The Sinking of MS Estonia: Case Re-opened Part II

[JayUtah]

Er, he is the Head Honch of Estlines.

You didn't know that at the time. You were presenting Meek's then-unknown source as "reputable and reliable" before you even knew who it was.

It is his job to know.

It's his job to advocate the interests of the company he heads. The prevalence of old sea mines on the seafloor in that area is hardly a secret, but what he should have known -- as the head of a passenger line plying the Baltic -- is what little danger those munitions had posed to shipping. MS Estonia would have been the only ship in decades, over thousands of yearly voyages through those waters, to have been sunk by a leftover mine. Johanson plainly bases his opinion not on what he knows, but what he doesn't know -- namely, how his ferry could have otherwise sunk so fast.

 

[JayUtah]

At least my posts are sourced, cited and properly referenced, even if people don't like them. (cf. James Meek.)

You pilfered a citation from someone else, pretended you had read the primary source, and inferred your claim from the headline alone. You are not intellectually honest.

 

[JayUtah]

Do you think Meek a reputable journalist for a respected British broadsheet, the GRAUNIAD would have published the story if he did not think it credible?

Yes.

He is not writing for the SUN or NATIONAL ENQUIRER where any old gossip will do.

Quoting the CEO of the line the sunken ship belongs to is not gossip-mongering. What such a person has to say in light of such tragedies is newsworthy. It may not be credible or cogent, but it's what the journalist has a duty to report regardless of his own personal beliefs.

Enter James Meek with his reasonable story that Estonia 'might have been sunk by a mine claim'. Note the word 'claim'.

You've shown no evidence that Meek found the claim reasonable. He quotes the CEO because what the CEO says is newsworthy. Luckily Meek published many more articles on the loss of Estonia that week than just the one you cite to. We don't have to resort to your second-guessing and handwaving to know which explanations he though more reasonable at the time.

 

[JesseCuster]

I wonder if Vixen thinks that journalists who report what Donald Trump has said must give credence to his inane utterances because they are bound by journalistic ethics to only report people saying credible things? Or that a publication like the Guardian mustn't or shouldn't report on what Donald Trump says because what he says is crazy or bigoted or otherwise not credible?

 

[JayUtah]

'Hack' is slang for a journalist.

Hack is slang for a poor journalist. No one here has claimed Meek is a poor journalist. The only claim made with respect to him states that he is probably not an expert on sea mines, so trusting his authority on the subject may not be the best information.

It is not necessarily derogatory, it is also affectionate.

I've never seen it used that way, and I know several reporters for the Pulitzer-Prize-winning newspaper in my town.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hack_writer

The point being made is that Meek is a first class professional journalist who is not the type of gutter-press hack who writes sex-obsessed stories about celebrities but who is sent abroad for serious news reports.

No one here has claimed that. Literally you are the only person in this thread to attach such nasty words to Meek, even if it's to try to pretend your critics have done it.

Reading your exchange with Mojo over this point has led me to believe you are irredeemably dishonest. Yes, you must be bothered to correct errors you make if you want to be taken seriously. Conveniently forgetting what you previously argued, completely fabricating arguments to shove into your critics mouths, and out of the blue accusing them of racism are not just minor semantic quibbles. You are fundamentally failing at carrying on an adult conversation.

 

[JesseCuster]

Conveniently forgetting what you previously argued, completely fabricating arguments to shove into your critics mouths, and out of the blue accusing them of racism are not just minor semantic quibbles. You are fundamentally failing at carrying on an adult conversation.

Also accusing her critics of making crass jokes about the victims of the disaster, accusing her critics of wanting to censor the testimony of survivors, and accusing her critics of only believing what the likes of Fox News and the Daily Mail have to say about current events.

None of which her critics have actually done.

Either she genuinely can't remember and can't follow what has been said in this thread or she is guilty of naked intellectual dishonesty.

 

[LondonJohn]

Really? So not like JayUtah's chief engineer of the Titanic or your fighter pilot dad, an expert in noise?

What? What the heck do you even mean with this "response" to my post?

 

[LondonJohn]

'Would', 'could', 'should'. Pure conjecture. Sheer fantasy. No sources, references or citations.

Goddammit. I knew I shouldn't have shelled out for my new billet-steel-cased weapons-grade Irony-o-Meter. I warned the people who sold it to me that it was probably going to face one of the sternest possible tests, and they airily assured me that far surpassed every military specification and could meet every challenge with ease.

How surprised will they be when I mail them back my newly-demolished machine and demand my money back...?

 

[LondonJohn]

Nope, people questioned your claim that Meek agreed with the claim that a mine could have sunk the ship. He didn't agree with the claim, he merely reported the claim that the Estline head honcho made, but you said that Meek agreed with the claim that a mine could have sunk the ship when he did no such thing.

You have been repeatedly corrected on that and refuse to acknowledge that you were wrong and have launched into a bizarre series of invective posts about gutter hacks and sex-obsessed yellow press, which has nothing to do with anything anybody has said.

I'll repeat what someone else has said, it's hard to know if you're genuinely incapable of reading and following the thread and remembering what you and others have said or if you're just that intellectually dishonest.

I personally think her posts clearly demonstrate the latter over and above the former (but of course I wouldn't rule out a fair dollop of the former either)

 

[Reformed Offlian]

A lot of people have been killed over mine claims. See the Treasure of Sierra Madre.

But I guess "killed over" is not the same as "sunk by a mine claim".

Citations?! We ain't got no citations! We don't need no citations! We don't have to show you any stinkin' citations!

 

[LondonJohn]

Come off it. There were seventeen nationalities on board. Swedes, Finns, Estonians do not mutually understand each other.

The rescue operation was extremely stressful for the helicopter crews, fearing the wind would throw the helicopter into the sea, the winches not being strong enough to bear the weight of people stricken by cramp barely able to move, the divers having to swim in a rough sea to reach people and get them out.

They then had to hurry the survivors to medical treatment and then return for the next lot of survivors. Likewise, the medical staff were only interested in supplying medical treatment. Each survivor on the nearby ships, the Mariella and Silja were kept separate from each other and from other passengers and were each interviewed by the security police once they were on their own ward in hospital and ready to give their first-hand early account.

No way would members of the navy, the coastguards, the helicopter rescue crew or the medics interfere with this process. It was not in their remit. As most passenger survivors recounted hearing a series of bangs and/or a collision, where did Bildt get his 'bow visor' fell off scenario from? Fair enough as conjecture but to make it the firm announcement as being the cause and prohibiting bringing up the bodies was bound to cause an outcry amongst the relatives and suspicions of a cover up.

No doubt Bildt was advised by his intelligence officers which raises the question, why is the incident 'classified top secret' if the Swedes had nothing to hide. If it was sabotage - and their is a hole in the starboard which has been kept secret - then whoever was responsible was the cause of the mass murder of a thousand people and should be brought to justice.

Instead we have a 'classified' label to protect the UK, USA and Swedish security forces, supposedly in the interests of national security but more likely to cover the back of the then POTUS Bill Clinton, who put in the order for former Soviet Union military secrets and poodles UK - PM John Major who would have signed off the UK signatory to the treaty - and Sweden, the three countries who were helping Estonia develop its own intelligence agency.

Source(s)? Or just rabid speculation?

You spew out this sort of bilge, yet in almost the same breath you mockingly reject (eminently feasible) suggestions that the shore-based management at the ship's owners Estline might rather desperately want to try to learn why their ship had sunk. And that an extremely obvious place to start would be to talk - in person or on the phone - with at least some of those crew members who had survived? And that senior politicians in Sweden and elsewhere in the region might, in turn, urgently want to try to find out why the ship had sunk - if for no other reason but to rule out military subterfuge by a foreign power. And that the obvious first place for the politicians to start would be to contact the ship's owners?


There's no need for mystery here. There's no need for Bildt to have learned about the bow visor via "briefings from his intelligence officers". There's no need whatsoever for any cloak-and-dagger bollocks. The ship sank because it was poorly designed and even more poorly maintained, to the point where a single mechanical stress failure (with a total lack of redundancy) set of an inevitable chain of events that culminated in the total loss of the ship. That's what happened here.

 

[Axxman300]

So now it was a mine. Not submarine, mini-submarine, KGB/Spetsnaz commandos, and or terrorists.

Here's the thing, a mine detonating IS LOUD. We had one wash up here about 25 years ago and they blew it up on the beach. You could hear that thing from 12 miles away.

I'm certain of two things: Had it been a mine everyone on the bridge would have known it was a mine meaning the captain wouldn't have left at the end of his shift. And they would have said something during their MAYDAY calls.

All that was communicated was that Estonia was taking on water and listing badly. That meant the bridge crew had no idea what was happening.

Should be pointed out that a mine would detonate under the ship unless it was just floating around, and the crack/hole in the side of Estonia IS TOO SMALL to be caused by a mine of any kind.

I can't wait until we get to the "Aliens did it" part of this.

 

[Axxman300]

Oh for crying out oud. These guys literally faced death in the face. Do you really think they would even begin to be experts into the cause of the accident. She-eesh.

Rolf Sörman, first-hand eyewitness survivor says:

Baltic Times

How could any responsible person know as of Day One the cause of the accident before (a) the ship was even located or (b) there had even been an initial investigation.

This a prime example of you wanting it both ways. You've spent half the thread arguing that the survivor testimony must be treated as gospel, but here you are claiming it would have been worthless in the hours immediately after being pulled from the sea. What makes you think their memories improved over time? Why would a statement made a few hours after rescue be any less reliable than one made weeks or months later?

Again, they've now surveyed the Estonia twice. The visor got knocked off in rough seas. There is a crack along the seems of the hull plating. There is no evidence of an explosion. They will actively dive on Estonia next summer. These are the facts.

 

[Mojo]

So now it was a mine. Not submarine, mini-submarine, KGB/Spetsnaz commandos, and or terrorists.

Here's the thing, a mine detonating IS LOUD. We had one wash up here about 25 years ago and they blew it up on the beach. You could hear that thing from 12 miles away.

I'm certain of two things: Had it been a mine everyone on the bridge would have known it was a mine meaning the captain wouldn't have left at the end of his shift. And they would have said something during their MAYDAY calls.

All that was communicated was that Estonia was taking on water and listing badly. That meant the bridge crew had no idea what was happening.

Should be pointed out that a mine would detonate under the ship unless it was just floating around, and the crack/hole in the side of Estonia IS TOO SMALL to be caused by a mine of any kind.

Yes, but apart from that, what reason do you have for thinking it wasn’t a mine?

 

[LondonJohn]

Do read the GUARDIAN report, which states:



Do you really think these guys are uneducated about the layout of their own seas?

No. I think they're perfectly well educated about "the layout of their own seas". They know, for example, that not one single ship - out of the tens of thousands of times this sea lane has been sailed since WWII - has even hit a mine, let alone been lost to an exploding mine. So they know that in reality, the chance that this ship sank because it was hit by a leftover WWII mine is as close to zero as makes no odds.

They also know that it would be very strongly to their own advantage if the cause of the sinking was nothing to do with the ship itself or their maintenance/crewing of it. Therefore they'd know that if (and that's all it ever was: an "if") the ship had been sunk by a UXM, that would by far be the "least bad" situation for them.

 

[LondonJohn]

If Meek didn't think his source was reliable he would not have bothered to quote it.

Whilst a professional journalist is bound by his professional ethics to present a balanced article at the same time they still have to make a decision as to whether the source of their story is reliable and they are expected to check the reliability of their sources. In other words they won't publish something that in their professional opinion and training does not ring true.

So in that sense, Meek did indeed believe that the Chief of Estline's opinion was a newsworthy and one, as spoken by a maritime expert.


He is not quoting some unnamed keyboard warrior on a conspiracy theory chat forum.


So, as I said, it is not conspiracy theory, it is current affairs.

You really don't know what you're talking about.

Look: suppose that Emmanuel Macron (just for example) said, in an interview with journalist X, that he suspected aliens might have been responsible for originating the current covid pandemic? For X, the veracity, falsifiability, reliability or credibility of Macron's claim would be of zero relevance or importance in the first instance. All that would be important at that point was that a person of Macron's position and status had made that claim. X would have filed his "French President Macron claims aliens may have planted covid onto Earth" story as rapidly as he possibly could.

And precisely the same logic applies to the "ship might have hit a mine" claim in our matter.

 

[JesseCuster]

This a prime example of you wanting it both ways. You've spent half the thread arguing that the survivor testimony must be treated as gospel, but here you are claiming it would have been worthless in the hours immediately after being pulled from the sea.

Didn't Vixen claim earlier in the thread that witness testimony taken very soon after a traumatic event was particularly valuable because the memory was vivid and fresh in their minds?

 

[LondonJohn]

Context is all. The original context is London John claiming that no way would anyone think it was a mine. So I pointed out that actually there was such a claim.


Do keep up.

No. LondonJohn (no space between "London" and "John") made no such claim. LondonJohn said that it was a nigh-on impossibility that the ship had - in reality - been sunk by a mine (of WWII era or any other).

That the head of the company which owned and operated the ship made some baseless speculation about a mine - when he himself must obviously have known how vanishingly improbable a scenario that would have been - is neither here nor there. Especially when those two dirty words "ulterior motives" come into play - as they most definitely did there.

See, it's also not impossible, for example, that the ship was struck by a meteorite that just happened to fall through the Earth's atmosphere at exactly the right time, in the right place, to collide with the ship's hull and cause it to sink. But in relative probability terms, it's even less probable (but not perhaps by as much as you might think) than the "hit a leftover mine" theory.


Oh and lastly, you seem repeatedly to overlook the fact that whatever might have been claimed (and for whatever reason) in the immediate aftermath of the sinking, it wasn't long at all before investigators were able to recover and analyse evidence. And had the ship hit a mine (it didn't), there would have been tell-tale signs of pitting and stretching of the hull at a visual and microscopic level, and there would have been easily-identifiable residues of explosives and explosives by-products. None of those were present. This ship did not hit a mine. End of story.

 

[LondonJohn]

A Baltic maritime expert likely knows better than London John as to whether there are mines in the Baltic Sea.

LMAO.

Do you perhaps therefore think that this "Baltic maritime expert" knows - as well as LondonJohn does - precisely how many of the tens of thousands of ship voyages in recognised shipping lanes in the Baltic, in the 50 years (at that point) since the end of WWII, had actually resulted in a ship being hit by an exploding mine?

(Hint: the answer is 4/4 minus one. I suspect that the "Baltic maritime expert" would have known that, don't you?)

 

[JesseCuster]

If the Estonia was sunk by an unexploded leftover WWII mine, then why would Carl Bildt make up a story about it being sunk by the bow visor coming off in a storm and letting water in that caused the ship to sink and why would the JAIC then go to the trouble of concocting a fraudulent investigation and report that affirmed that false story?