{"id":5844,"date":"2013-06-21T08:20:03","date_gmt":"2013-06-21T08:20:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/praag.org\/?p=5844"},"modified":"2013-06-21T08:20:03","modified_gmt":"2013-06-21T08:20:03","slug":"fanning-the-flames-of-conspiracy-on-death-of-michael-hastings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/praag.org\/?p=5844","title":{"rendered":"Fanning the flames of conspiracy on death of Michael Hastings"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"trapwire\"<\/a>WikiLeaks just threw some gasoline onto the conspiracy fire<\/a>. On Wednesday night, they Tweeted: \u201cMichael Hastings contacted WikiLeaks lawyer Jennifer Robinson just a few hours before he died, saying that the FBI was investigating him.\u201d<\/p>\n

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What exactly are they trying to say?<\/p>\n

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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.<\/p>\n

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Hastings has certainly been in contact with WikiLeaks before. In 2012 he wrote a profile of Julian Assange for Rolling Stone in which he asked tough questions \u2013 but the overall tone is sympathetic. Hastings appeared willing to accept that the US government might have targeted Assange in an effort to discredit him; the interview also highlights the failure of mainstream media outlets to expose mistakes made by the US military and generally permits Assange to push his side of the story. Hastings\u2019 empathy for WikiLeaks ties together the deceased journalist, Julian Assange and (through Assange) the leaker Bradley Manning. You can throw Edward Snowden into that mix because he, too, is an admirer of WikiLeaks. And Hastings\u2019 last article was about the evils of the NSA \u2013 which ended with the tantalising line, \u201cPerhaps more information will soon be forthcoming.\u201d\u00a0Glenn Greenwald Tweeted a link to the piece after Hastings’ death. Of such connections are conspiracy theories made. In the minds of the highly imaginative, that is.<\/p>\n

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So what is WikiLeaks trying to say with this Tweet? Is it simply priming us for a revelation about why Hastings was being investigated? Or is it trying to imply that there\u2019s some link between Hastings contacting Jennifer Robinson and the journalist\u2019s death? If so, we might have \u2013 in the words of Michael Moynihan \u2013 a peg for yet another kind of truther. – The Telegraph<\/p>\n

Tags:<\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

WikiLeaks just threw some gasoline onto the conspiracy fire. On Wednesday night, they Tweeted: \u201cMichael Hastings contacted WikiLeaks lawyer Jennifer Robinson just a few hours before he died, saying that the FBI was investigating him.\u201d What exactly are they trying to say? Michael Hastings was a much admired freelance journalist who covered the wars in … Continue reading “Fanning the flames of conspiracy on death of Michael Hastings”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5845,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,10,123],"tags":[3379,2990,3380,3381,2659],"class_list":["post-5844","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-united-states","category-world","tag-bradley-manning","tag-edward-snowden","tag-julian-assange","tag-michael-hastings","tag-wikileaks"],"cc_featured_image_caption":{"caption_text":false,"source_text":false,"source_url":false},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/praag.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/06\/trapwire.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5844","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5844"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5844\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5847,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5844\/revisions\/5847"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5845"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5844"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5844"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5844"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}