This is a little over the top. His car jackknifed into a tree. In order for your theory to make sense, his assassins would have had to ensure his car 1) hit a solid object, 2) caught fire.
He didn't try it again because, he later explained, he had discovered that an out-of-control car was just a random number generator, and he was terrified of a "partial" success that would leave him still alive but permanently incapacitated and forever dependent on others without the capacity to really live or really die.
I suspect that the powerful conspirators some people seem to suspect are well aware of my friend's lesson and are equally unwilling to tolerate a partial success. I don't believe they would risk so much on an out-of-control car and a simple tree.
It depends on what constitutes success.
Take this hypothetical: the target has a habit of driving lightly to moderately intoxicated. Assuming he or she survives, do you think anyone is going to believe this person's story about what actually happened when the toxicology report comes back saying they were intoxicated? No.
The said conspirators would still reap partial success in the form of a clear message and chilling effect, not to mention inflicting potentially debilitating injuries or the resulting damage to the target's reputation.
Hypotheticals aside, you're probably right. If an unlikely cabal of evil conspirators are going to go to such lengths, they likely would prefer a more predictable outcome.
Further conjecture: I am not familiar with the architecture of modern vehicles, but I know (hackable) software has been increasingly at the center of these. Failing that, there's always (easier to detect) hardware tampering. Fortunately, if things burn you destroy the evidence, and with the frequency of automobile accidents there is little motivation for an average investigation to turn micro-forensic... particularly with a young person in a risky age group in a foreign country.
Of course, maybe he just did a fat fifty lines of coke, or a hit of meth? Or, just maybe, he was challenged to a one-man street race after a dose of Scopolamine: http://watchdocumentary.org/watch/worlds-scariest-drug-video...
Non-conjecture: There's loads of ways to off people, and the military industrial complex makes it a business. This guy forced a general from that complex to end his career, later visited his country and wound up dead early in the morning.
That said, although peculiar given his line of work, I think it is premature for conspiracy theories at this point considering the near complete lack of information on the accident itself currently.
For the record, I still think this incident was a simple accident.
1) en.rsf.org keeps track of attacks on the press
2) Nasrullah Afridi died on May 10 when a bomb exploded under his car after he entered it.
Hindsight's a bitch too:
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/jun/24/journalist-m...
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2005/07/iraq-j01.html
The killing of journalists seeking to document or expose allegations of state-organised murder has accompanied every dirty war against a civilian population. Since the US occupation of Iraq began, dozens of reporters, cameramen and other media workers have been killed by American-led forces in suspicious circumstances that were never independently investigated.
I find it really amazing that you are not well versed in some of the tactics employed in international espionage and "source neutralization"....
As someone who is purportedly a security expert, I believe it would behoove you to square up on physical/psychological/political warfare -- as cyberwar is simply an additional channel for the stated three.
TpTacek, you're brilliant,but sometimes you're also an...
I am beginning to think your paycheck is subsidized by those who would want you to use your credibility in their favor but at detriment to your own...
Here is a historical maybe: I don't have time to trawl through for good ones, as there are a lot of more, er.. unusual sites out there who'll believe anything. However, there are some aspersions cast over the deaths of some former white house aides too.
http://spartacus-educational.blogspot.co.uk/2009/09/did-cia-...
Stuff like: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rub%C3%A9n_Salazar
Or several of the cases in here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journalists_killed_in_t...
Of course they don't go advertising those kind of things. What sometimes gets known is only due to gross cases of incompetence or pure chance.
To a guy that's into the official versions of things it can sound ludicrous. But then again, worse things happened. He would have said the exact same thing for this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guatemala_syphilis_experiment
Are you saying you're not aware of any retribution killings for journalism? I'm all for skepticism, but I've always understood that to mean it's your own problem to dig into this stuff. Asking for citation on a common knowledge item does no one any favors most especially yourself.
The Clinton body count (and I'll admit, it's a freaky list, but probably only because so many people have crossed paths with the Clintons)
says Rolling Stone managing editor Will Dana, "the sense that there are stories burning inside them, and that there's no higher calling or greater way to live life than to be always relentlessly trying to find and tell those stories. I'm sad that I'll never get to publish all the great stories that he was going to write,
I hope if he were working on new stories, that he at least left some notes behind. Also, the global surveillance grid is a double-edged sword. I'd love to see some GPS data and final tracking of this journalist before he died.
Anyhow, I don't choose to live my life thinking all these events and accidents are anything other than they seem. But I do hope we still have great journalists in our world who will expose reality to us when events are not as we thought. I'd love to read an alternate take on this journalist's accident, but until that story is published, I'm not turning into a conspiracy theorist. Amazingly, in recent weeks, I have felt very much like one, but it's just because I read the news and many nutcase theories have been proven to be very much true and widely acknowledged by the public (versus 5 years ago when talking about the government reading your email made you a tinfoil hat lunatic amongst non-programmers).