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It's important to remember that whistleblowing is extremely stressful, so much that it's one of the main things the government talks about on their whistleblowing site:
https://whistleblower.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/whistleblower.house.gov/files/whistleblower_survival_tips.pdf
Researchers have found the same thing, being a whistleblower is terrible for your mental health:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6604402/
In addition, "Half of Patients With Suicidal Thoughts Deny It"
https://psychnews.psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/appi.pn.2021.10.9
So, just because he denied he was suicidal doesn't mean that's necessarily true. He might have been trying to appear strong to everyone while suffering in silence.
This should definitely be investigated as possibly being murder. And, even if the investigation does determine that he shot himself, they should keep looking to see if he was being blackmailed or if he might have been pressured into suicide.
I just can't imagine an executive at Boeing going out and hiring a hit man. But, what I can imagine them doing is hiring a team of private investigators to go through this guy's entire life and dig up every bit of dirt on him. It could be they found something really embarrassing and were going to blackmail him with it. It could be that they found something innocent that they could frame as being awful, like to make him look like he was a child molester or something.
Really? That's weird, I totally can. It's an exceptionally narrow-minded and short-sighted knee-jerk reaction to a perceived threat of one's executive career. Most coked-out executives already have a massive god complex once they get their MBA and are installed above the ~~proles~~ workers. I can absolutely realistically imagine one Boeing executive getting angry enough and coked-out enough to just decide, "fuck it, I'm going to fix this problem for us before he threatens my career and reputation any more".
The information you present about whistleblowing being stressful is fair. He may indeed have been driven to kill himself instead of being straight-up assassinated like others believe. I refuse, however, to give the benefit of doubt to a massive corporation who has already demonstrated a complete lack of regard for human life and an extremely poor track record of moral and ethical decision-making. This needs to be investigated under the assumption that a hit is an entirely possible reality. Unless you'd rather that nobody blows the whistle on anything in the future - you've already demonstrated that it's an incredibly stressful action. If there's the lingering remote possibility that you can be simply assassinated over it and everyone will look the other way, nobody will ever raise their voice again. The nature of his actions before his death demand a comprehensive and exhaustive investigation into if any person from Boeing had anything to do with it whatsoever, or whistleblowing will continue sliding into something only the insane consider.
While Boeing executives may be criminals, they're pretty much exclusively white collar criminals. They went to business school, not the military. They come from rich households. They don't have gang or organized crime affiliations. How would they know anything about hiring hit men?
Hiring a firm to do PR and to dig up dirt on a whistleblower, sure, that's within their skillset. That's even something they can brag about in board meetings because it's legal. It's the kind of thing they can google, or have a secretary research for them. It doesn't matter if transcripts leak. But, hiring a hit man, how do they know they won't get caught -- and this time for the kind of crime where people actually get sent to real prisons?
Sure, they should work under the assumption that it was a very careful hitman who made it look like a suicide. They should be 10x more careful than they normally would if they even suspected it might be a suicide. But, I still think driving him to suicide is much more likely.
IMO, the kind of press this is getting is part of the reason I don't think it was a hit. If this were Russia, sure. A hit sends the message to anybody else that they better not think of doing the same thing. The press will tell whatever story the government wants. Even on social media nobody very few people will speak up in Russia. But, in the US, this death is going to draw so much more attention to Boeing. Just look at how many articles there are about the whistleblower's death vs. how many there were about him beforehand. Corporations are used to managing news cycles when it comes to legal cases and congressional hearings. Those are boring and don't tend to go viral. But a whistleblower dying as he was giving testimony, that's exciting, it's like the movies, so it's all everyone's going to talk about.
Unless he had even more damaging information that he somehow didn't give to anybody yet, despite the fact he had already been testifying, it seems like the damage his death does is much higher than the damage his testimony would have done.
Very much so. It would be hard to believe they would do it themselves. However, enrolling the right assistance should not be too difficult for them. They even have access to more options than the average business executive.
They are not military, but they have plenty of contacts there. Boeing is a big player in the military industry, they certainly know a lot of people in that world, both in government positions and the private sector.
Several of them don't, but organized crime is within reach. Illegal recreational drugs are not uncommon in the business world. Dealers are more often than not connected to the organized crime. Networking in that world is something within business people's skills.
Hey, who knows, maybe some of those execs started working many years ago as humble machine gun and bazooka salespeople. And who knows what kind of interesting characters they met during those days. While totally not burying their heads into a mountain of white powder sitting in the middle of the table.
It is very likely. High stress would have played against him if he was being bullied or threatened. Also, less involved than having them murdered.
Depends on what you consider damage here. The testimony could have been perceived as a threat to important business deals (and to bonuses). It is not infrequent to see executives caring only about their profits, even in detriment of the company as a whole.
They may have contracts with generals, but not much in the way with soldiers on the ground. If it were a defence contractor that made small arms, then maybe. But, this is Boeing.
Sure... but executives don't go to the bad parts of town to get them. The guy they're buying from is most likely someone who can travel in C-Suite circles and not draw attention. Maybe they're also a member of the golf club and have a legitimate business as a cover. The execs aren't getting in their Mercedes and cruising down to the ghetto to score. The dealers may have connections to organized crime, but not in a way that is obvious to anyone.
We know, their profiles are public.
The Boeing CEO, David L. Calhoun:
The COO, Stephanie Pope:
The CFO, Brian West:
The Chair, Supply Chain Operations Council, William A. Ampofo II:
Just look through their execs and find anybody with even a hint of dirt under their fingernails:
https://www.boeing.com/company/bios
Sure, so they hire PR firms, and private investigators, and call up friendly reporters to try to get them to publish a negative article. They aren't going to order a hit and make it look like a suicide.