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

[whoanellie]

nt

 

[whoanellie]

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? He is not writing for the SUN or NATIONAL ENQUIRER where any old gossip will do. GRAUNIAD readers are sandal-wearing middle-class lefties who are conscious of climate change, social inequality and the need for reform. They could not give a toss about sensationalist stories. Enter James Meek with his reasonable story that Estonia 'might have been sunk by a mine claim'. Note the word 'claim'.

Exactly vixen. You are starting to catch on. Note the word 'claim'. What do you think it means?

 

[Reformed Offlian]

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.

As I've said before: Conspiracy theorists generally have no idea what they are talking about. Literally no *idea*. No coherent image/model/hypothesis of what went down, who did it, nor why. Just a vague insinuation of "somehow, somewhere, somebody I don't like did something bad and fooled everybody except me."

So, Vixen. What do you think actually happened?

 

[MarkCorrigan]

I think I can guess what the answer will be. "I don't know, I'm just asking questions!"

Speaking of which, Vixen. Are you an expert on the KGB and have your interlocutors made callous jokes, and if so please link to them.

 

[Andy_Ross]

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.

There would be no need to look for microscopic or chemical evidence. It would be obvious if the ship had struck a WW2 German naval mine

 

[JesseCuster]

I think I can guess what the answer will be. "I don't know, I'm just asking questions!"

No, she's just reporting on current events.

Apparently the hypothesis that a Russian minisub attached a mine to the Estonia which caused it to sink is a current news event and not a conspiracy theory. I'm just a drooling Fox News junkie so I don't understand that.

 

[Andy_Ross]

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.

Well, some of the passengers heard a banging noise and the storm was loud.
Easy to miss this.

 

[Vixen]

Which 'experts' would have briefed him?

I thought you said he was the 'expert'?

Well he obviously was because unlike the posters here, he was aware of the historical mines at Utö.

Johannes Johanson, the managing director of the firm, Estline, said he could not believe the power of the sea combined with technical weaknesses would have been enough to let water into the boat.

'We know that there were very big minefields in this region around Yuto, during the second world war,' he said.

James Meek, GUARDIAN 3.10.1994

And he is absolutely right. I assume 'Yuto' is a phonetical spelling of Utö, which is about 28 miles from Pargas/Parainen on the Finnish mainland.

A survey of mines done in 1940 showed an estimated over 920 between Vyberg and Utö. See map showing area of territorial water minefields

(Credit: Merimiinoitteet Suomen vesillä talvisodassa
ja Suomenlahdella vuonna 1941. pdf)

So Johanson is entirely correct. In fact, a Finnish warship the Ilmarinen was blown up by a mine and its wreck lies within 15 km of the Estonia.

The armored ship Ilmarinen was a coastal armored ship completed in 1931 , which was the flagship of the Finnish Navy until its sinking in 1941. Ilmarinen and its sister ship Väinämöinen were the largest ships of the Finnish navy ever. Ilmarinen sank after colliding with a sea mine off Utö on September 13, 1941, when 271 men drowned.

<snip>

The wreck of the armored ship Ilmarinen was located after three years of exploration in 1990. The following year, six veterans rescued from the ship, Captain Huhta, the commander of Ilmarinen's heavy artillery, got to see the wreck in a mini-submarine . The wreck is upside down 25 nautical miles south of Utö at a depth of 70 meters. About 15 kilometers from the wreck of Ilmarinen is the sinking site of the passenger ship M / S Estonia, which sank in 1994 .
https://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panssarilaiva_Ilmarinen

As a matter of maritime interest. there also lies the wreck of the US Cargo Ship SS Park Victory nearby.

In addition, there are literally thousands of unexploded mines littering the region:

According to Västerbottens Kuriren , hundreds of old sea mines were lurking in the Kvarken in 2010 . According to the magazine, up to 500 mines await in the sea off the coast of Umeå from Holmö to the Finnish side of the archipelago. According to the Swedish National Defense Research Institute, they are still life-threatening. [1]
During the war, 60,000 mines were dumped in the Gulf of Finland
https://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merimiina

Thus, the idea that 'a bow visor causing a ship to sink' is by no means 'more probable' than hitting a mine.

 

[Vixen]

But you didn't give any sources, citations or references to the hypothesis that the Estonia might have been sank by a Russian submarine which was being sold to inexperienced third world buyers.

Either that hypothesis is yours or it is someone elses. If it is someone else's then you didn't cite them, source them or properly reference them, and you are repeatedly telling us that the hypotheses being put forth in this thread are not yours, you are merely reporting others claims, and you have said that your posts are cited, sourced and properly referenced.

Can you understand why people don't believe you when you say that your posts are sourced, cited and properly referenced? They aren't.

Or that none of the fantastical hypotheses being forth are yours, but you are merely repeating others claims? There's a stunning lack of sources for lots of your lurid stories about mine laying submarines, torpedo shooting minisubs, bridge hijackings, etc.

The antics of the Former Soviet Union is common knowledge general history. Just look it up in Wikipedia.

 

[Vixen]

Who said anything about 'anybody'?



Who's disrespecting the survivors now?



So we shouldn't make to much of the eyewitness reports of 'bangs', etc.? What about the witness who reported seeing something white flash by in the water? The next time 'anybody' posts such reports I'll remember this.

There is a big difference between eyewitnesses interviewed in the presence of the police, with a witness and the start time, date and place of the recording noted, either on tape or by hand, together with the names of all those present and concluding with the end time and date plus signature of the eyewitness.

Any exchange of words between a survivor and his or her rescuers would be hearsay on the part of the rescuer and of little legal value.

 

[Vixen]

We've just had several years of the press dutifully reporting a very long line of Trump's falsehoods. Oh, eventually, they started saying that what Trump was saying is false, but not at the start. They simply said this is what Trump said.

That's the job of the press in normal times. You report newsworthy comments. Doing so doesn't imply credibility of any sort. You're only reporting what this person, whose comments are newsworthy for various reasons, said. Erstine's comments at the time of the accident would be newsworthy because of his position, so it's reasonable to report them.

Whether Erstine's comments were credible is not necessarily considered by the reporter. That's really for others to judge.

Political news is very different from developing news of a disaster. People know that politicians are skilled spin doctors and thus what they have to say is often carefully scripted to achieve a certain political effect.

Trump was damned by his own words. No comment needed to be added.

Estline's opinion, being the vessel operators, as to the possible cause of the accident is bound to be a carefully weighed consideration of probabilities based on skill and know how.

 

[Vixen]

Indeed. What Carl Bildt said in the immediate aftermath of the disaster is of interest *only* if we concede the premise that there was some sort of coverup right from the get go. It's not a resource for making the claim that there was one. To use it that way is to beg the question.

First establish that there is some reason to think a coverup happened. Then what Carl Bildt said will matter to the rest of the discussion

If the massive hole in the starboard was carefully omitted from mention by the JAIC - as it was - then there is obviously a cover up.

When will you notice the elephant in the room?

 

[Vixen]

Per this reasoning, every reporter who quoted Trump over the past several years was attesting to Trump's reliability.

Totally different genre.

 

[Vixen]

Look, I don't really care about early conjectures regarding the cause, but let's look at this.

Correct me if I'm mistaken, but the survivors were evacuated to Sweden, right? And Johanson was in Estonia, right?

So, how is it that the Estline bosses were more likely to have access to the surviving crew than the Swedes?

The survivors were evacuated to three hospital locations: Mariehamn, which is the capital of the autonomous Åland Islands (it is geographically and politically Finnish because the open sea doesn't start until west this). Turku hospital which is nearby Parainen/Utö, the nearest land to the accident and Huddinge Hospital in Stockholm.


I assume the crew would have had NMT phones or hospital phones to ring their employers.

 

[JesseCuster]

The antics of the Former Soviet Union is common knowledge general history. Just look it up in Wikipedia.

That has absolutely nothing to do with what I wrote.

You have spun tales about bridge hijackings, torpedo shooting minisubs, mine laying minisubs, accidents involving British or Swedish escort submarines, etc.

You have repeatedly claimed that you are merely the messenger and you're just reporting what's in the news or what others have claimed.

Yet none of these lurid stories have been cited, sourced or properly referenced by you and you claim that your posts are sourced, cited and properly referenced.

You think you can get away with saying that "the antics of the former Soviet is common knowledge general history" and not be called on it?

Is reading up on the antics of Russia or the Soviet Union going to let me know who came up with the idea that a mine laying Russian minisub might have been responsible for sinking Estonia? Or let me know who came up with the hypothesis that the Estonia was sank by a British submarine escorting it? Or that the Estonia was sank by a collision with a Russian submarine being sold to a third world buyer? Or that the Estonia was sank by a Russian minisub firing torpedos at it?

You said you are merely reporting others hypotheses and that your posts are properly sourced, cited and referenced, yet you provided nothing to back up these stories and you didn't even mention the people you supposedly came up with these claims that you are merely repeating.

The one attempt you made at providing a reference for who came up with one of your stories (the possibility of a bridge hijacking) involving quoting a source which said absolutely nothing about a bridge hijacking.

Do you think that telling people to read about the former Soviet Union's antics on Wikipedia after you've laid out these scenarios about torpedos and hijackings and mine-laying minisubs is actually citing, sourcing and properly referencing your posts, as you claim you do?

Pathetic.

 

[JesseCuster]

I assume the crew would have had NMT phones or hospital phones to ring their employers.

Where's the cite, source and proper reference for this assumption?

 

[Vixen]

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'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.

There has not been an accident like it before or since, unless you count the ships sunk by torpedo during the wars.

It is nothing like the Herald of Free Enterprise, which did not have a bow visor and was simply due to the boatswain not putting up the car ramp.

 

[JesseCuster]

Estline's opinion, being the vessel operators, as to the possible cause of the accident is bound to be a carefully weighed consideration of probabilities based on skill and know how.

No cite, source or proper reference?

 

[Vixen]

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.

I see you are one those people who cannot debate without getting downright insulting and spiteful. You are telling lies when you claim I 'pretended' to read the original source, when I very clearly said I would need to get the original from a newspaper library, and that the source was Drew Wilson.

I had read of Johanson's claim before but Wilson's was the source that was at hand.

 

[JayUtah]

There has not been an accident like it before or since, unless you count the ships sunk by torpedo during the wars.



It is nothing like the Herald of Free Enterprise, which did not have a bow visor and was simply due to the boatswain not putting up the car ramp.

None of that has anything to do with what I posted.