Justice for Indonesia and Ethiopia: Boeing Plead Guilty About 737 Max
Dominic Gates, an Irish in America like Biden, living in Seattle, home of Boeing, works for Seattle Times, maybe the most knowledgeable journo on earth about Boeing. The stunning news around 10.05pm or 14 minutes ago like Dominic’s tweet, in entire U.S. is still long holiday because federal holiday, for Independence Day [this year means 248 years old America], can’t stop or postponed the decision between Boeing and Department of Justice.
Boeing will plead guilty to a criminal fraud charge stemming from two deadly 737 Max crashes, Justice Department says. But Boeing’s statement does not directly reference plan to plead guilty. [But] still not guilty to help killing Palestinian. This decision of course huge win for Boeing’s competitor, Germany - France / German - Franco airplane manufacture Airbus, as French people just celebrate the shocked [result of] election as Left - Wing alliance, also pro-worker union in France, won the parliament or legislative election. Victims relatives of those killed in the 2018 and 2019 MAX 8 crashes filed notice they will oppose the Boeing plea deal citing Judge O'Connor's prior statement that "Boeing’s crime may properly be considered the deadliest corporate crime in U.S. history"
346 Lives. The Boeing 737 MAX passenger airliner was grounded worldwide between March 2019 and December 2020 – longer in many jurisdictions – after 346 people died in two similar crashes: Lion Air Flight 610 on October 29, 2018, and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 on March 10, 2019.
Last March [March 25th] or 4 months ago, CEO David ‘Dave’ L. Calhoun, Chairman of the Board Lawrence ‘Larry’ W. Kellner, and CEO BCA Stanley Deal [president and CEO of Boeing Commercial Airplanes BCA], leaving the company effective immediately. Boeing Commercial Airplanes (BCA) is a division of The Boeing Company. It designs, assembles, markets, and sells jet airliners and business jets (Boeing Business Jets), and also provides product-related maintenance and training to customers worldwide. BCA operates out of its division headquarters in Renton, Washington, and employed about 35,926 people.
Stephanie Pope (who recently became Boeing’s Chief Operating Officer) will become President and CEO of Boeing Commercial Airplanes.
June 6th, 2024 or 1 month ago, Rep. Joaquin Castro [around 4am in San Antonio Texas, his home, very early morning] didn't hold back, & posted investigation by CNN that for 2nd time 'Made in USA' weapon, manufactured by Boeing, killed Palestinian.
Jennifer Koonings, one brightest member of
underMay 26, beheaded baby Ahmad Al Najjar and at least 70 others also killed by Boeing weapon. Joaquin decides to pinned his position - statement [April 20] about Gaza in twitter. Another baby named Qamar, also killed. Boeing has unveiled its proposal for a lander that could take humans to the Moon's surface. Under a programme called Artemis, the White House wants to return humans to the Moon by 2024 [by Boeing]. In fact, Boeing kills Qamar [Arabic, means Moon], Luna [means Moon].
186,000 Gazans killed by Israel, according to [research of] the Lancet
193,000 Gazans killed by Israel, according to [research of] EI or Electronic Intifada
Refaat Alareer - IF I MUST DIE, 310 Languages
Verse Quran named ‘QAMAR’ [Moon], 54:10
Joshua A. Cohen [
], Antony Blinken: same Jewish.Federal prosecutors gave Boeing the choice last week of entering a guilty plea and paying a fine as part of its sentence or facing a trial on the felony criminal charge of conspiracy to defraud the United States.
Prosecutors accused the American aerospace giant of deceiving regulators who approved the airplane and pilot-training requirements for it.
The plea deal, which still must receive the approval of a federal judge to take effect, calls for Boeing to pay an additional UD$243.6 million fine. That was the same amount it paid under the 2021 settlement that the Justice Department said the company breached. An independent monitor would be named to oversee Boeing’s safety and quality procedures for three years. The deal also requires Boeing to invest at least $455 million in its compliance and safety programs.
The plea deal covers only wrongdoing by Boeing before the crashes, which killed all 346 passengers and crew members aboard two new Max jets. It does not give Boeing immunity for other incidents, including a panel that blew off a Max jetliner during an Alaska Airlines flight in January, a Justice Department official said.
While the MAX crashes in 2018 and 2019 left Boeing with a scarred reputation and billions of dollars in legal bills, fines and losses, the company cut an unusual plea deal with federal prosecutors to avoid a criminal conviction. If it met conditions negotiated with the Justice Department until Jan. 7 of this year, Boeing could avoid further sanctions and yet another black mark related to the disaster.
The families who lost loved ones when two Renton-built 737 MAX planes crashed have talked almost daily for roughly five years strategizing about how to hold Boeing accountable.
The families contend the agreement Boeing signed with federal prosecutors violated their rights as crime victims, because the Justice Department did not consult them before making the deal. And, the families say, it let Boeing off easy.
That group has been waiting three years for the deal to expire, opening a window for the Justice Department to determine whether Boeing complied with the agreement. If it had not, the manufacturer could face criminal charges for the MAX crashes.
Berthet, 56, had just finished the five-hour drive back to Paris from her mother’s house, where she often stays for a week at a time to help with caregiving, when she saw a letter from the Justice Department’s Victim Witness Unit.
Boeing, the letter said, had violated the terms of the agreement. Berthet had to read it twice. Her phone pinged with messages from other families asking if this could really be true. Berthet cried tears of joy for what she saw as a small victory in a five-year battle and prayed to her daughter Camille. She called her son and her mother, and got on Zoom to celebrate with the other families who had lost loved ones in the MAX crashes. Speaking with The Seattle Times on Zoom at nearly 3 a.m. Wednesday last week, she said she was ready to go dance in the streets.
“This is the first time we have hope,” Berthet said.
Boeing disputed the Justice Department’s findings and said it had “honored the terms of that agreement.” The company has 30 days to respond to the findings to “explain the nature and circumstances” of the violations and any steps it has taken to remedy the concerns, according to the deal.
In a letter to a district judge in Texas, where the deal was signed, the Justice Department said it is “determining how it will proceed in this matter.”
But, for the families who lost loved ones in the MAX crashes, the letter feels like a significant turning point, as it is unclear why the Justice Department would find Boeing had breached the agreement if not to pursue new sanctions against the company.
After the deferred prosecution agreement expired in January, the Justice Department had six months to determine if Boeing had met all the conditions it had agreed to. If it had not, federal prosecutors could pursue the criminal charge that had been put on hold.
Berthet, other victims’ families, and the attorneys representing them had little hope the Justice Department would choose to do so. In 2022, federal prosecutors said in court records that Boeing had already met nearly all of the conditions in the agreement.
But days before the deal expired, a panel blew off a Boeing 737 MAX plane midflight, leaving a gaping hole in the side of the aircraft, Alaska Airlines Flight 1282. Since then, whistleblowers, aviation safety experts and the FAA have released a stream of accusations. The consensus among critics is that Boeing prioritized speed over quality, created a culture of fear and failed to overhaul its safety practices.
Berthet refers to the panel blowout not as a “safety incident,” but instead as the “crash that hasn’t happened.”
“One hour after the blowout of the panel, all the world knew that there was a problem,” she said.
She saw the accusations that followed as further evidence that the Justice Department should prosecute Boeing. But, after an April meeting with federal prosecutors where they declined to share what information they were considering, Berthet had all but written off the possibility that the Justice Department would pursue criminal charges.
In May, the Justice Department scheduled a May 31 meeting with victims’ families and said it expected to have a decision about Boeing’s compliance. One attorney asked the Justice Department to give them a heads-up before that meeting, hoping to prepare their clients for what they expected to be disappointing news.The decision from federal prosecutors came two weeks early.
Though a victory, Berthet said this wasn’t the end of her fight. She was hopeful federal prosecutors would pursue additional criminal claims against Boeing and two of its CEOs: Dennis Muilenburg, who headed the company at the time of the crashes, and Dave Calhoun, who took over after.By 3 a.m. after she heard the news, wrapped in pajamas and a pink scarf, Berthet found herself holding several emotions at once.
She was celebrating the victory, strategizing her next steps and mourning the loss of her daughter.
“Every day I pray, and I ask God to help us, to be at our side, and for all the people who were in that plane and all the families,” Berthet said. “And this time I prayed and I cried and said, ‘Thank you so much.’
“But this is the first step. Now, of course, we’re going to have another strategy.”
Referring to all the victims’ families, Berthet said “we were very often despaired, very often discouraged, angry, furious. But we were still together. … We know this will last long. We know that, but we are patient.”
For another case.
Also 4 days ago, a former Boeing manager who raised safety questions about the aircraft maker and was found dead after several days of depositions in South Carolina took his own life, police said Friday after concluding their investigation.
John Barnett, 62, of Louisiana, was found dead March 9, and police had said earlier that his injuries were self-inflicted.
Barnett was a longtime Boeing employee and worked as a quality-control manager before he retired in 2017. In the years after that, he shared his concerns with journalists.
Barnett said he saw discarded metal shavings near wiring for the flight controls that could have cut the wiring and caused a catastrophe. He also noted problems with up to a quarter of the oxygen systems on Boeing’s 787 planes.
“Information and records reviewed during the investigation uncovered Mr. Barnett’s longstanding mental health challenges, which had intensified in connection with ongoing legal proceedings related to his whistleblower case,” police said in a statement.
Barnett was in Charleston answering questions for depositions for his whistleblower complaint, and a hearing on the matter was scheduled for June.
Back again Boeing and Southeast Asia, 7 months ago, Boeing has officially opened an office in Jakarta and signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the Indonesian Transportation Ministry on the sideline of the office’s inauguration to intensify cooperation in the aviation industry.
The deal also does not cover any current or former Boeing officials, only the corporation. In a statement, Boeing confirmed it had reached the deal with the Justice Department but had no further comment.
In a court filing Sunday night, the Justice Department said it expected to file the written plea agreement with the court by July 19. Lawyers for some of the relatives of those who died in the two crashes have said they will ask the judge to reject the agreement.
“This sweetheart deal fails to recognize that because of Boeing’s conspiracy, 346 people died. Through crafty lawyering between Boeing and DOJ, the deadly consequences of Boeing’s crime are being hidden,” said Paul Cassell, a lawyer for some of the families.
Federal prosecutors alleged Boeing committed conspiracy to defraud the government by misleading regulators about a flight-control system that was implicated in the crashes, which took place in Indonesia in October 2018 and in Ethiopia less five months later.
As part of the January 2021 settlement, the Justice Department said it would not prosecute Boeing on the charge if the company complied with certain conditions for three years. Prosecutors last month alleged Boeing had breached the terms of that agreement.
The company’s guilty plea will be entered in U.S. District Court in Texas. The judge overseeing the case, who has criticized what he called “Boeing’s egregious criminal conduct,” could accept the plea and the sentence that prosecutors offered with it or he could reject the agreement, likely leading to new negotiations between the Justice Department and Boeing.
The case goes back to the crashes in Indonesia and in Ethiopia. The Lion Air pilots in the first crash did not know about flight-control software that could push the nose of the plane down without their input. The pilots for Ethiopian Airlines knew about it but were unable to control the plane when the software activated based on information from a faulty sensor.
The Justice Department charged Boeing in 2021 with deceiving FAA regulators about the software, which did not exist in older 737s, and about how much training pilots would need to fly the plane safely. The department agreed not to prosecute Boeing at the time, however, if the company paid a $2.5 billion settlement, including the $243.6 million fine, and took steps to comply with anti-fraud laws for three years.
Boeing, which blamed two low-level employees for misleading the regulators, tried to put the crashes behind it. After grounding Max jets for 20 months, regulators let them fly again after the Boeing reduced the power of the flight software. Max jets logged thousands of safe flights and orders from airlines picked up, increasing to about 750 in 2021, about 700 more in 2022 and nearly 1,000 in 2023.
The company based in Arlington, Virginia, has dozens of airline customers spanning the globe. The best customers for the 737 Max include Southwest, United, American, Alaska, Ryanair and flydubai.
That changed in January, when a panel covering an unused emergency exit blew off a Max during the Alaska Airlines flight over Oregon.
Pilots landed the 737 Max safely and no one was seriously injured, but the incident led to closer scrutiny of the company. The Justice Department opened a new investigation, the FBI told passengers on the Alaska plane that they might be victims of a crime and the FAA said it was stepping up oversight of Boeing.
A criminal conviction could jeopardize Boeing’s status as a federal contractor, according to some legal experts. The plea announced Sunday does not address that question, leaving it to each government agency whether to bar Boeing.
The Air Force cited “compelling national interest” in letting Boeing continue competing for contracts after the company paid a $615 million fine in 2006 to settle criminal and civil charges, including that it used information stolen from a rival to win a space-launch contract.
The company has 170,000 employees and 37% of its revenue last year came from U.S. government contracts. Most of it was defense work, including military sales that Washington arranged for other countries.
Boeing also makes a capsule for NASA. Two astronauts will remain at the International Space Station longer than expected while Boeing and NASA engineers troubleshoot problems with the propulsion system used to maneuver the capsule.
Even some Boeing critics have worried about crippling a key defense contractor.
“We want Boeing to succeed,” Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, said during a Senate hearing last month on what he termed the company’s broken safety culture. “Boeing needs to succeed for the sake of the jobs it provides, for the sake of local economies it supports, for the sake of the American traveling public, for the sake of our military.”
Relatives of the Max crash victims have pushed for a criminal trial that might illuminate what people inside Boeing knew about deceiving the FAA. They also want the Justice Department to prosecute top Boeing officials, not just the company.
“Boeing has paid fines many a time, and it doesn’t seem to make any change,” said Ike Riffel of Redding, California, whose sons Melvin and Bennett died in the Ethiopian Airlines crash. “When people start going to prison, that’s when you are going to see a change.”
At a recent Senate hearing, Boeing CEO David Calhoun defended the company’s safety record after turning and apologizing to Max crash victims’ relatives seated in the rows behind him “for the grief that we have caused.”
Hours before the hearing, the Senate investigations subcommittee released a 204-page report with new allegations from a whistleblower who said he worried that defective parts could be going into 737s. The whistleblower was the latest in a string of current and former Boeing employees who have raised safety concerns about the company and claimed they faced retaliation as a result.
At least 12-13 days Jennifer Koonings, PMHNP, MS, MS, NYSAFE , one brilliant CODEPINK Alert CODEPINK’s Newsletter under Medea Benjamin, hunger strike outside White House in the wake US complicit Genocidal Gaza. This is [click link] her writing as member of CODEPINK Alert CODEPINK’s Newsletter. Jennifer is Certified Forensic Examiner for Adults and Children, really full knowledge about sexual assault, such as sexual assault by Israel to every Palestinian, like NYT reporting [photo uploaded].
We as Muslim prohibited to fasting at least 6 days for entire year [365, or 366 in leap year]. 2 Days Eid Fitr / Eid el-Fitr [1 Shawwal and 2 Shawwal / Syawal Syawwal], Day of Eid Adha / Eid el-Adha [10 Dzulhijjah / Dhul-Hijjah - today], and days of Tashriq [11th, 12th and 13th Dhul-Hijjah / Dzulhijjah, or in Gregorian Calendar 2024, the days of Tashriq means 17-19 June]. But doesn’t mean prohibited for ‘less eating or hunger strike.’ As sacrifice in DC at least 13 days by Jennifer Koonings just because her protest about Gaza, I keep ‘eating less’ not only for her but also for Palestine, at least until 19 June. And for June 20th, back again for nonmandatory fasting, normally 17-18 hours, as even Jennifer, with her gut, sacrifice herself for Gaza. Wisdom quote I hear since war [Israel - Gaza] nonstop ‘’...You can't make people care about a genocide happening right in front of their eyes. They either do immediately, or a chip is missing up there, and they never will.’
For solidarity, since she started to hunger strike, I put myself eat 1 very tiny plate/day for break the fasting and for entire day after, extreme fasting 16.5 hours [based on my location]. I’m still continued for hunger strike, because its very easy. In last 17 years, I already [minimum] 340 days / year to fasting [29 - 30 days for mandatory fasting for muslim, ramadan session, the rest is voluntary fasting / sunnah]. Photo Jennifer with ann Wright, retired retired US Army and also [Ann] retired State Department. Sometimes I’m fasting up to 22 hours / day because forgot to break my fasting.
Medea Benjamin Medea Benjamin Medea’s Substack and Jennifer Koonings
Medea Benjamin Medea Benjamin and Mary Ann Wright ann Wright
footage by CODEPINK Alert CODEPINK’s Newsletter, multiple nurses in DC, after humanitarian duty in Gaza
Please keep donating to [1] PCRF / Palestine Children’s Relief Fund or [2] Freedom Flotilla.
As PCRF pictures by Dr Rajha in Gaza, Ariana Grande - Butera, and CODEPINK Alert
Jennifer Koonings PMHNP, MS, MS, NYSAFE part of CODEPINK AlertJen
Unlike Israeli and pro zionist student [very easy] get a money [thanks for multiple billionaire], contrary, Palestinian very hard to get a money [like encampments across the world]. Link attached by CODEPINK Alert Jen Jennifer Koonings PMHNP, MS, MS, NYSAFE is Nagham, same healthcare worker like Jennifer but in Palestine. 4 Weeks ago is Nagham’s birthday. Link to donate. Nagham is still alive after Rafah bombing 3 weeks ago.
Link to help journalist Abdelrahman Alkahout, Reshare by CODEPINK Alert
Jen Jennifer Koonings, PMHNP, MS, MS, NYSAFE. Abdelrahman is still alive after Rafah bombing 3 weeks ago
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Yellow Flower, Jennifer Koonings in Betlehem [around 3pm local time West Bank, 5 weeks ago], nearly same exact result voting UNGA [11.17am NYC - Rockefeller Building of United Nations], 143 votes in favor, nine against, and 25 abstentions for Palestinian membership.
Footage by mine. Minutes before Jennifer
Jennifer Koonings literally singing also for foundation - charity movement Sing for Hope. How golden heart.
her mine
My mine. Doppelganger cat
Love you, Jennifer Koonings PMHNP, MS, MS, NYSAFE. Dont know how deteriorated of you after Hunger Strike