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

[theprestige]

Jack Black as the hapless Russian soldier who can't remember to take his finger off the PTT button.

ETA: Jeff Bridges as the Estonian/Swedish/Finnish commissioner who dissents from the JAIC conclusions.

"It was the failure of the bow visor!"

"That's, like, just your opinion, maaaan."

 

[Andy_Ross]

Rowan Atkinson as the suave but blundering MI6 agent.

 

[Jack by the hedge]

And Steve Buscemi as somebody. Because he always plays somebody.

Get the Fargo band back together: Him, William H Macy and Peter Stormare as the inept arms smugglers.

 

[LondonJohn]

Get the Fargo band back together: Him, William H Macy and Peter Stormare as the inept arms smugglers.

"Yes, your finder's fee. We're not just going to give you a whole truckload of (obselete) Russian military equipment! We're not an arms bazaar, Jerry Sergei!"

 

[LondonJohn]

Estonian prostitute, being quizzed about one of the inept smugglers who hired her the previous evening:

"Oh, he was a little guy. Kinda Soviet-lookin'. Jah (Estonian for "Yaaah")"

 

[catsmate]

One of the passengers - one with a seemingly dodgy background - was also ready and waiting in a life raft in a survivor suit. He claimed he 'found it in the life raft provisions'. How likely is that story?

It is very interesting.

Will your be supporting these assertions with evidence?

 

[Dabop]

Will your be supporting these assertions with evidence?

Why start now????

 

[Vixen]

Primary injuries are caused by blast overpressure waves, or shock waves. Total body disruption is the most severe and invariably fatal primary injury.] Primary injuries are especially likely when a person is close to an exploding munition, such as a land mine. The ears are most often affected by the overpressure, followed by the lungs and the hollow organs of the gastrointestinal tract. Gastrointestinal injuries may present after a delay of hours or even days. Injury from blast overpressure is a pressure and time dependent function. By increasing the pressure or its duration, the severity of injury will also increase.

Extensive damage can also be inflicted upon the auditory system. The tympanic membrane (also known as the eardrum) may be perforated by the intensity of the pressure waves. Furthermore, the hair cells, the sound receptors found within the cochlea, can be permanently damaged and can result in a hearing loss of a mild to profound degree. Additionally, the intensity of the pressure changes from the blast can cause injury to the blood vessels and neural pathways within the auditory system. Therefore, affected individuals can have auditory processing deficits while having normal hearing thresholds. The combination of these effects can lead to hearing loss, tinnitus, headache, vertigo (dizziness), and difficulty processing sound.

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

Also see
CDC
Explosions and Blast Injuries
A Primer for Clinicians

https://www.cdc.gov/masstrauma/preparedness/primer.pdf

This is talking about people directly in the line of the blast. For example, SS Kursk. I've been within 200 metres of an Oxford Street IRA bomb. It didn't cause physical injury. I don't believe anything AB Linde says anyway.

 

[Vixen]

Why would a "skilled military operator" take part in a mission which could start a war, and end up with them standing in front of a wall with a blindfold.

The whole point of "skill" is to solve a problem to achieve the desired result. If the mission is to sink a ship the size of Estonia, but not with torpedoes, anti-ship missiles, or artillery then you need a crap loud of high explosives. Lucky for operative(s) Estonia is a Ro-Go ferry, and in 1994 one could just drive a truck packed with explosives onboard. One truck would do it, but any EOD guy would tell you three or four would guarantee the ship sinks.

See, what you clearly don't understand is that setting charges specific to blasting the various locks of the visor is not a simple matter of placing explosives next to or on them. This requires a specific shape charge, and because we're dealing with steel it has to be a cutting charge with a compound that works on steel. These kind of charges leave a signature which would be obvious to just about everyone, certainly an accident investigator. The only other way to blast off the visor would be a big truck packed with a crowd-pleaser. But that would also be obvious because entire front of the ship would be gone, not just the door.

The short version is the bow ramp showed no damage from explosives.

You don't know that yet.

 

[Vixen]

Yes, they killed ONE guy. They didn't blow up the plane he flew out of Moscow on. That's the whole point of having assassins - you kill the person you need dead, not everyone in the zipcode.

They had enough of that stuff to kill >250,000 people. Highly dangerous act. They knew it would get world wide publicity. 'Ex-Russian spies, we are watching you!'

They could just as easily have simply shot the guy or stabbed him with an umbrella but no, this was a statement.

 

[Kid Eager]

This is talking about people directly in the line of the blast. For example, SS Kursk. I've been within 200 metres of an Oxford Street IRA bomb. It didn't cause physical injury. I don't believe anything AB Linde says anyway.

Considering that the Estonia is only 155m long, and Oxford St not being a ship, the anecdote is worthless.

 

[Vixen]

I was rock guitarist in my youth. I would expensive earplugs made by 3M (Sonic II). I forgot to wear them to a Ted Nugent concert and I had a headache, vertigo, and tinnitus for about 10 days. No fun. After that I bought extra plugs and this is the only reason I'm not totally deaf today.

I saw Led Zeppelin at Earls Court and immediately had hearing problems after the concert. Everyone sounded like Donald Duck and it was like this for three days, when I thought I had gone deaf. My ear specialist doctor laughed and reassured me that, no, no, Deep Purple were the loudest.

But seriously, the volume of any blast depends on the amount of explosive. Builders use explosives all the time. Here in Finland you can openly buy the stuff in buckets. So to claim that if Linde had been near the car ramp when he heard a bang that knocked him off his feet due to the consequent sea swell 'He would have been deafened', ain't necessarily so.

 

[Vixen]

That is not what happened: he asked if *you* knew anything about the topics.

I'm glad you finally acknowledge that she made no claims that there explosives involved. Does this mean you will recant your previous false attributions?

To even get to temperatures above 700°C artificially you need to be in a laboratory. There is no way 'welding' would cause the type of deformation as seen here. Professor Westermann was being purely descriptive and was not giving an opinion as all she did was microscopically examine the bow visor for deformations and its type.

 

[Vixen]

Why the CIA?

I ask only because the US had its own operation to secure hazardous Soviet military hardware working with NATO and former Eastern Block countries, and this meant we had plenty of opportunity to steal all kinds of things. And we probably did. The thing you must understand is we have our own air force and our own navy, and our navy has a bunch of submarines. And in a pinch we will contract out with local cargo companies to fly or sail something out of a contested area. The reason we do that is to maintain control of the mission, something lost when placing sensitive materials on public transport.

This whole line of conspiracy to stop stolen Rusky hardware is ludicrous.

But it looks like maybe the CIA did contract out their own local cargo planes.

 

[Vixen]

I love the idea that the Russians would sink the Estonia over hardware that was probably decades behind what the western counterpart in technology. But they go to great lengths to steal US technology to this day.

That's just what nations do. They play nice on one level while spying and stealing things from each other. When one country gets caught there is a diplomatic row, ambassadors are recalled, everyone convenes in Switzerland for a few weeks, backroom deals are made, and sometimes someone apologizes...right before stealing something else...

To my knowledge, the only thing where a political leader signs off on the murder of innocent civilians is to stop a confirmed WMD, such as a nuclear warhead, or these day a hijacked jumbo jet. And this would be done in the open.

You say 'probably decades behind' but the Russian space programme was quite advanced. And Russia shared with the USA the COSPAS-SARSAT system. In any case, the point isn't to use the stuff, it is to steal their strategy and get an insight into their defence plans.

Re civilian collateral: you saw at Salisbury recently, the Russians had no problem putting he lives of 250,000 people at risk just to target one guy and his daughter.

In WWII it had no problem bringing down the Swedish merchant ship Hansa even though it had been painted white to convey it was non-military (the Soviet motivation was to stop iron ore from reaching Germany).

 

[Vixen]

Has she microscopically analyzed it? How?

Sent from my SM-G991U using Tapatalk

At the Norwegian University department she works at? Material Science students get to do all this stuff.

 

[Vixen]

Are you suggesting that the Russian government sank the Estonia to send a message to itself?

Was it stealing its own secrets? In any case, Yeltsin had no idea what the intelligence services were up to half the time.

 

[GlennB]

To even get to temperatures above 700°C artificially you need to be in a laboratory. There is no way 'welding' would cause the type of deformation as seen here. Professor Westermann was being purely descriptive and was not giving an opinion as all she did was microscopically examine the bow visor for deformations and its type.

Astonishing crap. Mig welding reaches 1650°C and arc welding much higher. Mig welding is a DIY/hobbyist activity for some.

 

[Jack by the hedge]

They had enough of that stuff to kill >250,000 people. Highly dangerous act. They knew it would get world wide publicity. 'Ex-Russian spies, we are watching you!'

They could just as easily have simply shot the guy or stabbed him with an umbrella but no, this was a statement.

Whereas in the Estonia case the statement was "it looks like an accident".

Your plot still makes zero sense.

Kill the smugglers. Quietly if you only want the opposition to know, openly and gruesomely if you want the world to know. Don't sink the ship you're travelling on and make it look like an accident because that fails to send a message and it's a flip of a coin whether it kills your own team rather than the smugglers.

 

[erwinl]

I saw Led Zeppelin at Earls Court and immediately had hearing problems after the concert. Everyone sounded like Donald Duck and it was like this for three days, when I thought I had gone deaf. My ear specialist doctor laughed and reassured me that, no, no, Deep Purple were the loudest.

But seriously, the volume of any blast depends on the amount of explosive. Builders use explosives all the time. Here in Finland you can openly buy the stuff in buckets. So to claim that if Linde had been near the car ramp when he heard a bang that knocked him off his feet due to the consequent sea swell 'He would have been deafened', ain't necessarily so.

If the blast had been powerful enough to knock somebody of their feet, they are most likely in the lethal blast area and as such will most certainly have ear problems (and having 'being alive' problems).

Back in the day that videos of the Syrian civil war were still widely available it was very easy to see the difference.
If people were just in the lethal area they just fell over or down, sometimes even without the extremities bendig during the fall.

For there to be 'knocked off the feet' (with the accompanying visual of there being a motion of being shoved aside, during that fall), would mean that the person in question was very, very much inside the lethal area.