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Comment by esoterica | Hacker News Reader

No, not they are not. The military and intelligence apparatus does not care if Boeing has to pay a fine. They will not carry out an execution at Boeing’s behest just to save them from a lawsuit.

Conspiracy theorists love conspiracy theories because they allow them to feel smarter than the “sheeple” that believe the official story. They don’t care if the actual conspiracy theory is wildly implausible and stupid, it’s just too psychological seductive for them.

Sorry but couldn’t be me, I am not dumb enough to fall for that cognitive hazard.

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The military and intelligence apparatus does not care

You don't need the whole apparatus, just someone who has been trained by it and is morally flexible. Well, you don't even need that, but obviously people with professional experience tend to do a better job.

We do not have evidence yet of this being a murder-for-hire or similar, but you're insisting on the impossibility of such when in reality it's not all that unusual. Excluding it as a possibility is just as much cognitive bias as assuming it to be true.

Pretending this is common in the West is absurd. Why wouldn’t POTUS have journalists killed then? Surely he’s more powerful than boeings CEO.

Virtually all journalists work for the same system POTUS is headlining, why would he kill his own henchmen? Those rare cases where some don't are handled much better by censorship and deplatforming. Why kill someone if you can make it so virtually nobody would listen to him anyway and all "respectable" news outlets would declare he is insane and likely is working for the enemy, whatever that is today? Killing the story is much easier and much more efficient, and has been done many times.

In France/Lybia, the last two witnesses of khadafi personnal finances died within a week of each other, in two different countries (one Irak, one Netherlands if I remember correctly) once revelations from journalists about ex-president Sarkozy financing of his 2007 campaign hit. They also raised questions about the reason Khadafi was the first foreign leader invited in France, and why France took the lead in starting the Lybia war (representatives of the rebel groups were present in the Elysée two days before the start of the lybian Civil War).

>Pretending this is common in the West is absurd.

That's fair. That said it's also not unreasonable to consider it a real possibility assuming it isn't immediately ruled out by evidence.

>Surely he’s more powerful than boeings CEO.

Stuff like this doesn't necessarily originate from the top. It can be people lower on the food chain feeling the heat on the other end of the blame steamroller.

---

“They brought them in from other areas of the company. The new leadership team – from my director down – they all came from St. Louis, Missouri. They said they were all buddies there.” [0]

“That entire team came down. They were from the military side. My impression was their mindset was – we are going to do it the way we want to do it. Their motto at the time was – we are in Charleston and we can do anything we want.” [0]

---

It's most likely he took his own life, although in my opinion it's blood on their hands regardless given the way he was treated.

[0] https://www.corporatecrimereporter.com/news/200/boeing-whist...

Murder-for-hire happens regularly. Corporate involvement is very unusual, but that might be colored by a greater ability to throw resources at the problem. Most murder-for hire prosecutions that make the news seem to have something in common - the protagonists were amateurish, typically motivated by personal grudges, and spent relatively small sums of money (<$10k), and hired relatively inept killers who did a sloppy job and were caught. In contrast, organized crime killings often go unsolved for long periods.

Why wouldn’t POTUS have journalists killed then?

One current candidate for that office has lawyers who argue a POTUS would be immune from prosecution for such acts.

Corporations get caught doing crime all of the time. The fact that no large corporation in contemporary America has ever been caught hiring a hitman to assassinate a former employee is a very good sign that unlike all the other crimes they DO get caught doing, this one has never actually happened.

I wouldn't write that off if a certain candidate wins in 2025 to be honest. It's not like they haven't laid hints that such things are on the options list.

An S&P 500 corporation hiring a hitman to murder a witness is beyond "unusual", it has literally never happened in contemporary America. You can't even give me an example of it happening because it hasn't.

> An S&P 500 corporation hiring a hitman to murder a witness is beyond "unusual"

It doesn't have to be the corporation itself, it could be an ambitious sociopathic underling of a security officer who was himself known and hired for his edgy/dirty attitude and "fix anything" reputation. This is essentially what happened in the eBay case; death threats in the mail aren't that far removed from actual murder, and got people sent to prison (proving the 'legal deterrent' to agents of corporations doing irrational and illegal things isn't perfectly reliable) You keep setting up strawmen to make the thing sound implausible.

You vastly overestimate how hard it is to have someone killed.

It doesn't take nation-state resources to kill a random civilian. It's a few tens of thousands of dollars. Even a few million is basically nothing to a corporation like this.

It’s not the money that’s the issue, it’s the risk of getting caught with multiple life sentences. They got money to spare but it’s useless when you serve 50 behind bars.

And that's why no murders are ever committed, because the possibility of jail time or capital punishment dissuades anyone who would consider committing murder.

Admittedly, we're speculating in conspiracy-land right now, but... Yeah, going to jail for years is a pretty decent deterrent for committing murder. But a criminal investigation was officially opened into Boeing. Maybe some powerful individuals realized they could be looking at jail time anyway if certain information comes to court, so they ran a risk analysis and decided it was worth it.

It was irrational not to mention illegal for eBay to harass some obscure blogger with death threats, yet it happened.

> Conspiracy theorists love conspiracy theories because they allow them to feel smarter than the “sheeple” that believe the official story. [...] Sorry but couldn’t be me, I am not dumb enough to fall for that cognitive hazard.

You're right, you'd have to be a total idiot to structure your worldview around the assertion that you're smarter than everyone else.

I'm not claiming to be smarter than everyone else, but I am claiming to be smarter than the people who believe that Boeing hired Michael Fassbender from The Killer to assassinate a former employee after but only after years of whistleblowing and after all the allegedly incriminating information was already out in the open.

> Sorry but couldn’t be me, I am not dumb enough to fall for that cognitive hazard.

Good for you, we all strive to reach your level of enlightenment. Leave the rest of us stupid plebs alone and move along, then.

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