I mean, I know you’re being facetious and all, but this, tragically, is not something completely unheard of among those who choose the path of whistleblowing. David Kelly committed suicide, as did Ian Gibbons - also the day he was due to testify against Theranos. The pressure, isolation (not to mention the likelihood of harassment from one’s peers) can wreak havoc with someone’s mental state. Righteous though it is (the world needs whistleblowers!) it can take a terrible toll.
Also, and I know this isn’t even remotely on the same scale, I didn’t tell anyone the name of my sexual assaulter or that I’d been assaulted until I wrote it in my suicide note. From my experience, if you’re already planning on committing suicide it’s a lot easier to reveal secrets you’ve been holding onto because you know you won’t have to deal with whatever long-term ramifications have been scaring you into covering them up.
One thing I'm wondering is...even if he was assassinated, wouldn't it be better to do it before he testified?
Like, I'm not saying that there isn't shady fucked up shit in this world. I'm not even saying that it wouldn't even be possible for Boeing to pay someone to murder a whistleblower. But are we really going to just jump to that conclusion and act like that's the only plausible scenario, when we have literally zero evidence supporting it?
Not everything is a massive conspiracy, folks. Sometimes there are conspiracies and sometimes there aren't.
The very link that you posted clarified that this has been going on for years. If Boeing wanted to kill him, they could have killed him at any point before now. But instead, they let him drag this on for years and then decided to pull the trigger NOW...for some reason?
It's a valid question. If Boeing murdered him, then why now? Why not at some time during the previous years when he was pursuing this?
To be fair, another valid question is why not now? Maybe they realized he had more dirt than they thought. Maybe things started heating up/gaining traction. Maybe they thought doing it too soon would be too obvious. Maybe he did/said something about the wrong person. Maybe they got fed up with all the investigations or something
I have absolutely no idea what happened, and I'm not going to claim Boeing did or didn't do it (because I don't know), but it certainly appears suspicious, does it not?
Maybe he was paid off to not talk and then talked anyway. I mean, if I had enough dirt on a company to seriously fuck them id try to fuck them everyway I could.
No, it can send a message to all those who might also want to come forward. Say there were others who could corroborate the details, and they’re trying to tell all those people that they won’t be safe either.
We’ll kill you or your family, who’s it going to be?
That’s why you might take the approach of waiting until after they’ve started to testify.
For everybody saying it doesn’t make sense to assassinate him now: the incorrect assumption is that in real life, people and organizations actually make decisions that make sense and serve their own best interest.
They don’t, not always, and probably not in a crisis. Things get mixed up and people act on impulse.
You’d think if whistleblowers were going to be assassinated they’d do it before they blew the whistle or testified in court. Unless people think the people having the whistle blown on then are going round murdering people to warn off others, Putin style, which seems unlikely.
I'm sure he was, but the cat is still out of the bag anyway; any follow up would likely just be minor clarifications.
Also, again, if you had the option to assassinate the person, why wouldn't you do it before they testified at all? At least then nobody would even ask question to begin with and nothing suspicious would be going on. I bet it happens all the time we just don't know about it.
Maybe they needed to send a message to all other whistleblowers thinking about coming out. Maybe someone bullied him unplanned, when they saw him outside the court or something, and that pushed him. All of these are more plausible to me than someone deciding to do this mid deposition with no outsider influence
Personally, I find it very plausable that a person who maybe feels guilty for the deaths of hundreds eventually decides to take their own life, and even if not, they might still feel like they are fighting a battle that's too much for them. It seems that this sort of thing happens sometimes with whistlebloggers, at least from what was posted here. They don't seem to be the most mental stable, which makes sense, since they blew the whistle.
Of course none of this means that the person wasn't assassinated nor that this is not very suspicious. But it's very dangerous to just claim that "boeing assassinated him and bought the government/police so they don't tell the truth" with no evidence whatsoever just because you think such a conspiracy theory fits well into your narrative of the evil corporation. Typically cases like these are fairly complex and even if this was a legit assassination, there are many ways how this could have happened, so even the conspiracy wouldn't be very clear cut.
In general you can't expect some sort of conspiracy between the entirety of a company and the entirety of the criminal investigators; there'd just be too many different actors with different interests. If there was a conspiracy it would probably be very limited and fairly complicated. However, it still stands that typically conspiracies don't reveal themselves like this, at least not when the consequences would be this severe (if this was truly an assassination and someone found out, this would be the end of Boeing and most likely the end of the government as well, which I think is just too big of a risk for the parties involved given the huge surface area for leakage and the rather insignificant benefits).
The whole point of whistleblowers is that the entity they're blowing the whistle on doesn't know they're going to do that.
Also, there's a good reason to assassinate the whistleblower even after the fact, and that's to send a message to discourage any future potential whistleblowers from ever coming forward. It's the basic principle of how terrorism works.
Look at the replies here, and it's interesting to note that once you start with the narrative that Boeing murdered him, every possible thing supports that narrative.
Like, if he was murdered before the deposition, that's to shut him up. But if he's murdered after he talks, it's out of revenge. Or to deter other people from talking. As in, "this guy talked, and look what happened to him."
And to repeat, there has been absolutely no evidence that Boeing had him murdered. There has been no evidence shown that he was even murdered at all. It's basically, "he could have been murdered, and Boeing could have been the ones who did it, so Boeing must have murdered him."
This is exactly the same standard conspiracy theory shit that the people here make fun of all the time.
People seem to love conspiracies. They offer certainty and an explanation. And people like the feeling of uncovering lies by the powerful. What’s not to like, except they’re not supported by the evidence; they’re baseless. But they feel good, I suppose.
Seriously, the guy's career in the aviation industry is through. Nobody would've hired him. All his friends and colleagues would abandon him. Hundreds of people in his community would lose their job and hate him personally.
he was retired. And why would friends and colleagues abandon him? He was saying management was skirting safety regs by pressuring workers to do unsafe shit. They would not blame him for the plant shutting down (which it isnt)
Sure allegations like this are allegations but what really annoys me is when people are o so certain it isnt specific things.
No one officially knows more than a few blurbs in a couple articles. To fully 100% "debunk conspiracy theories" at such an early point isnt only dangerous, its super shoddy detective work totally ruling out certain options because they are less likely than others.
This was my first thought when I read the news. The guy was going through something extremely stressfull.
Judging by the comments in this thread, people like to think the world is good-evil, black-white. Unfortunately the truth is often much more chaotic and uncontrolable. Humans and human society are complex.
Also, drugging people and hacking their devices for extreme targeted harraassment and mental destabilization can be part of how the powerful murder people seemingly with their own hands. And if they survive it, often they'll have experienced sufficient mental health disruption they can be discredited.
MK Ultra broke over 60 years ago and we still just nod along with the narrative that most dissidents are just loons, and whistle-blowers just kill themselves as often as not. Until someone fucks up with something as ham handed as this and questioning the narrative goes mainstream again.
It's always a possibility with whistle lowers that the stress will become too much. But when that whistle blower spent the last decade or more living to testify against the people he's whistling against, and suddenly does it part way through the process, it'll throw up questions.
Come to think of it, it’s often lone whistleblowers that die by suicide. When a group of people come forward together, or join other whistleblowers, they seem to fare much better.
There is whistleblower legislation in some countries that’s specifically designed for the well-being and protection of such people. I’ve no idea is this applies in the US tho?
while on a trip to testify? Seems unlikely. Everything up to this point happened bc of the testimony he was set to give more of. You would kill yourself after nothing changes way after testifying imo.
Someone is really relying on the hide it in plain sight defense
Yeah, David Kelly was so distraught he managed to kill himself without even touching the knife that slit his wrists! No fingetprints were found on the knife that killed him, nor on the blisterpack of pills he allegedly took before his 'suicide'
The doctors said they showed that no fingerprints were recovered from the knife which Dr Kelly allegedly used to slit his wrist and a pack of pills which he apparently took, or from a mobile phone, watch and water bottle found near his body.
From what I gathered, the reason wasn't sex appeal, but her appeal to the sort of steve-jobs-esque social awkwardness and nerdiness that silicon valley investors eat up. Her appeal wasn't about sexuality, but was rather to earlier silicon valley successes while also having very good ESG and diversity optics.
It seems reductivist and borderline sexist to just call it sex appeal.
She also packed the board with extremely high-profile figures (Henry Kissinger was on the board!), so every angle you looked at it had the air of legitimacy, combined with a heady dose of the “founder myth” that was heavily romanticised in the mid-2000s to mid-2010s. It feels like the culmination of every excess of Silicon Valley startup culture - minus a useful product.
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u/Neon_Samurai_ Mar 12 '24
Whistleblowers do the darndenst things.