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The Sinking of MS Estonia: Case Re-Opened

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Vixen said:
The UK process for signing Treaties:

UK.Gov

Therefore, under the terms of the Freedom of Information Act, why is there no response when UK citizens enquire as to the reasons for the UK signing the Estonia Treaty of 1995*?

*pdf here.


Freedom of Information Act aims:

ICO Org


A public body can refuse on these following grounds but it does clearly say a reason should be given for the refusal.

ICO

So, why cannot a survivor of the accident get a response to a perfectly reasonable request?
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Incidentally, why did you highlight the words “will arrange for the treaty to be published and laid before Parliament” in that post?
 
Mojo said:
Incidentally, why did you highlight the words “will arrange for the treaty to be published and laid before Parliament” in that post?
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I'd guess that Vixen believes that to be important, that the treaty would have to be discussed in Parliament before being ratified. I'd guess again that Vixen believes that this either didn't happen and as such, is evidence of a cover up. Or it did happen and as such, is evidence of a cover up.
 
LondonJohn said:
But here's a thought: These mythical (for that is all they are) "collisions" and/or "explosions" are not claimed - as far as I understand, anyhow - to have occurred anywhere near the bow visor.

So, that being the case, the rather obvious question would be: exactly how/why would the bow visor have failed - especially in the manner in which the evidence shows it failed - if it happened after this "bomb"/"explosion" malarkey? After all, there's not really any credible mechanism for it to have failed either a) as a direct reaction to the "bomb"/"explosion", or b) as a reaction to the ship sinking. And, obviously, the odds on it coincidentally having failed in that tiny time window (relative to the age and history of the ship) is very close indeed to zero.

And yet..... all of the credible & reliable evidence, including structural/metallurgical analysis of the bow visor and bow ramp, points to the bow door having failed of its own volition owing to the combination of bad design/construction, poor maintenance, and the rough seas on the night of the sinking. And also, since the evidence shows that the bow visor and then the bow ramp failed in a specific manner, we know that the manner of their failure would have guaranteed a large volume/mass of seawater flooding the vehicle deck and fatally destabilising the ship. Oh and the manner of their failure is also entirely compatible with the passenger accounts of what they heard.
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This is what is known as post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning, i.e., water must have flooded the car deck as in the Herald of Free Enterprise. However, to do this, the bow visor must first have been compromised. Therefore it must have fallen off and taken the car ramp with it but as two people claim to have climbed down the car ramp, then the bow visor must have left a gap at the top of the car ramp for the seawater to seep in. That should keep the plebs happy whilst we slap a 'classified' label on what really happened.

It wouldn't do for POTUS Bill Clinton peace-maker extraordinaire between Israel and Palestine to be exposed as the person prepared to use a thousand civilians as collateral damage whilst smuggling out weapons for Israel on the Estonia public passenger ferry.
 
LondonJohn said:
They don't "say that in Yorkshire" (meaning, they don't say it any more or less than any other county in England). And if Yorkshire people were singularly well-known for such a saying, they wouldn't say it like that (more/better research needed on regional accent, dialect and patois, I think).
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My Yorkshire friend assured me that is what they did say.
 
LondonJohn said:
Nope. You don't properly understand what's being referred to in the text you've quoted, including why it doesn't apply here. The UK's signatory status in the Estonia no-dive matter is under the aegis of laws and protocols that were ratified by the UK Parliament a long time ago.
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The no-dive matters have zero to do with the Estonia gravesite Treaty. In fact, there were British divers involved in the Rockwater dive, as outsourced by the Swedish government.
 
LondonJohn said:
Ermmmm.... that's why I wrote ".... after the report's investigation" (my bolding here for emphasis).

This official visual investigation/inspection of the wreck would (obviously and necessarily) have taken place some time - and probably some considerable time - before the actual publication of the report.

Next.
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Balderdash. It didn't take any time at all. Swedish PM Carl Bildt declared it a foregone conclusion it was the bow visor that fell off due to a few strong waves within sixteen hours of the investigation and his number one military chief Svensson who also said within a day or two of the 'accident' in a press conference that the bodies should not be recovered. And lo! and behold! it came to be. All the JAIC did - the Swedish head guy appointed directly by Bildt - was to elaborate on this foregone theory [the 'halo effect' scientists are supposed to guard against] - and spend the next three years providing hundreds of page of bow visor specifications and a summarised version of three or four Estonian lower rank crew members testimonies - as all the senior ranks died - including one boatswain trainee, the third engineer and a general seaman, who all had to be interviewed up to seven times over the years with one imprisoned shortly after for nine years for drug smuggling - that is all the JAIC did. It provided a glossy coffee table brochure explaining how the bow visor fell off taking the car ramp with it. It stated plainly that the vessel was seaworthy, the 'only damage was to the bow and car ramp' and that the vehicles had been lashed down correctly for the weather conditions. The Swedish government even set up an Information Defence Department to encourage the public to believe the report.
 
LondonJohn said:
I've also provided correction for you on this one already. Perhaps try to take it on board this time.

1) You (still) seem to be labouring under the misunderstanding that eyewitness testimony in a criminal trial is always automatically accepted by the court at face value as credible and reliable. That's not true. Eyewitness testimony is tested in court, via the process of direct- and cross-examination. And after that, it is down to the court to determine its view on the credibility/reliability of the claims of any given eyewitness. Only then is that eyewitness's claim accorded the correct weight by the court.


2) If the Estonia passengers were testifying in a criminal court (or even in a civil court), it's a racing certainty that the judge and the counsel would be instructing them only to give evidence about what they actually heard & experienced. They simply wouldn't have been allowed to draw their own inferences (and indeed, any lawyer who asked any of them a question along the lines of "What do you think caused the noise you heard?", or "Do you think the noise/jolt sounded like a collision?" would immediately draw an objection, and the objection would be sustained with the jury being told to disregard what had been said.


3) Eyewitness testimony in a criminal trial is only direct evidence if (provided that it's been determined by the court to be credible and reliable) it is evidence of the criminal act in question having been committed by the person(s) on trial.
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Captain Bleeding Obvious, here.
 
RolandRat said:
I'd guess that Vixen believes that to be important, that the treaty would have to be discussed in Parliament before being ratified. I'd guess again that Vixen believes that this either didn't happen and as such, is evidence of a cover up. Or it did happen and as such, is evidence of a cover up.
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But why make a FoI request for something that would be published in Hansard, the parliamentary Journals and as a Command Paper?
 
Captain_Swoop said:
I think two separate explosions are being claimed.
We have a set of explosions that severed the bow visor and a separate mine or charge that blew a hole in the hull.
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It is pretty much a certainty there were explosives applied to the bow bulkhead and side locks. However, that might well have been done post-accident by the various divers who went down on official government business with their various cutting tools and what have you to access the ship. What is strange is that they should have left the so-called incriminatory 'poorly designed bolts' on the sea bed with the claim they were 'too big for the helicopter'.

It could be that the bits of metal Royal Naval expert Brian Braidwood was looking at were the ones manipulated by the Rockwater divers. It needs to be determined when the deformation suggesting high intensity detonation happened.
 
Vixen said:
Captain Bleeding Obvious, here.
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Then why are you complaining that people are only accepting the witnesses’ accounts of what they heard rather than their (or your) interpretations of what they heard, and trying to support your position by alluding to the use of witness evidence in court?
 
Vixen said:
This is what is known as post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning, i.e., water must have flooded the car deck as in the Herald of Free Enterprise. However, to do this, the bow visor must first have been compromised. Therefore it must have fallen off and taken the car ramp with it but as two people claim to have climbed down the car ramp, then the bow visor must have left a gap at the top of the car ramp for the seawater to seep in. That should keep the plebs happy whilst we slap a 'classified' label on what really happened.

It wouldn't do for POTUS Bill Clinton peace-maker extraordinaire between Israel and Palestine to be exposed as the person prepared to use a thousand civilians as collateral damage whilst smuggling out weapons for Israel on the Estonia public passenger ferry.
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Look, it's fine that you report the opinions of those you don't agree with, but you should point out precisely what you're advocating, insofar as you have some theory at all.

You've been saying for some time that there were bombs planted at the bow visor (at least that some folks claim so). Now you're saying that the theory the bow visor failed and water rushed in is a post hoc fallacy because the ramp was still in place[1]. If so, the whole theory that explosions blew the visor off would also be rejected.

So, you do need to figger out this: Was there damage to the visor that occurred, in your opinion? Or did the only damage that allowed water to come in occur at the one hole on the starboard side (rather smaller than the opening at the bow ramp) and that was the entire reason the ferry sunk within a short time?

I do like, however, the addition that this wasn't just about intelligence smuggling. Now Bill Clinton himself is secretly running guns to Israel on a ferry traveling to Sweden! That's good. But don't talk yourself out of the bombs planted at the bow visor. We really do need the explosions and the minisub planting a mine in the storm doesn't really do it for me. It's creative, but I just can't see it. So, please, whether the minisub stays or goes, we need some proper bombs for the story to work.

[1] You are, of course, confused when you call it post hoc. A post hoc fallacy is when one recognizes that event A occurred before event B and concludes fallaciously that A therefore caused B. When one commits such a fallacy, the error is in presuming the causal relationship. It doesn't follow that A didn't occur at all.
 
GlennB said:
Now I'm hugely confused.

I thought the Russian sub was there to collect the secret Russian military documents that their agents had liberated on the ship? But it all went a bit wrong and the mini-sub hit the ferry, which sank?
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Did whoever hijacked the bridge have anything to do with the minisub laying mines or was that another piece of subterfuge going on at the same time? :confused:
 
Mojo said:
Then why are you complaining that people are only accepting the witnesses’ accounts of what they heard rather than their (or your) interpretations of what they heard, and trying to support your position by alluding to the use of witness evidence in court?
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Let's get back into context. Captain_Swoop asked what evidence there was of a collision that the JAIC must have known about. I pointed out early newspaper reports and 34 eye witness passenger survivors, explaining that eyewitness testimony is considered 'direct evidence' in a court of law ceteris paribus. [Obviously, subject to being called to testify and cross-examination. It is a perfectly valid form of evidence.]

People have been convicted of murder purely on an eye witness account. One that springs to mind is an archaic case in which a woman overheard the defendant bragging that it was him 'what dunnit' and her testimony was enough to send him down.

We were talking about what constitutes evidence. The sheer number of vanishingly small number of survivors who reported hearing bangs - a rapid series of them in most cases - and having the physical sensation of a collision, i.e., of literally been slammed into a wall or onto the floor - IMV means that the JAIC should have investigated these reports instead of excluding all those that did not agree with their bow visor falling off narrative.
 
Vixen said:
It wouldn't do for POTUS Bill Clinton peace-maker extraordinaire between Israel and Palestine to be exposed as the person prepared to use a thousand civilians as collateral damage whilst smuggling out weapons for Israel on the Estonia public passenger ferry.
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I'm confused, maybe this has already been answered, but what is the evidence for Bill Clinton smuggling weapons to Israel on the Estonia? :confused:

Just to make it clear Vixen, I'm asking you for evidence that the Estonia was smuggling arms to Israel and that Bill Clinton was involved. That is the question I am asking. Please answer that question and not something else.
 
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