesn't fly. Scrip amphetamine salts like Adderal will indeed produce positive results, though. But no one is saying Hastings was under a doctor's care which would provide legal use of the drug. And the family member isn't disputing the DMT or the pot.

That said, the mention of meth rather than a more straightforward reportage of the test results strikes me as a smear tactic.

Who said he was on DMT? Does one need to detox from that? Has anyone ever been addicted to it?

Addiction is mostly mental, right? And Hastings was an addict. So, if you're Michael Hastings' family and you discover he's using drugs, you want him to stop. Proper response: intervention, detox, rehab, etc.

[Luther Blissett]

I'm just saying that the nature of extremely strong psychedelics is a little different than most other drugs. I understand his family's not wanting him to do it if indeed he was, but even the most constitutional of us couldn't handle more than perhaps two 15-minute mind-warping DMT trips per week.

The implications are very strange. That's not a casual drug.

[Forgetting2]

It seems the family member isn't disputing pot or DMT but oddly, the article doesn't even mention if the question came up. Was it denied? Did they even ask? Did the family member ask the reporter not to say anything about the other two items?

Without going into detail, I'd say the WhoWhatWhy article I posted above is fairly slanted in the 'nothing to see here,' direction.

[barracuda]

Parhamovich was a graduate of Marietta College in Ohio. She developed her career in political communication with the Massachusetts Governor's office, and the International Republican Institute in Iraq before joining the NDI staff in 2006.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrea_Parhamovich

The National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI) is an organization created by the United States government by way of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_D ... _Institute

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_E ... _Democracy

How many Americans could identify the National Endowment for Democracy? An organization which often does exactly the opposite of what its name implies. The NED was set up in the early 1980s under President Reagan in the wake of all the negative revelations about the CIA in the second half of the 1970s. The latter was a remarkable period. Spurred by Watergate-the Church Committee of the Senate, the Pike Committee of the House and the Rockefeller Commission, created by the president, were all busy investigating the CIA. Seemingly every other day there was a new headline about the discovery of some awful thing, even criminal conduct, the CIA had been mixed up in for years. The Agency was getting an exceedingly bad name, and it was causing the powers-that-be much embarrassment.

Something had to be done. What was done was not to stop doing these awful things. Of course not. What was done was to shift many of these awful things to a new organization, with a nice sounding name-the National Endowment for Democracy. The idea was that the NED would do somewhat overtly what the CIA had been doing covertly for decades, and thus, hopefully, eliminate the stigma associated with CIA covert activities.

It was a masterpiece. Of politics, of public relations and of cynicism. Thus it was that in 1983, the National Endowment for Democracy was set up to "support democratic institutions throughout the world through private, nongovernmental efforts". Notice the "nongovernmental"-part of the image, part of the myth. In actuality, virtually every penny of its funding comes from the federal government, as is clearly indicated in the financial statement in each issue of its annual report. NED likes to refer to itself as an NGO (non-governmental organization) because this helps to maintain a certain credibility abroad that an official US government agency might not have. But NGO is the wrong category. NED is a GO.

Allen Weinstein, who helped draft the legislation establishing NED, was quite candid when he said in 1991: "A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA." In effect, the CIA has been laundering money through NED.

The Endowment has four principal initial recipients of funds: the International Republican Institute; the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs; an affiliate of the AFL-CIO (such as the American Center for International Labor Solidarity); and an affiliate of the Chamber of Commerce (such as the Center for International Private Enterprise). These institutions then disburse funds to other institutions in the US and all over the world, which then often disburse funds to yet other organizations.

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/CIA/N ... tDemo.html

[Forgetting2]

LA Weekly has a long article up.... Michael Hastings' Dangerous Mind: Journalistic Star Was Loved, Feared and Haunted.

A lot of stuff in there with attributes not in the coroner's report.