Wikileaks: CIA's Brennan on 'witch hunt' when Hastings was killed

[starroute]

29. The Barrett Brown situation is a lot more bizarre, though

He didn't have the audience that Greenwald does. He wasn't an obvious target. And yet they tried to throw the book at him, imposed a gag order on his talking about his own case, and have a veil of secrecy over the reasons why they're arguing that he should get the maximum under the plea bargain rather than time served. And now the sentencing has been delayed and they've moved him to a different prison where he has fewer resources and less access to outside contacts.

There's something deeply weird about the Brown case that goes further than a mere smear job. For example, why are they trying to accuse him of plotting with Anonymous to overthrow the US government? I mean, that's beyond insane.

And Brown and Hastings were personal friends -- which wasn't the case with Greenwald. Brown had written a sympathetic article about Hastings in 2010 (http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2010/06/why-the-hacks-hate-michael-hastings). And Hastings may have been working on a story about Brown at the time of his death, along with his story about Brennan.

http://freepress.org/departments/display/16/2013/5030

Hastings is also believed to have been working on a story about the Petraeus's replacement as director of the CIA, John Brennan. Brennan is the key architect of Obama's Disposition Matrix, affectionately called a “kill list” by the press, which help the National Command Authority to decide who to kill and how to kill them outside of combat zones without judicial review. A career CIA man, Brennan was considered for nomination by Obama for the agency's top post once before, but withdrew his name once his public support for torture and extraordinary rendition (illegal kidnapping and torture) became a potential liability.

Hastings's third reported pending story was the most potentially shocking. It concerned his friend and fellow investigative journalist Barrett Brown. Like Hastings, Barrett Brown was a young iconoclast deeply concerned about national security and domestic spying issues. When Brown came into possession of emails from HBGary and Stratfor he ceased work on his book and began looking into the mechanisms and implications of domestic spying. The sheer volume of the revelations by Jeremy Hammond and other members of LulzSec caused him to initiate a crowd sourced journalistic entity called Project PM.