WAS MICHAEL HASTINGS' DEATH IN LOS ANGELES AN ASSASSINATION?

The ancient and tyrannical power, the despotism beginning to take its distinct shape again, depends most of all on a climate of fear, which it hopes to sustain. With the uncertainty and edge of chaos, the psychological element is more suitable to its success than the occasional act of domestic terror. But if it reaches out destructively to kill a persistent journalist, and does so as brazenly as it seems to have done; then we have fallen a long way down, indeed, into the well of fascism.

By one eyewitness account, the engine of Michael Hastings' Mercedes coupe landed 100 feet from the shredded, burned wreckage of his car. Friends of Hastings disclosed that the brilliant writer and journalist typically drove his car "like a grandma". He let a close friend know that he would soon be breaking the biggest story of his career, concerning the CIA.

How did his life end as it did, along the narrow lanes of an LA park, in the darkness among the palm trees, at around 4:00 AM?...
burned to death like that in the wee hours of the morning?

Hastings was only 33 years old.

His talent and his willingness to break with journalistic conventions brought him to well-deserved public recognition, for the interview he did with Gen. Stanley McChrystal, then the NATO commander in charge of Afghanistan, who eventually had to resign his command, when the interview published in Rolling Stone Magazine revealed the general's contempt and disdain for civilian authority.

The last published article by Hastings, appearing in Buzz Feed on June 6th, Why Democrats Love To Spy On Americans, examined the White House obsession with surveillance and with prosecuting whistleblowers.

The very topic of Democratic two-facedness on civil liberties is one of the most important issues that [Glenn] Greenwald has covered. Many of those Dems — including the sitting President Barack Obama, Senator Carl Levin, and Sec. State John Kerry — have now become the stewards and enhancers of programs that appear to dwarf any of the spying scandals that broke during the Bush years, the very same scandals they used as wedge issues to win elections in the Congressional elections 2006 and the presidential primary of 2007-2008. [...]

Unsurprisingly, the White House has dug in, calling their North Korea-esque tools “essential” to stop terrorism, and loathe to give up the political edge they’ve seized for Democrats on national security issues under Obama’s leadership. The AP spying scandal — which the administration attempted to downplay at the time, even appointing Eric Holder to lead his own investigation into himself —was one of the unexpected consequences of one of two leak investigations that Obama ordered during the 2012 campaign. 

It’s unclear where a possible third leak investigation would lead. However, judging by the DOJ’s and FBI’s recent history, it would seem that any new leak case would involve obtaining the phone records of reporters at the Guardian, the Washington Post, employees at various agencies who would have had access to the leaked material, as well as politicians and staffers in Congress—records, we now can safely posit, they already have unchecked and full access to.

 Later this month, Hastings confided to a friend, by e-mail, that he felt he was being pursued, that "the feds were interviewing his friends and associates".  Much that has happened in the last few weeks seems to be punctuated by this man's death. The extent to which government intelligence services spy on journalists now, on the Associated Press, is a rude awakening for Americans. And what's more, Edward Snowden, the whistleblower, whose disclosures only emphasize the significance of the government spying on the press, has revealed the scale and ambition of this vast surveillance, the arrogance that lies at the root of it.

The hubris and the impulse behind it, aims to obliterate the privacy of everyone. It can't be described except as a nightmare being brought to life: global in the sense of covering the whole planet, but also global in another sense of the word, penetrating the private fabric of life, as people go about their lives. It's like a war that's been declared on everyone, an engulfing reality. Angela Merkel, the conservative leader of Germany, remarked that Obama's setup reminded her of the Stasi, the former East Germany's  Ministry of State Security.

Richard Clarke, the former counter-terrorism advisor to two presidents (Clinton and Bush Jr.) said the technical knowhow exists now to hack the computers of more modern cars, taking over the control of the vehicle from the driver. This was covered in Huffington Post a few days ago. "There is reason to believe that intelligence agencies for major powers" -- including the United States -- know how to remotely seize control of a car", Clarke is quoted as saying.

The question has to be asked now. Who or what is really running the United States? Was Michael Hastings murdered because of the offense he gave to Gen. McChrystal, leading to the general resigning his command in Afghanistan? Did retribution come years later because this breach of journalistic code happened, a code that was presumed to mean that when the general was a little drunk, and running at the mouth about what he really thought of Obama, his civilian commander, the reporter doing the interview was not supposed to publish it, word for word? Or has the task of assassinating people, and targeting them, been parceled out to more than a few agencies--government/military/business--to select their own victims as they see fit?

Hastings had received death threats after the McChrystal interview came out.

Who is being served?-- and who is the master of this house? One of the most astounding facts revealed by Edward Snowden, employee of Booz Allen Hamilton, former analyst and systems administrator at the NSA, is that a corporation like Booz, a contractor working for the super-snooping NSA, has been granted the authority to issue top security clearances. And there are now something like 1.4 million Americans in our security state who hold top security clearances. Corporations can issue top security clearances; and as an example of how chummy this business and government relationship is, former Booz people have been put in positions of leadership in this intelligence service octopus we have here.

June 18th: an explosion was heard sometime after 4:00 AM, in an LA park among rows of palm trees; and the car's engine was thrown 100 feet from the vehicle, according to an eyewitness. And Michael Hastings died in the fire. But what he has sacrificed is yet to be appreciated; and what we have all lost who call ourselves American is yet to be understood.

***

UPDATE:  I highly recommend James Corbett's video and commentary, in order that readers here may better put together the information surrounding Michael Hastings' death. 

Crashes of Convenience: Michael Hastings (video)

copeland morris MAY

When fate demands to be
Before the eye, it takes its voice
From a starling and catches the tone
Of her scolding, fussing with her nest,
Coaxing her fattening chicks
Before they fledge, before they
Are ready to fly. And she who filled
The nest with tokens of past years
Rewoven, drives them further with what life
Feels like; and all its heaving splendor
Comes full harvest. It is May alright,
May even so, with stabs of cold wind
That no one welcomes; but she is in
Fine voice, still there, scolding.

"FREEDOM....FREEDOM"..."NO WAR...NO WAR"

DemocracyNow! rebroadcast this performance by Richie Havens in 2003.
He sang Freedom in New York City on February 15th, as part of worldwide protests against the Iraq War.

You may recall the song from Havens’ performance at Woodstock, where he was the first act to take the stage, and did so quite dramatically. After a nearly 50-year career, Havens died Monday at age 72 in his New Jersey home after a sudden heart attack.

At Tholos we say our goodbyes and express our thanks for the great music and life of Richie Havens.

So far, 2013 has been a time that is full of new shocks to the conscience. A long hunger strike by our prisoners at Guantanamo has been going on for two three months already. The latest reports from RT show that the deepest grievance among hunger strikers is mostly in response to the unchanging reality of indefinite detention itself. There is no day in court for these men: no habeas corpus, no trial, no real review of any kind. This treatment amounts to the worst kind of psychological torture.  Those resisting the horrible reality are being force fed right now; and the military, the administration, and our big media have been repeatedly downplaying these events, or not bothering to report at all. Some men whose innocence has even been conceded are still not about to be released. Prolonged incarceration without trial is nothing less than a nightmare.

From RT on March 22 :

It’s going to take the American people to demand Guantanamo Bay prison facilities be closed, former Gitmo prison official Ret. Col. Morris Davis told RT. Until the issue catches the public’s attention, there is little hope for improvement, he says.

"A majority of the men at Guantanamo -- 86 of the 106 who have been cleared for transfer -- have been in confinement now for more than a decade in some cases," Davis said. "So to them... the only way to potentially call attention to it is to do something drastic like a hunger strike."

In Washington, several weeks ago, a White House source claimed that President Obama was monitoring the situation.

Ten years of war up to now, including word on Friday from President Obama, of his willingness to use military force against Syria, shows that our leaders have learned nothing in all these years. Just the day before, Obama and the rest of our living presidents were observing a ceremony in Dallas,  to dedicate to that war criminal, George W. Bush, his very own Presidential Library and "Museum".

If Richie Havens had been able to join the protest of a couple of hundred people, taking place just across Central Expressway from Bush's new monument to Empire, he would have gladly celebrated the occasion, taking the stage with Phil Donahue, with Medea Benjamin and the women of Code Pink, with Cindy Sheehan and other survivors who lost sons or daughters, parents or siblings, in these dreadful wars; and he would have sung out to activists and ordinary people, rallying all of us to inspire one another and hear his cry again...

"Freedom...Freedom"...

"No War...No War"

PS: 

This month marks the tenth anniversary of Tholos; and I should take this opportunity to thank our readers for their kind attention.

copeland morris BEES

Can you hear bees dancing? Their shuffle
Is all shimmy coming up to the hive,
The buzz of rehearsal before a melody comes
Back to the flower: those greatest hits,
The songs you can't stop humming, if you're a bee,
When the dew is yours on the road to school,
And the young at heart adore you.

What is with their magic? Don't bees boogie
Over our graves as well as they dance
When we put up our stores? The whisper
Released from the palms of kids who cupped
Hands for it, is another name for them.
They rock the tempo with a kind of wobble
When mockingbirds whistle the bobwhite's song.

IT STILL SOUNDS SO BEAUTIFUL AND SAD

FROM OUR CULTURE OF FEAR TO A NEW CLIMATE OF HYSTERIA

One of the most unsettling sights of the pre-inaugural business,  was video footage of the president's carefree, delighted and docile audience, just working their way through the ramparts of the New Power, right past the bright uniforms of the TSA, consenting to be felt up, brushed with the wand, and passed through the detection equipment, on their way to the universal raising of hands, to their rendezvous with the Disney King, where the total harmonics of make believe lay within their reach.

The speech sends one hell of a signal for the Second  Inauguration, after a disastrous, and decadent four years,--those years of outrageous corruption in public office,-- permissiveness on behalf of fraud, virtual surrender to the central banks, insider trading, US Federal gun running to Mexican drug lords with no subsequent prosecution or real investigation.  Historians will have to pursue the meaning of Barack Obama's goo-encrusted oratory, dripping with artificial sweetener, and its nutrient-free glut of pure fantasy.

The president announced that "a decade of war is ending"; and yet it looks like Africa is going to be the next war front. The continent is wide open now. Mali, especially, has veins of gold and uranium to be tapped, and is waiting to bleed luxuriously into the vaults of the Americans and the NATO countries.

Our own fixation with terror has become a psychological trap that controls behavior; where  the new normality of terror becomes the "englobing narrative" of a totalitarian state. Some Americans have been lured into the exaggerated hysteria that can be produced out of the fear of ever more ridiculous threats. Terror in the hands of the State is all about the badlands of hysteria and how to manipulate emotion: for instance, with the creation of arbitrary thresholds: the world before and after 9/11, the world before and after staged events, and in the aftermath of false flag operations.

Empires resort to the same vile practices throughout history. As Cicero said of Rome: "In the midst of arms the law falls mute". And a kind of authoritarian disease is descending on Americans from the ranks of our civilian and military control structure. Stories abound these days, concerning police and paramilitary overreaction in our neighborhoods; where SWAT teams come out just because a firearm is seen in someone's hands. It comes as hysteria and overreaching force, and people getting tasered and killed too often by tasers. Their crime is lack of quick compliance.

Now there are places in the country where people are being acclimated--sometimes through unannounced drills, to the presence of military in the streets, --which goes deeply against the grain of our traditions. The line between military maneuver and policing is being blurred here; and this is an affront to the warnings of our country's Founders. As Americans, we were not meant to be placed under the thumb of our own army.

Commenting on the legacy of torture, Glenn Greenwald writes,

Those who ordered and implemented torture were never prosecuted. They were actively shielded from all forms of legal accountability by the current president. They thus went on to write books, get even richer, and live the lives of honored American statesmen. Torture was thus transformed from what it had been - a universally recognized war crime - into just another pedestrian, partisan political debate that Americans have.

Under Barack H. Obama, a lot of law has fallen mute, while we were presumably at war with terror. Among the casualties is habeas corpus; and due process--including judicial review itself--when the object this chief executive has in mind is targeted assassination. And torture has not been ended; but it is instead turned over to proxies, or hidden from scrutiny at ghost sites. We find decency and justice are being betrayed by our president who has sworn to "faithfully execute the laws".

City blocks of computing power, ranks upon ranks of servers, trillions or even quadrillions of bytes of information storage, unimaginable data mining, and the snooping power of the NSA, which was once prohibited by law to spy on us; and there it is, turned against American themselves, obliterating any expectation of privacy--or really any moment of respite--when one is hopeful of not being watched. But you see the government insists that it is the victim; and soon it will fall prey to prying eyes, and the penetration of its secrets.

And there is the automation of killing, the soon-to-be ubiquitous range of drones, a robotic destruction, with its further remove from human agency and from contact with those who are slaughtered. Those who keep abreast of events understand that drones will be policing our own movements before long, using deadly force too, provided that Americans passively accept the presence of these things over their heads.

In an unsettling, figurative sense, Barack Obama is our teacher.  Like Cicero said, "In the midst of arms the law falls mute". What better way is this to be demonstrated than through the despotic power that is rising in the US? What better rhetoric for the job than the glittering facade of progressive piety that must shield the eye from the blood that Obama tracks into the White House?

OBAMA SETS THE STAGE FOR HIS DAY OF INFAMY

Corrupt international power is flexing its muscle, spinning its propaganda, making ready its false flags, and salivating in anticipation of the truly biblical image of Damascus in smoke and utter destruction.

So many enemies have gathered from beyond the borders of Syria. And these enemies are operating on a tight, revised schedule now, after grinding away at the country for almost two years. Extremists of the al-Qaeda brand, freebooting their way to martyrdom, are fighting alongside the West's Special Services, fighting beside  hirelings and thugs whose paymasters include  the royal houses of Saud and Qatar, with the connivance and assistance of Turkey, with its leader Erdogan, who is absolutely stabbing a neighboring country in the back. 

War is not on the verge of breaking out; it is being escalated. War did not begin almost two years ago with the coordinated attack on Assad's government in Syria; and it will continue to exist to further the ongoing, fateful war against Iran. The attempted destruction of secular life, the most civilized part of life in Syria, is not an interlude; but it is, frankly, a continuum of war. And to speak frankly, acts of war by the United States on Iran, spurred by Israel and Israeli acts of war against Iran, may come short of overt war, but these verbal and deadly physical assaults always contain the threat lurking, in none too subtle language, of a final reckoning. 

Humanity advances and humanity retreats; and history with its cycles moves through the delusional idea of purification by violence, from one extremity to the next one. We are cycling down into a dark place now with Obama, one of the most deceitful US presidents ever, whose cards remain ever close to his vest, supported by Hillary Clinton, that harpy of eternal war, at the State Department, with Susan Rice, more viper than diplomat, rumored to be Clinton's replacement. How can we take any comfort in this? And then there is the depravity, also, of prominent European governments: France, Britain, even Germany--agreeable to finding a space on Syria's scrawny neck, where a boot heel can still crush down.

It's hard to say if most Americans realize that this is an international crisis that could lead to a World War; or that this thing was really kicked off when President Obama agreed to overthrow, by mostly outside military force, the Gadhafi government in Libya,--an operation which was planned within NATO,-- and carried out with a hoax, and by criminal misrepresentation in the UN Security Council, a resolution which Russia and China would never have agreed to let stand, and would have vetoed; if they had understood the hidden agenda behind the words, "responsibility to protect"; --if only they had been alerted to the deception and hypocrisy of those who used the language.

An international crisis exists because US, French, and British leaders, lied to the world about their intentions in Libya; and now with the manufactured crisis over the Syrian government, and the propaganda onslaught against its president's legitimacy, they are perfectly willing to partner with the instruments of terror that have been imported into that country; and the real corruption of these western men, the willingness to use any means available, is a most ugly truth. 

Syria's president, Bashar Assad, has no incentive to use chemical weapons inside his country. And if a NATO naval armada and its amphibious landing craft are gathering off the coast of Syria; it is not because our own Obama, Prime Minister Cameron, or French President Hollande, are expecting Assad to use chemical weapons indifferently, or to use them at all; it is rather because they are not content to let Syria's secular government stand for much longer.  And they have pressing business and violent work to do upon Iran.

The unholy alliance is disposed to create a hell in Syria; and this is borne out by the strategy NATO used in the Libyan operation, where extreme Islamist elements were a major part of the rebel cadre there, and where tons of advanced military hardware in Gadhafi's former depots, including shoulder-launched anti- aircraft man pads could migrate onward to the front in Syria, and who knows where else.

There is not a word coming out of the mouths of US and NATO officials, on the subject of President Assad or Syria, that the Russians or Chinese are bound to believe. And the US, and some European media, the major corporate ones, have just been mindless parrots, whenever they have helped to further the vilest kind of aggression, whose clear aim is to overthrow a government by force. This is all very dangerous; and no one knows yet how dangerous it is.

It is vanity, hatred, and greed,--always as it was before--that drags individuals and nations into the abyss. To hear something again that reminds us of the pure of heart is what always amazes us,  wherever or whenever it bears within it the seeds of redemption, like the words of Martin Luther King:

Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.

AN ENDORSEMENT OF JILL STEIN AND THE GREEN PARTY

The debates between the establishment contenders for president have finally ended; and the two men are still at pains to run on their public records. The foreign policy debate (which means war debate) as well as questions about the world's ecological crisis were constantly subject to evasion. Given the relationship of both these party mouthpieces to oligarchy, it was hard to avoid the conclusion that both men, Romney and Obama,  would remain committed to letting the corporations have their way. The further plundering of exploitable societies along the path to global feudalism, goes hand in hand with the militarization of our own society; and under either man,  this will surely extend the lawless and despotic methods we have already seen.

When Obama describes the United States as "the indispensable nation in the world" you can be sure that a principle like that is arrogant enough to satisfy the taste of any empire. Surely it is a provincial attitude not shared by any nation the US has savaged economically, or threatened with destruction, or delivered to chaos and madness. Both Mitt Romney and Barack Obama agree on these goals in the most fundamental ways. And the cockeyed framing of this empire's place in the world could not go on in its reckless way, if third party voices were admitted to our political debate.

The state's power of impunity, the regime of total surveillance, the slow dismembering of due process, and continual testing of the public tolerance for bullying and police state tactics, is more prevalent than ever  at home. The authorities right up to the highest level are less and less answerable to our legal rights; for they prefer secrecy to transparency; and they are satisfied to levy token fines on the worst corporate offenders.

By endorsing Jill Stein, I am declaring my eternal opposition to the corporate takeover of my government. This is because certain refusals are crucial to being a citizen now. That  means the rejection of war as a policy,  and it means rejecting the globalist race for profit which has slavery as the ultimate model.  This bad behavior defines global corporate despotism-- which is another name for a parasite that destroys and assumes the identity of its host--the former sovereign government of the people. These transnational corporations want to make it illegal to interfere with their profits in any way; and therefore we must act to protect our descendants' DNA, from those who would irradiate their genes, or tinker in dangerous ways with the genetic code of things we eat.

And with all of these necessary refusals it is good to endorse something, many things that are positive, such as political liberty and the ideals of justice. I endorse the campaign Jill Stein is making on behalf of us all. She is worthy of the presidency.

Chris Hedges has recently thrown his support behind Jill Stein. His warnings about the XL agenda should be heeded:

The XL pipeline, which would cost $7 billion and whose southern portion is under construction and slated for completion next year, is the most potent symbol of the dying order. If completed, it will pump 1.1 million barrels a day of unrefined tar sand fluid from tar sand mine fields in Canada to the Texas Gulf Coast. Tar sand oil is not conventional crude oil. It is a synthetic slurry that, because tar sand oil is solid in its natural state, must be laced with a deadly brew of toxic chemicals and gas condensates to get it to flow. Tar sands are boiled and diluted with these chemicals before being blasted down a pipeline at high pressure. Water sources would be instantly contaminated if there was a rupture. The pipeline would cross nearly 2,000 U.S. waterways, including the Ogallala Aquifer, source of one-third of the United States' farmland irrigation water. [...]

Keystone XL is part of the final phase of extreme exploitation by the corporate state. The corporations intend to squeeze the last vestiges of profit from an ecosystem careening toward collapse. Most of the oil that can be reached through drilling from traditional rigs is depleted. The fossil fuel industry has, in response, developed new technologies to go after dirtier, less efficient forms of energy. These technologies bring with them a dramatically heightened cost to ecosystems. They accelerate the warming of the planet. And they contaminate vital water sources. Deep-water Arctic drilling, tar sand extraction, hydraulic fracturing (or hydro-fracking) and drilling horizontally, given the cost of extraction and effects on the environment, are a form of ecological suicide.

There's an attack on civic life and justice, that's been gaining momentum with the weakening of our safeguards on due process; and we cannot risk much more of this degenerative history we are seeing.  There are apparently signs in some parts of the country of of a new kind of capitalist adventurism that dissolves municipalities as it seizes municipal real estate: an evil process where the police stand down or fade away; and it sets up a sort of Twilight Zone, where anarchy is just another business opportunity. 

I thought of Jill Stein after she and her running mate were arrested at the site of that final ludicrous foreign policy debate, where Romney and Obama traded gusts of hot air. Jill Stein and Cheri Honkala, the national candidates of the Green Party, were detained in a warehouse, where it is reported they were shackled to chairs for eight hours. 

IT'S COME TO THIS

copeland morris ARCHIPELAGO

Old fishermen admit to dry mouth,
Perpetual brine soaking the seat
Of their pants, and never managing,
Absent some fish, or without
Fidgets and superstitions that
Mention the smell of land.

There is the regret of Ovid’s writing.
And his lines, mindful of correspondence,
Bubble suddenly in the busy waters--
Or churn with memories of banishment,
Remembered within the archipelago‘s
Ebbing counterpoint.

The sea describes miracles that confound all
Wherever boundless moments belong to men
When their catch overflowed with double
Bounties of shrimp; for as they hauled up nets
They slid uncertainly on the deck.
And what a flock of seagulls came!

The wild delight and swarming obscured
The long-sought messages of these friends,
These that had been forgotten in the mêlée
Of fishermen’s oaths and hands that
Couldn’t prevent the artful glee,
Pilfering through hungry beaks, the prize

Until an old mate says, “The way to be rid of
This nuisance is to kill one.” Then the seagulls,
The flock as one, forgot their hunger; they
Abandoned the chase at the moment, just as
Their flesh lay down in the water, trembling
Wing torn. So Ovid himself would have noticed--

Drifting off to port, the wings still pay homage,
Like a grimace above and away; and only
The new moon trails behind them
Singing of hunger and longing.

Out of your ignorance, you seek much more than
Even gods are able to control.

THIS HAPPENS WHEN THE BUSINESS MODEL AND THE CONSPIRACY MODEL ARE THE SAME

"The world is big enough to satisfy everyone's needs; but will always be too small to satisfy individual greed."

--Mahatma Gandhi