Because in Russia it is an open message to the public 'don't mess with the KGB or we kill you and maybe your children'. Everybody knows and understands who is the sender and the message. Classic mafia move of intimidation. It is a message to the living.
In the Western World the secret services kill to silence people, not to broadcast messages to the public.
Quite the opposite PR strategy.
And when powerful people want to show off their power it tends to be less fatal and more drag-through-the-mud style tactics. Like what happened to Julian Assange. Killing him was an option on the table as far as I recall, but it wasn't what they ended up doing.
Although that being said, I wouldn't rule this out as being organised by Boeing's management or a major shareholder or something. It is a company in the military-industrial complex.
Julian Assange has invalidated so much about modern America for me. Even when I think I should sort of trust the US government, his name seems to echo through my mind and I think, nahhhh, too much hypocrisy.
If the US government pardoned him they’d be doing themselves a massive favor.
Do you have a source for this? I recall he asked for intel on both parties, but ended up getting it only for one. The conundrum then became releasing only the one, or release nothing.
Should have given him protection, quite bad for the USA that they cannot let the truth succeed in this case. In the long term there is no cheating about safety possible anyhow.
> Killing him was an option on the table as far as I recall, but it wasn't what they ended up doing.
Because this time wasn't about silencing him (too late for that), but making an example. And for this, a blatant enough assassination would likely tarnish the image the US government wants to project too much. Going through the courts, making a show of "due process", now that's looking pretty good: "hey journalists, we can't kill you if you babble too much, but we can make you wish we did, and since it's all legal good luck about rousing public opinion about it".
I don't know. He never talked about a captivity switch.
Perhaps he is an object lesson that one should create a "switch escalator".
Perhaps a dead man's switch used in captivity could also potentially make captivity worse and remove what last remnants of hope he has. I suspect if he pulled the switch now then a lot of the sympathy he got for exposing a war crime might go out the window.
The purpose of a dead-man switch is that an action automatically happens, if a person cannot trigger that action themselves anymore. This is not required in any kind of normal captivity, where the captured still can talk to lawyers and other visitors. So, frankly, if Assange is not using the leverage (using in the sense of using it as a threat) my best explanation so far is that he does not have any (at least not anything substantial enough). But I am open to be convinced otherwise.
There are still lots of angry articles about how it will PUT LIVES AT RISK if it is unencrypted.
The powers that be appear to be walking a tightrope between not exposing their own assets and trying to make an example out of people who expose war crimes while trying not to put lives at risk.
Think this comment is a bit too naive on the western side.
There are some high profile cases were the west (or the deep state) very clearly went "full Russian" on some figures to send a "don't mess with us" message.
David Kelly and Epstein come to mind. As also noted in this thread Assange is arguably being given a fate worse than death, rotting in a dungeon an example to terrify whistleblowers around the world.
Granted, it is only used much more sparingly than the KGB, but it is there.
Everyone with career sense in Russia will deny that, of course. They probably even believe it, in the sense that they're so indifferent to the truth of the matter that they don't even feel they are lying when they say the window-jumper was just a suicide and accusing FSB is preposterous.
Maybe you'll find a few who will say, off the record, that of course it wasn't a suicide.
But those people aren't rare in the US either! Feds are just as "paranoid" as the rest of in these matters.
Exactly. People need to understand that the murding methods in the West are just so much more civilised and polite, otherwise they just might commit suicide
I think also in the west you can’t be as blatant. There are checks and balances. Every murder invites journalistic investigation, so plausible deniability is important should things get out of hand.
Just speculating here but isn’t jumping out a window in Russia usually an implication it was ordered by the Russian state (ex: FSB) while in the US a framed suicides are assumed to be done by numerous non-associated actors. So in one place a single entity is responsible and in another it’s multiple entities.
It doesn’t seem surprising to me that there would be an affinity towards a particular method within entities.
Or a poisoning with a ludicrously rare poison, a strange car crash, a plane falling out the sky, dying at a gulag when you were fine a few days earlier etc etc.
It’s a very unsafe place when you don’t toe the line.
> It’s a very unsafe place when you don’t toe the line.
This one seems less like "it's a very unsafe place" and more like Prigozhin was trying to be killed. He went into open armed rebellion and negotiated a deal where he was exiled to Belarus. Then he went back to Russia, where he experienced a fatal plane crash. He would have to have been a total idiot not to see that coming.† What happened?
† My favorite story in this general vein is what happened with the Mitanni king Tushratta, whose brother the king was killed by a usurper when Tushratta was young. Tushratta inherited the throne, and the usurper, Tuhi, held power as regent until Tushratta came of age.
At which point Tushratta had Tuhi and his coconspirators executed. This was 3400 years ago, but somehow I suspect that even then this wouldn't have been hard to predict.
> He would have to have been a total idiot not to see that coming
The confusing bit for me is why did it go on for so long? It’s one thing to kill him, but seemingly letting him back into Putin’s circle before killing him is surprising. I hope to hear the story one day.
Russian ballistic missiles just hit residential area in Odessa, killing at least 16 and injuring 70. It was a double-tap attack. The second missile hit the same place 15 minutes later to kill first responders that had arrived: one paramedic and one firefighter died on the scene.
That's 2 civilians as contrasted to 118 from a massacre that is part of a genocide fully endorsed (using its veto power at the UN) and supported (with weapons deliveries) by the United States:
It's tongue in cheek, we kill in many different ways.
Drowning related however, the most known is this one (even got a wiki page, so it's really well known!) en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Boulin
But Choukri Ghanem also managed to drown himself in Vienna.
A related death was Albichari, a 37 yo dying of diabetes, and 6 years later, Bechir Saleh assassination attempt by a commando (with his bodyguard crew saving him), so the DGSE clearly have multiple ways of doing business.
Small nitpick, if (which is very likely to me but unfortunately hasn't been proven) Robert Boulin has been murdered, it's definitely not by the DGSE or it predecessor, as they operate outside of France.
If you agree is that it's not a suicide, opinions differ on whether it's government team that did it or the "SAC", a paramilitary group linked to the then ruling party, not an official secret service
True, true, it probably wasn't secret services (interestingly, they were busy preparing an operation against Khadafi in Lybia around that time, that they did not execute according to Pierre Marion, ex DGSE director), and Mitterand wasn't keen on assassinations before 81, so i don't think it was on his orders, weirdly.
But i've read that recently "https://www.amazon.fr/tueurs-R%C3%A9publique-Assassinats-op%..." and now i have to jump in when people talk about political assassination, even though i know almost nothing about the subject, and everything i know is so thin it should be disregarded anyway. As the memory fade, i will stop doing that. Sorry :/
> “It could also have been someone who bought a ton of Boeing calls”
Now I’m imagining a show set in Greenwich, Connecticut, where a gentle white-haired family man trades options during the day and manages assassinations after the kids go to bed. “The Americans” meets “The Big Short”?
Ever since my friend’s father (a police officer reviled for lacking the requisite appetite for corruption) “committed suicide” I’ve been a little more than a little skeptical about convenient suicides.
I was one of the first on the scene. The passenger window of his car was shattered, all of the glass on the inside of the car. No blood on the glass. The car was still in drive and had driven itself off the road. A gun was found on the floor under the seat, a gun that was unknown to family members.
Ruled a suicide and multiple attempts to open an investigation all the way up to the federal level were ignored, and his son received numerous, documented death threats warning him to stop perusing an investigation.
The USA is just another banana republic, only with a higher price of admission to the table.
I think most people know that these kind of “suicides” or “accidental falls” from hotel balconies are not suicides, yet we all know we are powerless to root out this level of imbedded corruption.
What most people fail to understand is that it isn’t so much the work of corrupt politicians or shadowy crime bosses, but more often is rooted in the C-Suite. Since criminal and sociopathic characteristics are often rewarded at the executive level , it should be no surprise that crime and corporate governance are frequently intermingled.
saying "a black man did it" is being used in America as the same sort of explanation for a death as "fell out of an apartment window"in Russia. its racist as hell, but it's a plausible cover story over what really happened.
Why not be specific, and consistent, like Russia?