Hacker News Reader

Comment by ferdo | Hacker News Reader

Steve Kangas was ex military intel that became a journalist. In 1999, he was found dead of a gunshot wound in a billionaire's building in Pittsburgh.

He was an education for me some 20 years ago when I began learning about the depredations of the National Security Corporate State that now has us in thrall.

A Timeline of CIA Atrocities

By Steve Kangas

http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/CIAtimeline.html

View on HN

> It was ruled a suicide by local police.

How convenient. Maybe Greenwald and other persons of interest should go on the record that they does not intend to suicide.

I consider Kangas the first internet-age reporter to die under suspicious circumstances. I won't busy up the thread with links but I urge anyone with an interest in this topic to research Kangas and his writings. He imparted much information in his short career.

I have a strong dislike of Richard Mellon Scaife and his influence on politics. But if I were a wicked billionaire who wished a bad end on a troublesome gadfly, why would I have that person assassinated in the bathroom outside my office, as opposed to knocked out, smuggled out via the freight elevator, and done to death in some deserted spot? If the goal is to demonstrate impunity of some sort, why not just have him thrown off the roof of the building?

Here, we have to posit a conspiracy powerful and cold-blooded enough to commit and cover up murder, but which is too inept to to put any significant distance between (presumed) co-conspirator and victim. I think we need to give equal consideration to the possibility of it being a 'doorstep suicide,' where a troubled person ends their life in proximity and as a reproach to a perceived antagonist, if only because of Occam's Razor.

Or what better way to consign someone to obscurity by engineering a "how pathetic... he was so obsessed with Scaife that he killed himself in one of his properties in the men's room" moment.

Occam's Razor cuts both ways when dealing with neurotic geeks or with megalomaniac billionaires.

No, I don't think it does. If I want to kill someone and consign them to obscurity as well, I'd do it in a way that didn't maximize the potential for gossip involving a famous person. For example, staging the suicide somewhere else and just scattering blackmail-type evidence around, like some particularly skeevy kind of porn which would reflect badly on the victim.

I mean, if you're going to go down that route why not stage the suicide in the lobby or even the inner sanctum of the putative megalomaniac's office, which would be even more dramatic and damning? The obvious answer is 'because that would be suspicious,' which invites the rejoinder 'and doing it 25 feet down the corridor isn't?' If you have a wicked plan to destroy someone's reputation, you might as well pick the least ambiguous way of doing it.

Apposite reading right now: "The Execution Channel" by Ken Macleod. Yes, it's a work of science fiction -- by someone with a background in fringe political groups who were being actively infiltrated/used for disinformation during the cold war, and who's been thinking about just how far things could go wrt. the internet.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Execution-Channel-ebook/dp/B00CBFX...

Reading it now, thanks.

Finished. That was quite the page turner. Apart from the science twist it is quite uncomfortably believable. Thank you for the pointer!

Score 2 for Scotland :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com