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Cont: The Sinking of MS Estonia: Case Re-opened Part IV

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Mojo said:
Can you give citations for the specific passages of the minutes that say that Clinton made these demands?


ETA: adding the posts that led to this, just in case Vixen has forgotten what she had claimed:
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For some reason, I feel the dead hand of Bjorkman behind this particular piece of arrant nonsense of Vixen's.......
 
Vixen said:
If you have ever researched history you will have discovered they are an excellent source. When researching WWII, I found no shortage of books on the topic. Unfortunately, despite having attractive covers and five-star write ups, I found it impossible to get beyond page 18 of most of them as they all had the same turgid style of listing events like a school textbook.
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Well. That's science for you. A bit surprised a scientist like you would not relish a chance like this.
So I visited the British Newspaper library. The daily on-the-spot TIMES newspaper report on the Battle of Stalingrad, together with maps and charts brought it to life for me. They even had reporters on the German front line, who must have been British secret agents to have infiltrated it in the first place.
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On the other hand.
Oh my god. If that is how you conduct research, this so much explains everything, about how wrong you can be and keep being wrong.

Research like this is interesting if the research subject is the way the reporting was done back in the day. But if you really want to know what actually happened, how it happened and why it happened, then this is worse than useless.

So, yes, early news reports although prone to inaccuracies - of course they would be - are nonetheless often an excellent relay of events as they happen before the spin doctors move in to reinvent their own interpretations, as with the Estonia.

Carl Bildt having told the world it was 'the bow visor what done it', led to a whole plethora of news items (cf Panorama re 'Swedish/Finnish floating coffins') all linking the catastrophe to The Herald of Free Enterprise just as he was hoping with his 'management of expectations'.
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But yeah.
Yet another. Look! Squirrel!!
 
Vixen said:
... So I visited the British Newspaper library. The daily on-the-spot TIMES newspaper report on the Battle of Stalingrad, together with maps and charts brought it to life for me. They even had reporters on the German front line, who must have been British secret agents to have infiltrated it in the first place.
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I skimmed over this before, and missed this gem.

The Times, back in London, was printing daily reports on the battle of Stalingrad using reports from British secret agents infiltrated into the German 6th army's front line.

This is some form of performance art, just fishing for reactions, right? I mean it can't possibly be serious.
 
erwinl said:
Well. That's science for you. A bit surprised a scientist like you would not relish a chance like this.

On the other hand.
Oh my god. If that is how you conduct research, this so much explains everything, about how wrong you can be and keep being wrong.

Research like this is interesting if the research subject is the way the reporting was done back in the day. But if you really want to know what actually happened, how it happened and why it happened, then this is worse than useless.



But yeah.
Yet another. Look! Squirrel!!
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And there's a further point to mention here:

Media war reporters are usually embedded with the combat troops. They're actually seeing and hearing things as they unfold on the battlefield. And notwithstanding the obvious limitations on their reporting of war (not least that they're only getting one heavily-filtered point of view), the very fact that they're there as "****'s going down" at least lends a degree of reliability and credibility to their reportage.

On the other hand, no journalist (so far as I'm aware) was present on the Estonia when it sank. Let alone being on the bridge as the ship foundered and sank, with senior crew explaining what was happening and why the ship was sinking. No: in fact, every Nordic journalist working on this story - a story which demanded huge amounts of copy, and in which speculation and sensationalism would be deemed positive facets of reporting - was receiving nothing but a confused, and often contradictory, jumble of information snippets. Even with the best will in the world, there truly was no way that any media outlet, in those days and weeks following the disaster, was basing its copy on anything other than unreliable sources - from which it was drawing necessarily-speculative opinions and conclusions.

Vixen's attempted comparison with war reporting is yet another epic fail.
 
zooterkin said:
Technically, at least in the UK, and workplace jargon notwithstanding, the police are civilians too.
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Well yes, of course that's true. (Though the Met's Tactical Support Group had a good bad go at changing all that a decade or so ago........)

But it's actually commonplace usage of the term "civilian" in this context as a shorthand for "non-sworn employees of the police force". It's a term that's used within police forces themselves as well.

Here, for example, is an abstract to a paper from the US DoJ discussing the role and value-add of civilian (meaning non-sworn, non-police-officer) employees of the (UK) Metropolitan Police:

https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-l...-force-competencies-and-conflict-police-force
 
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LondonJohn said:
And there's a further point to mention here:

Media war reporters are usually embedded with the combat troops. They're actually seeing and hearing things as they unfold on the battlefield. And notwithstanding the obvious limitations on their reporting of war (not least that they're only getting one heavily-filtered point of view), the very fact that they're there as "****'s going down" at least lends a degree of reliability and credibility to their reportage.

On the other hand, no journalist (so far as I'm aware) was present on the Estonia when it sank. Let alone being on the bridge as the ship foundered and sank, with senior crew explaining what was happening and why the ship was sinking. No: in fact, every Nordic journalist working on this story - a story which demanded huge amounts of copy, and in which speculation and sensationalism would be deemed positive facets of reporting - was receiving nothing but a confused, and often contradictory, jumble of information snippets. Even with the best will in the world, there truly was no way that any media outlet, in those days and weeks following the disaster, was basing its copy on anything other than unreliable sources - from which it was drawing necessarily-speculative opinions and conclusions.

Vixen's attempted comparison with war reporting is yet another epic fail.
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Oh yes, concerning these reporters. Totally true.
What you have to remember is that they can only report what they see, when they see.

In the case of a battle like Stalingrad, the how the who and the why, the amount of information is so much and concerns so many square miles (from the break out at Kharkov, all the way to the mountains of the Caucasus) and so many people, that no single reporter can see and report it all. And it is all important for the why's and hows of the actual battle of Stalingrad.

But then, a true scientist like Vixen would know this.
 
Vixen said:
[The Times] even had reporters on the German front line [at the battle of Stalingrad], who must have been British secret agents to have infiltrated it in the first place.
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This isn't even funny, it's either utterly delusional or part of a troll-fest.
 
Mojo said:
Can you give citations for the specific passages of the minutes that say that Clinton made these demands?


ETA: adding the posts that led to this, just in case Vixen has forgotten what she had claimed:
Click to expand...

He was de facto head of state, was he not? The CIA was answerable to him? (When he wasn't with that woman.)
 
Jack by the hedge said:
I skimmed over this before, and missed this gem.

The Times, back in London, was printing daily reports on the battle of Stalingrad using reports from British secret agents infiltrated into the German 6th army's front line.

This is some form of performance art, just fishing for reactions, right? I mean it can't possibly be serious.
Click to expand...


Oh God, I missed this as well! Like you, I just skimmed over the (excruciating - but, as it turned out here, astonishing) details of Vixen's latest farrago, and thought she was just talking about war reportage in general.

I wonder if all these "British secret agents" shared the fate of their erstwhile German "colleagues" - ie they either froze to death, or they got carted off for a more protracted death in a Russian gulag...?

Besides, any fule kno that if you want to learn about this particular battle, all you need to do is read Antony Beevor's book on the subject*.


* I'm only semi-serious about that: many contemporary historians view Beevor's approach with a degree of mild disdain - viewing it as somewhat over-dramatised and editorialised (he makes his living predominantly from selling his books into the mass market, after all - and I thought his book was an excellent read). An acquaintance of mine is actually currently working with a Russian academic on assessing all the Russian material available on Stalingrad (plus the St Petersburg and Moscow campaigns, and the drive towards the Baku oilfields), after which she plans to write a history of the Russian Campaign alongside an eminent German historian, to try to view things appropriately from both sides of the line.
 
MarkCorrigan said:
1. You've been told about not using news reports from immediately after because they might not be correct in their reporting through no fault of their own. Why do you seem to insist that this newspaper report is accurate in all respects?

2. I'm assuming he drowned. Do you have any actual evidence that he did not?
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The newspapers and Bengt Stenmark, having all told the world Piht was alive, never once put out a news item stating he was dead. The JAIC are schtum.
 
Vixen said:
He was de facto head of state, was he not? The CIA was answerable to him? (When he wasn't with that woman.)
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Uhm he was the actual Head of State.

But that's utterly irrelevant in any assessment of your (stupid, baseless and bogus) claim.
 
Vixen said:
The newspapers and Bengt Stenmark, having all told the world Piht was alive, never once put out a news item stating he was dead. The JAIC are schtum.
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Why would either the media or the JAIC have been beholden to inform people of Piht's (actual or presumed) death?
 
Jack by the hedge said:
Can you find any more than secondhand reports about people assuming he was going to be interviewed? Are there no reports at all from anyone who actually saw him? Why would that be?

What did Helsingen Sanomat say, if anything, about the revelation that a man they had previously reported saved was actually presumed drowned?
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Despite Piht being described as waiting for questioning in Turku and described as having been interviewed (Stenmark), not one newspaper or official ever retracted this claim or stated it was an error.

The Estonian government officially believes that those nine Estonians listed as survivors have been disappeared by Sweden.
 
Vixen said:
He was de facto head of state, was he not? The CIA was answerable to him? (When he wasn't with that woman.)
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To answer your two questions 1. Yes, he was. 2. Sort of but not really.

Again, the CIA is not the arm of the President. They have to (sort of) answer to the President in some respects, but the President doesn't tell them what to do.
 
Vixen said:
The newspapers and Bengt Stenmark, having all told the world Piht was alive, never once put out a news item stating he was dead. The JAIC are schtum.
Click to expand...

Why on Earth would the JAIC have reported on his death? Why would the papers for that matter?

If the Swedish government HAD abducted him, why wouldn't the papers report on his death? Or write that he was "missing, presumed dead"? Are you claiming that the Swedish government ordered the papers to not report that he had died or something?

You seem to have the understanding of the world and realpolitik of a 5 year old.
 
erwinl said:
Oh yes, concerning these reporters. Totally true.
What you have to remember is that they can only report what they see, when they see.

In the case of a battle like Stalingrad, the how the who and the why, the amount of information is so much and concerns so many square miles (from the break out at Kharkov, all the way to the mountains of the Caucasus) and so many people, that no single reporter can see and report it all. And it is all important for the why's and hows of the actual battle of Stalingrad.

But then, a true scientist like Vixen would know this.
Click to expand...


Yes, absolutely. Stalingrad was different (though far from unique) in that it evolved into an entirely chaotic situation, where there was no such thing as a battle line per se, where command & communication lines were stretched and broken all over the place, and where not even the senior military hierarchy on either side (especially the German side, of course) had a true picture of what was going on, where and when.

On the other hand, in the "good old days" of pitched battles, an embedded reporter would have been able to see pretty much the entire battlefield, and would have had regular access to the command personnel of the army with which (s)he was embedded. Still far from a complete picture of what was happening/had happened, but nevertheless a pretty good idea.
 
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