My first thought is "WTF!" But my second is this: every single person who's ever criticized Boeing is going to die (eventually). With so many people in a position to notice and speak out about Boeing's issues, it isn't terribly surprising that a few deaths have occurred.
Combine that with one headline-grabbing (apparent) suicide during a deposition, and we're now all primed to notice these deaths and attribute intent.
> With so many people in a position to notice and speak out about Boeing's issues, it isn't terribly surprising that a few deaths have occurred.
Also, let's not kid ourselves, even if Boeing doesn't retaliate (and there is a lot of reason to think they have), being a whistleblower adds a tremendous amount of stress & disruption to your life. Whatever your life expectancy was before you were a whistleblower was, it's going to be lower (likely MUCH lower) afterwards. It's a terrible price to pay, which is why they deserve as much protection & support as possible.
That’s an awful lot of BS to swallow. I know the blue pill is nice and all. But just know, the day you finally doubt what you’ve typed, the red pill is there waiting for you when you’re ready to see fact over fiction. But I warn and caution you in hopes of deterring you: the Truth is usually more depressing than the fantasy.
I guess what’s missing is the denominator. How many Boeing whistleblowers are there? It’s a nice little math problem.
Let’s say both of the whistleblowers were age 50. The probability of a 50 year old man dying in a year is 0.6%. So the probability of 2 or more of them dying in a year is 1 - (the probability of exactly zero dying in a year + the probability of exactly one dying in a year). 1 - (A+B).
A is (1-0.006)^N. B is 0.006N(1-0.006)^(N-1). At 60 A is about 70% and B is about 25% making it statistically insignificant.
But they died in the same 2 month period, so that 0.006 should be 0.001. If you rerun the same calculation, it’s 356.
You are ignoring literally every other variable, especially the ones that are likely common to whistleblowers in general, Boeing employees in general, and Boeing whistleblowers in particular.
Characteristics like having spent a career building airplanes surrounded by all kinds of mechanical and chemical hazards.
Whistleblowing itself is extremely stressful for the attention it draws, the personal and professional relationships it strains, the media attention and of course the rampant speculation of assassination.
Does personal health influence the psychology of a whistleblower? If you get a terminal diagnosis would you be more likely to spill the beans?
This is some very specific, public, whistleblowers, in the span of months. Not some pool of thousands, or even hundreds people with mere "potential to criticize".
Sure, but how many people are whistleblowers about Boeing misbehavior. I would guess at most a hundred, the chances that two of them die in such a short time seems low. What are the odds that an apparently healthy person just drops dead in two weeks over the span of maybe two years. Certainly seems somewhat unlikely.
My ex killed herself not long after telling me she wasn't suicidal. This may surprise you, but suicidal people often lie about being suicidal. Or, they rapidly go from not being suicidal to being so. Or, due to mental illness, they've lost a grip on reality.
The proper comparison is not the size of the employee pool over a human lifespan its the size of the list of people actively advocating or publicly known to be testifying against Boeing over the course of a month.
Not that I disagree with you, but since the is the most upvoted comment - had this happened in, say, Russia, people would say: "The bloody Putin's totalitarianism!". But in the US, well: "[...] every single person who's ever criticized Boeing is going to die". This is absolutely hilarious and deserves the best comment of the year award.
No-one is truly healthy. Everything is a game of statistics
You may be totally healthy and the peak of physical fitness and a sudden stroke destroys you. Everyone can improve their chances, but no-one can guarantee they're indestructible.
> every single person who's ever criticized Boeing is going to die (eventually)
That's extremely tautological.
> it isn't terribly surprising that a few deaths have occurred.
It's surprising they have so many whistle blowers that more than one has died in a short span of time, in particular, before the investigations over their allegations have been satisfactorily and publicly completed.
> and we're now all primed to notice these deaths and attribute intent.
That doesn't mean it's pointless to ask questions and to investigate further. There's a lot of people who seem very eager for this all to just "go away." That should make anyone, let alone a forum of hackers, somewhat suspicious.
> I'm baffled by this comment. It's exceedingly rare for two middle-aged and otherwise healthy people to die without warning.
No. It happens every day. Yes, if you pick two random middle-aged people at random, it's exceedingly rare for both of them to die without warning. However, if you pick a large population of otherwise healthy middle-aged people, the probably that two of them might die without warning is actually quite high.
The question is, how large is the population? If the union is to be believed (and there's a lot of credibility there), Boeing whistleblowers are a pretty large population. Add in to that the stress & disruption of being a whistleblower, and then layer on the stress from any retaliation from Boeing (which allegedly is happening on a daily basis), and the probability of two of them dying around the same time isn't really that low.
e.g., if you assume a mortality rate of 1 in 1000/yr (which seems very low, considering their circumstance) and a population of 100, the odds of two of them dying over the course of a year is over 50% (1-0.999^100)^2 = 53.29%.
> Both were whistleblowers of which there are allegedly no more than 32 in the last few years.
Yeah, out of a population of 32, it's unlikely to happen. It seems likely that this number is grossly underrepresenting the size of the population. Maybe whistleblowers are being targeted, maybe there are a lot more than 32, maybe both of those are true, but it seems unlikely that both of them are false.
I'm baffled by this comment. It's exceedingly rare for two middle-aged and otherwise healthy people to die without warning.
Suicide is the 7th leading cause of death for men 55-62. It's considerably more common than murder.
Both were whistleblowers of which there are allegedly no more than 32 in the last few years.
Barnett hadn't worked for Boeing since 2017, and was being deposed as part of his appeal of his original whistleblower complaint. It makes no sense to think that someone trying to silence him would wait until 7 years and one Netflix documentary have transpired.
I’m having a hard time seeing how pneumonia and stroke could be inflicted on a person as part of a cover up. Seems like this was just unfortunate illness.
Pneumonia is just a lung infection, so I imagine there's a number of ways you can make a person to unknowingly inhale something.
However, it looks way too complicated for a plot. There are many tried and proven methods of getting rid of people. Spooks aren't actually that good in hiding their works - we know about a lot of cases where people were assassinated (of course, we may also not know about many, but I think we have a good sample). Among those, we have a lot of ways it can be done - shootings, stabbings, explosions, poisons, drownings, falling from heights, whatever - but I can't remember any case where a biological agent were used. And thinking about it - biological agents are hard to produce, hard to handle, unstable, unpredictable in use, can't be properly targeted, why would anyone use that instead of dozens of easier and more common methods?
So while it does look suspicious on its face, I'd have hard time believing it's an example of an assassination.
> Spooks aren't actually that good in hiding their works
This is pretty similar to the old argument about why mass surveillance is unlikely to be happening - we're just not that good at keeping secrets. Seems like a pretty safe bet that there's good spooks who are good at hiding their works.
> we know about a lot of cases where people were assassinated (of course, we may also not know about many, but I think we have a good sample). Among those, we have a lot of ways it can be done
Let's not forget about survivorship bias. You only know about the assassinations you know about. You don't know about the assassinations that were successfully kept secret.
"Something?". Having them inhale oil or dirt will do it. Pneumonia is usually caused by a bacteria that's just everywhere (though usually on the skin), that's too simple. If it starts growing in your lungs, you can try antibiotics. If that doesn't work, well, nice knowing you.
We are surrounded by lethal bacteria. That humans survive depends on the immune system having a 100% success rate preventing bacteria from forming even a small colony in the lungs (and several other places, like the teeth, where infections can rapidly and surprisingly turn deadly)
This is why people cough so extremely hard when inhaling solid or liquid stuff in their windpipes.
Also this happens all the time. That someone dies from pneumonia is not uncommon (though for oil it's usually someone who manages to spray themselves with aerosolized oil at work). So even if an autopsy found a few specs of dirt in the lungs, and even if they actually trace that to be the cause, that's not extremely suspicious. (Plus why would they check? Obviously with a pneumonia patient you know the cause of death)
This sounds a bit like the toupee fallacy - you have never seen a good toupee, because the good ones you don't recognize as anything other than normal hair.
I'm not at all inclined to believe this is anything more than a co-incidence, but those things can definitely be induced in a way that's difficult to detect.
Not to say that I believe it happened, but there is a difference between actual cause of death and reported cause of death. As in, just because it was written down that pneumonia and stroke were involved doesn't necessarily make it true.
Again, I do not believe this happened, but that's probably how you'd do it.
MRSA [1], though? He could have been inoculated with it.
MRSA is awful, difficult or impossible to clear, and can certainly be fatal.
This could be a very diabolical way to assassinate someone.
How would you be able to trace it? It could have been laced in his food or drink. Or simply transfered by touch (got on his hands, then wiped on his face or nose). Or aerosolized as he walked by.
There are 3 million Americans unknowingly walking around with MRSA in their nose right now, all around us. It is so common I'm not sure it would be a good assassination weapon even if you tried.
MRSA is fairly common especially in hospital settings. After all, you have a setting where people are coming in sick with a disease that is hard to kill and resistant to antibiotics.
It's also trivially easy to culture MRSA. A lot of university micro-bio classes induce anti-biotic resistance in e-coli as an experiment for under graduates.
certainly not out of reach for a determined and powerful adversary. infecting someone with a respiratory virus isn't exactly rocket science. just spraying a subperceptibly thin aerosol into someone's face should do it.
Doubt Boeing or its spook going to use a bioweapon to off a whistleblower. Too complex, too many parties involved, too much of a trail, too high consequences if caught (i.e. terrorism), too high survival % vs. the panoply of less exotic options. It’s a Wile E. Coyote-level plot.
I figure there's like a 99% chance it happened naturally, and a 1% chance it was the most brilliant assasination of all time specifically because any rational person would think it's unlikely to have been one.
I think there were some heavy metal poisons (not Alice Cooper or Bret Michaels) that had symptoms of pneumonia, and the treatment for pneumonia fucked up the patient a bit.
I don’t think too many spooks want to handle something as dangerous as MRSA. How do you even infect someone with that without infecting yourself in the process.
He had a sudden mysterious illness that caused him to have problems breathing. If this were a cover up, that illness would have been the cover up attempt, not the pneumonia. The breathing problems required the whistleblower to be intubated and he later developed pneumonia, and later still MRSA.
The pneumonia and MRSA were certainly just an unfortunate illness. The more conspiratorial can debate over if the original breathing difficulties that brought him into the hospital were the result of an assassination attempt or not. For all we know he just had Covid.
Que the leaked pentagon briefing from … what was it, 12 years ago … about the use of “vaccines” to alter the brain chemistry of people with “extremist” views, so they too may benefit from approved values.
Running someones immune system or poisoning them is a fantastic way to get plausible deniability. No smoking gun...
Plausible Deniability is when a person's involvement or culpability in an event might be denied, or at least mitigated, by creating a situation where they can claim ignorance or an inability to act.
Guy comes in with routine influenza, transfer him to emergency, pacify him and forcibly intubate him with MRSA infected tube. The rest happens as if by mistake.
Actuarial table says death from all causes at 45 is ~0.4%. It's an unlikely death, paired with another unlikely death - the previous Boeing whistleblower.
I'm really confused by the reporter's attitude. It seems like the exact opposite attitude from what you'd want in a reporter. He seems to be dismissing the unusual coincidence based on... I guess nothing? Just "come on, you can't believe that - we aren't Russia."
How many Boeing whistleblowers are there? How many should we expect will die by chance this year? If another one dies is that the cutoff where it's reasonable to be suspicious?
I don't understand why I would extend any courtesy to Boeing. I was suspicious when the first whistleblower died. Why shouldn't I be? You may be a perfectly nice guy, but if the witnesses testifying against you start dying, I'm going to be suspicious. Why should I treat Boeing any differently?
There are still a lot of unanswered questions around the first death.
In a post-COVID world, a 45-year-old dying of a respiratory infection isn't at all surprising. I concur with the reporter's assessment that more evidence of foul play before open accusations is warranted in this second case.
Check your priors. What's your base rate likelihood for a person dying from:
* suicide (many documented cases)
* infectious diseases (ditto)
* corporate assassinations (zero cases in the US documented)
Everyone thinking Boeing is carrying out killings that have minimal potential upside and massive downside is succumbing to some cloak and dagger deus ex machina. After age 40 people die from all sorts of causes. This is not about "courtesy," but rational thinking that there would be almost no point in killing an employee when the company is already mired in bad news and that corporate assassinations just don't happen in the US.
"It was definitely a murder to create a chilling effect on whistleblowers" says a guy on the internet, pushing a narrative that if you whistleblow on Boeing you'll definitely be murdered.
Bacterial infection, grammatical inflection, both natural causes of death [According to uncyclopedia Wiki probably? Don't ask me, I am not germ-anist here in germ-any]
If they were really killed because of their leaks, I struggle to find what could be so sensitive that an assassination is ever an option. Do Boeing engineers work on stuff that secretive ? Are you given the nuclear codes on your first day ? I'm really curious
The effect on the value of the company and the strategic effect of letting Airbus (a European company) dominate aerospace manufacturing is a pretty big threat
Boeing will never fail financially or fall out of use because of their importance for US geopolitical status. I don’t think the USA cares much about the issue except insofar as the USA wants Boeing to deliver reliable high quality products.
However, Boeing executives can (and should) get in to trouble. They probably care very much about what comes to light in court.
well, whoever would make this type of "executive decision" should be prepared to go to jail for a really long time next to really violent bad people. Multinational execs did not show propensity for these types of decisions (the propensity at C-Suite is to pay a fine and move on....) So prior knowledge makes me think these are accidents.
It would be really good to get as much information about these deaths (and closure for the families)
PS. for arguments sake, if another Boeing whistleblower would get a sudden disease I would be more inclined to think that maybe there is some chemical/mechanical exposure in the Boeing / Spirit factories rather then some Michael Clayton-type action...
But why would any executive organize that and risk life in prison for their 0.3 percent ownership stake? They could just retire rich and leave the problems to the shareholders. Is there criminal liability that the executives may face that could form a motive?
This is the commercial arm of Boeing, but not even that bit a spun off bit of Boeing that just builds airframes called Spirit.
Boeing does do highly classified things in other branches of the company that have nothing to do with any of this, even then nobody would be assassinated for the most egregious espionage outside of some absurd movie plot scenario. Spies go to prison if they’re not recruited for counterintelligence.
Influenza and MRSA would be very odd assassination tools.
Any other industry I would have called bullshit, but defense companies are always a bit murky, with close links to intelligence services (who help in international negotiations and industrial spying) and current/former military. So lots of people who would know who to call to make things happen.
I have in mind for instance the Taiwan frigate scandal that has seen all sort of mysterious deaths, including Thiery Imbot (former DGSE, and son of former head of the DGSE), who died falling from a window in Paris. The official investigation blamed the wind which will make anyone who lived in Paris laugh.
Oh you're right, I completely forgot their involvement in defense projects. Maybe something involving the level at which Boeing along wiah the US gov spied on Airbus to win contracts as well.
> I struggle to find what could be so sensitive that an assassination is ever an option.
When Putin's regime punishes a critic or dissident, it is not done to stop this particular critic disclosing something sensitive. It is done as a warning to future critics. If you think this principle is never applied by western agencies, look at what happened to Julian Assange - after being prosecuted for 12 years the dude has lost it and Ecuador has kicked him out for smearing faeces on embassy walls.
Additionally, western corporations were, multiple times, accused of being involved in assassinations of union leaders in developing countries.
Yeah I have no doubt this serves as a message for future whistleblowers, but damn that is some level of prevention.
> Additionally, western corporations were, multiple times, accused of being involved in assassinations of union leaders in developing countries.
Unions are the kryptonite of capitalists and threaten their very existence, so it isn't that out of field; if we are to make the parallel, it means there is something in what they know that threatens the very existence of Boeing and I fail to imagine what
I'm not a fan of conspiracy theories, but I do like crime thrillers so I'll add that one potential reason could be that one or more people at the company are worried about prison time for something they did. That kind of thing could lead someone to make desperate moves, like assassinating a whistleblower. Hell, it doesn't even need to be someone high up on the ladder, it could be one of the factory workers that worked on a plane that went down, and is panicking because he got bad legal advice from ChatGPT!
... but I'm like 99.9998% confident this is actually just a series of non-malicious, tragic coincidences rather than a conspiracy.
This was before use of the internet was widespread, but I knew a women who worked at a regional airport. She repeatedly reported safety violations to the (politically connected) operator of the airport, but was ignored. Eventually, she reported them to the FAA who launched an investigation.
- She started receiving threatening phone calls
- Pictures of her kids walking home from school showed up in her mailbox
- Her house was shot up in the middle of the night
- The family dog was killed, disassembled, and the parts were strung up in the house
The police wouldn't do anything and she eventually had to quit her job and move out of the county.
Do you have a source or reference for this? I'd be really surprised if some of your items (e.g. her house being shot up, her dog "disassembled") wouldn't result in some level of journalistic coverage.
My apologies, but my time on the Internet has definitely trained me to be skeptical of extreme reports that make me enraged, without additional evidence.
I suppose one would have to take OP's word. A 3 year old account doesn't seem to be the kind (hopefully) engaging in false rumors. And after all this I definitely wouldn't expect her to go forward lest her family gets harmed.
Sidenote, but coming from a country where it's "known" that speaking up against corruption can likely end up killing you, it's funny to see people being skeptical about it. It's maybe similar to racism/sexism - yes, don't believe anything without proof - but if someone claims it's happened and give details, it's certainly quite plausible.
I’m not surprised to read this, as it only takes 1-2 people to do these sorts of things, and some people are capable of it. They may not be totally mentally stable, or they feel desperate, or confident they can get away with it, or all of the above.
American history is full of these sorts of incidents of harassment, violence, and sometimes even murder. The history of the labor movement or civil rights movement is sobering.
It doesn’t take a CEO making a call to some assassin on the corporate payroll. Usually the reality is far more banal: a supervisor or coworker or neighbor who just takes matters into their own hands.
To be clear, I’m NOT claiming that that is what happened to Josh Dean; I’m speaking generally about people getting harassed for trying to do what they think is the right thing.
Similar things happened to journalists and activist short sellers reporting on irregularities at Wirecard before it all blew up. (The German authorities reacted swiftly to the reports by... banning short sales of Wirecard shares and investigating the journalists for market manipulation.)
Occasionally, reality apparently is as crass as some classic corporate conspiracy thrillers suggest.
Readit News
Combine that with one headline-grabbing (apparent) suicide during a deposition, and we're now all primed to notice these deaths and attribute intent.
Also, let's not kid ourselves, even if Boeing doesn't retaliate (and there is a lot of reason to think they have), being a whistleblower adds a tremendous amount of stress & disruption to your life. Whatever your life expectancy was before you were a whistleblower was, it's going to be lower (likely MUCH lower) afterwards. It's a terrible price to pay, which is why they deserve as much protection & support as possible.
There was a whole court thing, he lost, and then he died aged 39 of a heart attack.
https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-east-news/metric-...
Let’s say both of the whistleblowers were age 50. The probability of a 50 year old man dying in a year is 0.6%. So the probability of 2 or more of them dying in a year is 1 - (the probability of exactly zero dying in a year + the probability of exactly one dying in a year). 1 - (A+B).
A is (1-0.006)^N. B is 0.006N(1-0.006)^(N-1). At 60 A is about 70% and B is about 25% making it statistically insignificant.
But they died in the same 2 month period, so that 0.006 should be 0.001. If you rerun the same calculation, it’s 356.
Characteristics like having spent a career building airplanes surrounded by all kinds of mechanical and chemical hazards.
Whistleblowing itself is extremely stressful for the attention it draws, the personal and professional relationships it strains, the media attention and of course the rampant speculation of assassination.
Does personal health influence the psychology of a whistleblower? If you get a terminal diagnosis would you be more likely to spill the beans?
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This is some very specific, public, whistleblowers, in the span of months. Not some pool of thousands, or even hundreds people with mere "potential to criticize".
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The one where he specifically told his family beforehand that he wasn't suicidal...
This game of telephone is absurd.
His family has said no such thing. A proclaimed "friend of the family" claimed he told her this.
it's not exactly a smoking gun but you can't blame the guy's age, either. 45 is just middle age, I hope
I mean just the other day, the emergency slide fell off a Boeing aircraft and landed essentially, in the backyard of the lawyer suing Boeing. Lol
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A month later another whistleblower who was in good health dies suddenly and unexpectedly.
I don't think it's surprising to think that this combination of events is extremely unlikely.
I mean if I had dedicated my life to taking Boeing down and was contemplating suicide, I'd consider saying that too.
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You may be totally healthy and the peak of physical fitness and a sudden stroke destroys you. Everyone can improve their chances, but no-one can guarantee they're indestructible.
That's extremely tautological.
> it isn't terribly surprising that a few deaths have occurred.
It's surprising they have so many whistle blowers that more than one has died in a short span of time, in particular, before the investigations over their allegations have been satisfactorily and publicly completed.
> and we're now all primed to notice these deaths and attribute intent.
That doesn't mean it's pointless to ask questions and to investigate further. There's a lot of people who seem very eager for this all to just "go away." That should make anyone, let alone a forum of hackers, somewhat suspicious.
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> With so many people in a position to notice and speak out about Boeing's issues
So many? Both were whistleblowers of which there are allegedly no more than 32 in the last few years.
and one died after ventilation?
No. It happens every day. Yes, if you pick two random middle-aged people at random, it's exceedingly rare for both of them to die without warning. However, if you pick a large population of otherwise healthy middle-aged people, the probably that two of them might die without warning is actually quite high.
The question is, how large is the population? If the union is to be believed (and there's a lot of credibility there), Boeing whistleblowers are a pretty large population. Add in to that the stress & disruption of being a whistleblower, and then layer on the stress from any retaliation from Boeing (which allegedly is happening on a daily basis), and the probability of two of them dying around the same time isn't really that low.
e.g., if you assume a mortality rate of 1 in 1000/yr (which seems very low, considering their circumstance) and a population of 100, the odds of two of them dying over the course of a year is over 50% (1-0.999^100)^2 = 53.29%.
Yeah, out of a population of 32, it's unlikely to happen. It seems likely that this number is grossly underrepresenting the size of the population. Maybe whistleblowers are being targeted, maybe there are a lot more than 32, maybe both of those are true, but it seems unlikely that both of them are false.
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Suicide is the 7th leading cause of death for men 55-62. It's considerably more common than murder.
Both were whistleblowers of which there are allegedly no more than 32 in the last few years.
Barnett hadn't worked for Boeing since 2017, and was being deposed as part of his appeal of his original whistleblower complaint. It makes no sense to think that someone trying to silence him would wait until 7 years and one Netflix documentary have transpired.
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However, it looks way too complicated for a plot. There are many tried and proven methods of getting rid of people. Spooks aren't actually that good in hiding their works - we know about a lot of cases where people were assassinated (of course, we may also not know about many, but I think we have a good sample). Among those, we have a lot of ways it can be done - shootings, stabbings, explosions, poisons, drownings, falling from heights, whatever - but I can't remember any case where a biological agent were used. And thinking about it - biological agents are hard to produce, hard to handle, unstable, unpredictable in use, can't be properly targeted, why would anyone use that instead of dozens of easier and more common methods?
So while it does look suspicious on its face, I'd have hard time believing it's an example of an assassination.
This is pretty similar to the old argument about why mass surveillance is unlikely to be happening - we're just not that good at keeping secrets. Seems like a pretty safe bet that there's good spooks who are good at hiding their works.
> we know about a lot of cases where people were assassinated (of course, we may also not know about many, but I think we have a good sample). Among those, we have a lot of ways it can be done
Let's not forget about survivorship bias. You only know about the assassinations you know about. You don't know about the assassinations that were successfully kept secret.
That's because it's the failures we learn about. Which could be 90% or 5% of "their works".
But never mind the spooks. We are also told "there's no perfect crime". Yet, less than half the murders get solved in the US, for example:
https://www.npr.org/2023/04/29/1172775448/people-murder-unso...
We are surrounded by lethal bacteria. That humans survive depends on the immune system having a 100% success rate preventing bacteria from forming even a small colony in the lungs (and several other places, like the teeth, where infections can rapidly and surprisingly turn deadly)
This is why people cough so extremely hard when inhaling solid or liquid stuff in their windpipes.
Also this happens all the time. That someone dies from pneumonia is not uncommon (though for oil it's usually someone who manages to spray themselves with aerosolized oil at work). So even if an autopsy found a few specs of dirt in the lungs, and even if they actually trace that to be the cause, that's not extremely suspicious. (Plus why would they check? Obviously with a pneumonia patient you know the cause of death)
So that you will think it is not suspicious
Like... head shot in an alley? suffocating them in their sleep? drowning them in a body of water?
I think you can probably answer your question yourself if you think about it
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Ask Suge Knight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxPTtFv4AkM
You can assume criminals have gotten better at this type of thing since 1995
[1] https://www.military.com/video/guns/pistols/cias-secret-hear...
Again, I do not believe this happened, but that's probably how you'd do it.
MRSA is awful, difficult or impossible to clear, and can certainly be fatal.
This could be a very diabolical way to assassinate someone.
How would you be able to trace it? It could have been laced in his food or drink. Or simply transfered by touch (got on his hands, then wiped on his face or nose). Or aerosolized as he walked by.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methicillin-resistant_Staphylo...
https://now.uiowa.edu/news/2013/06/be-gone-bacteria
The pneumonia and MRSA were certainly just an unfortunate illness. The more conspiratorial can debate over if the original breathing difficulties that brought him into the hospital were the result of an assassination attempt or not. For all we know he just had Covid.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_bomb, for example.
Plausible Deniability is when a person's involvement or culpability in an event might be denied, or at least mitigated, by creating a situation where they can claim ignorance or an inability to act.
> I've had enough
> Because I knew Josh, I had to report this - and the coincidence with Mitch, whom I also knew
> But if you really believe Boeing has adopted Putin-style assassination, unfollow me and go away
> If you're joking, it's not even slightly funny to joke about this death
https://twitter.com/dominicgates/status/1785812827581849988
FYI 11,000 people die of MRSA every year.
In the US alone.
I'm really confused by the reporter's attitude. It seems like the exact opposite attitude from what you'd want in a reporter. He seems to be dismissing the unusual coincidence based on... I guess nothing? Just "come on, you can't believe that - we aren't Russia."
How many Boeing whistleblowers are there? How many should we expect will die by chance this year? If another one dies is that the cutoff where it's reasonable to be suspicious?
I don't understand why I would extend any courtesy to Boeing. I was suspicious when the first whistleblower died. Why shouldn't I be? You may be a perfectly nice guy, but if the witnesses testifying against you start dying, I'm going to be suspicious. Why should I treat Boeing any differently?
In a post-COVID world, a 45-year-old dying of a respiratory infection isn't at all surprising. I concur with the reporter's assessment that more evidence of foul play before open accusations is warranted in this second case.
* suicide (many documented cases)
* infectious diseases (ditto)
* corporate assassinations (zero cases in the US documented)
Everyone thinking Boeing is carrying out killings that have minimal potential upside and massive downside is succumbing to some cloak and dagger deus ex machina. After age 40 people die from all sorts of causes. This is not about "courtesy," but rational thinking that there would be almost no point in killing an employee when the company is already mired in bad news and that corporate assassinations just don't happen in the US.
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What effect do you imagine that might have?
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That should be "MRSA", for Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. Terrible fact checking.
(But they did helpfully provide a hyperlink to Facebook-related stories.)
However, Boeing executives can (and should) get in to trouble. They probably care very much about what comes to light in court.
It would be really good to get as much information about these deaths (and closure for the families)
PS. for arguments sake, if another Boeing whistleblower would get a sudden disease I would be more inclined to think that maybe there is some chemical/mechanical exposure in the Boeing / Spirit factories rather then some Michael Clayton-type action...
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Boeing does do highly classified things in other branches of the company that have nothing to do with any of this, even then nobody would be assassinated for the most egregious espionage outside of some absurd movie plot scenario. Spies go to prison if they’re not recruited for counterintelligence.
Influenza and MRSA would be very odd assassination tools.
I have in mind for instance the Taiwan frigate scandal that has seen all sort of mysterious deaths, including Thiery Imbot (former DGSE, and son of former head of the DGSE), who died falling from a window in Paris. The official investigation blamed the wind which will make anyone who lived in Paris laugh.
So, I don't know, but not implausible.
It's a warning to future whistleblowers.
When Putin's regime punishes a critic or dissident, it is not done to stop this particular critic disclosing something sensitive. It is done as a warning to future critics. If you think this principle is never applied by western agencies, look at what happened to Julian Assange - after being prosecuted for 12 years the dude has lost it and Ecuador has kicked him out for smearing faeces on embassy walls.
Additionally, western corporations were, multiple times, accused of being involved in assassinations of union leaders in developing countries.
And they used to do it in the USA, in 1920's.
https://prospect.org/features/coca-cola-killings/https://www.vice.com/en/article/88n97g/3-union-leaders-were-...
> Additionally, western corporations were, multiple times, accused of being involved in assassinations of union leaders in developing countries.
Unions are the kryptonite of capitalists and threaten their very existence, so it isn't that out of field; if we are to make the parallel, it means there is something in what they know that threatens the very existence of Boeing and I fail to imagine what
... but I'm like 99.9998% confident this is actually just a series of non-malicious, tragic coincidences rather than a conspiracy.
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- She started receiving threatening phone calls
- Pictures of her kids walking home from school showed up in her mailbox
- Her house was shot up in the middle of the night
- The family dog was killed, disassembled, and the parts were strung up in the house
The police wouldn't do anything and she eventually had to quit her job and move out of the county.
My apologies, but my time on the Internet has definitely trained me to be skeptical of extreme reports that make me enraged, without additional evidence.
Sidenote, but coming from a country where it's "known" that speaking up against corruption can likely end up killing you, it's funny to see people being skeptical about it. It's maybe similar to racism/sexism - yes, don't believe anything without proof - but if someone claims it's happened and give details, it's certainly quite plausible.
https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdga/pr/two-sentenced-their-rol...
American history is full of these sorts of incidents of harassment, violence, and sometimes even murder. The history of the labor movement or civil rights movement is sobering.
It doesn’t take a CEO making a call to some assassin on the corporate payroll. Usually the reality is far more banal: a supervisor or coworker or neighbor who just takes matters into their own hands.
To be clear, I’m NOT claiming that that is what happened to Josh Dean; I’m speaking generally about people getting harassed for trying to do what they think is the right thing.
Occasionally, reality apparently is as crass as some classic corporate conspiracy thrillers suggest.
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If there are, I can't imagine how they feel.
[1] "Aside from Mr Barnett and Mr Dean, there are some 30 Boeing whistleblowers, including Mr Salehpour." https://theloadstar.com/im-scared-says-boeing-whistleblower-....
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Barnett_(whistleblower)
So which one is it? Suddenly or not?
(I say this with all of the seriousness of a 1980s British comedian who probably thought it before I did)
"How did you go bankrupt?"
"Two ways. Gradually and then suddenly."