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

[Andy_Ross]

de;leted

 

[Andy_Ross]

The ECHR does have an Article 6, which covers the right to a fair trial. Problem is, the Egyptians never had a trial (hearing) at all before being carted off the street and onto a plane.

Which is not the same as disappearing.

 

[JayUtah]

However, although the case of the two Egyptians differ - which is why there is no need to go into the minutiae of the two Egyptians' cases - the salient point is that they were disappeared.

No, they were not. And yes, it is extremely important to "go into the minutiae." That's why we have courts and lawyers, and discovery, and the rule of law. You claimed you assisted prosecutors as a forensic accountant in the conviction of people of serious financial crimes. Don't you think that counsel for the defense would insist that the prosecution "go into the minutiae" such that your services were required? Could the prosecution simply obtain a conviction simply by stating the "salient point" of its belief that the defendants were guilty? Or is actual evidence required?

Whether that was for 48-hours as you claim, whilst a frantic lawyer tried to find out his client's whereabouts, or 48 years, they were disappeared during the time frame nobody at all knew where they were, except their removers.

Then you can certainly cite legal precedent in a relevant court attesting that 48 hours constitutes a "prolonged period" as required in the statute. For Pete's sake, I've been inadvertently out of contact with everyone else for more than 48 hours. I don't claim to have been "disappeared." Does it ever cross your mind that you don't get to decide these things from your armchair? Of course I've already looked at the relevant ECHR findings that cite to Ahmed Agiza and Muhammad al-Zery as precedent. The words "disappeared" or "enforced disappearance" are not used. The Court's later decisions that refer to them use the terms "repatriation" and "expulsion." As usual, your "Because I say so" argument carries zero weight.

And again, your motive is clear. Your conspiracy theory asserts that Sweden has "disappeared" the officers of MS Estonia under orders from the CIA. Lacking any actual evidence for this claim, you're trying the lesser path of showing that it's congruent with Sweden's pattern of behavior, that Sweden would later also "disappear" two Egyptians under orders from the CIA, so we shouldn't have any problem believing that they "must" have done something similar previously with the MS Estonia officers. Except that your increasingly comical attempts to make a lesser crime look like the more serious crime of enforced disappearance have fallen flat. Sweden simply did not do what you accuse them of doing in 2001, and so there's no pattern of behavior by which you can assert they probably did the same thing in 1994. You have no direct evidence. You have no indirect inference. All you have is handwaving pleas that we take your judgment over those of the relevant courts.

 

[Andy_Ross]

Yes, that doesn't work because switching the buoys on would activate their transmitters. So you don't do that on installation. That is an error in the article.

There is a short delay before broadcast on the early models to allow them to be turned on for a few seconds to observe that the battery charge light illuminates.
This check is supposed to be done at fixed intervals as laid down in the units manual.
Because of the risk of accidental activation later models have a separate battery test button (not a switch)

 

[JayUtah]

Nobody said it had powers of prosecution.

You're trying to fault the JAIC for not following up on criminal allegations made by third parties. You accuse of them of remaining silent on matters it's required for them to remain silent upon.

That does not abnegate its responsibility to properly investigate the cause of the accident.

Which it did, and found the cause of the accident to be loss of stability caused by the ingress of water through the opening created by the unexpected loss of the forward visor. The loss of the forward visor is explained entirely by a combination of poor repairs and maintenance, and the operation of the ship in a manner inconsistent with safety. Engineering investigations don't delve into allegations of criminal conspiracy. That's the responsibility of other organizations.

 

[JayUtah]

Really? So London John is asserting confidently that the ship's crew needed to dive two fathoms below a raging sea to manually active the EPIRB's.

No.

Literally no one but you has made this ridiculous claim. Of all the many straw men you've sent into battle, this is by far the most absurd.

He doesn't know what he is talking about.

No, you don't know what he's talking about.

 

[MarkCorrigan]

If the JAIC had found evidence of sabotage, say explosive residue on the visor locks or evidence that the ship had been holed in some way other than the bow visor being lost they would have published those findings, and a criminal investigative organisation would have started an investigation into who did it.

But they didn't. They found that a poorly maintained and badly repaired ship was operated in ways that would have combined with the aforementioned to create a situation in which a bloody great hole opened on the ship when the visor came away. The fault lies with those who maintained her and those who sailed her. Your attempt to pin the blame on a phantom "other" group holds no water. It is inconsistent with the findings, and there is no evidence for any of the other fanciful scenarios you've dreamed up. You've got nothing Vixen, you lose.

 

[JayUtah]

That doesn't work because once activated, a signal is sent to COSPAS-SARSAT.

That's exactly the point. On the model of the buoy you tell us was carried aboard MS Estonia, there is exactly one switch. When flipped, it first shows the battery charge status. Then after a delay, it begins transmitting to the satellite network and continues to do so until switched off -- again with the solitary switch on the device -- or until its battery is exhausted. We know this because the specifications of the device in question have been preserved. That is a primary source.

When faced with the claims of a secondary source -- a journalist's attempt at explanation -- that contradict the primary sources, we don't throw out the primary sources and accept what some author (and many since him) have misunderstood. The facts don't change simply because you prefer one story over another.

 

[Vixen]

Just noticed this. I missed it when I replied to that post earlier.

Medals for the missing aircrew weren't awarded until 2004.

Three of the eight crew members were military personnel from the Swedish Air Force, and the other five were civilian signals intelligence (SIGINT) operators from the FRA.

This is the incident that the aircrew medals refer to.

The so called 'Catalina Affair'

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

Also see

https://www.raoul-wallenberg.eu/articles/the-swedish-dc-3-the-destiny-of-its-crew/

That is one of the most shocking, saddest and most outrageous stories I have ever read. I must find out more about this. Albeit having taken place during the post-war Cold War, it was still during peacetime 1952. It exposes Sweden's claim to being merely a neutral benign player in world affairs as a sham. What Sweden did was to deny the families of the airmen shot down in the Baltic just off its east coast closure as to what had become of them. Instead, it gave them a vague story of their being missing, perhaps in a gulag, when all the time it knew exactly what had happened and instantly, as they were actually listening in when the DC-3 was shot down! It knew all along the men were dead and that they had never been diverted to USSR territory and captured as spies (which they were). So, for forty years, their children, parents, wives, brothers, sisters, friends and neighbours had no idea what had happened to the men. So after seeing declassifed information from Russian archives, it came to light where they were shot down and the aircraft and bodies salvaged and recovered. What is most shocking of all is that the men did not get a Gold Medal with Sword until 2005! Some ten years after Ensign Kenneth Svensson got his for his surface rescue in respect of Estonia.

Sorry, I am not seeing an equivalence here.

What Svensson did must have been rather more than rescue seven people, because many other rescue men did the same, if not more.

 

[Vixen]

Working backward, the JAIC and other investigative bodies in this case, as well as in other accident investigations, are not obligated to explain OBVIOUS CLERICAL ERRORS to stupid people. Especially when they have no bearing on the cause of the accident.

In the case of the MS Estonia sinking, the Swedish government has actaully caved into the demands of the soft-headed, and are now conducting a second investigation of the wreck which, so far, is just underlining the original JAIC. If spending a few million dollars guaranteed the satisfaction of morons, I'd support it, but the MS Estonia-CT crowd are already re-tooling their arguments for when the investigation fails to find their unicorns and fairies.

And as to your first point, you certainly have said they were killed. While it is clear that you post declarative statements without thinking, it still does not absolve you from the things you say. To "Disappear" someone means you kill them. You claim "trident frogmen" sought the surviving crew members out. You don't send SEALs or SBS types out to look for someone unless you want that person to experience a level of suffering. They're not SAR guys, they're killers. And you've driveled out an endless stream of scenarios which, in the real word, all end with someone getting a bullet in the head.

Plus, you speculate that a Spetsnaz team as on the ship, and sank it so the Russians could "send a message". So yes, you're claiming assassination right and left.

So back this up with evidence, or accept that Estonia sank due to the failure of the bow-visor in rough seas because the ship was never designed for open-ocean travel in rough seas.

How is it OBVIOUS CLERICAL ERRORS to have listed in the first place those now delisted Estonian crew? There has never been an explanation.

We saw how the Sweden Defence Forces secret services were happy to let relatives of the dead of the shot down DC-3's in 1952 not know of their loved ones fate, in the interests of keeping classified Sweden's covert highly secretive espionage activities on the Soviet Union, so you can't ruled out it having happened again.

Especially in light of the immediate cover up of the sinking.

 

[JayUtah]

In essence, removing people from one state to another - especially, as in the case of the Egyptians it is a state from which the person is legally seeking asylum from - without a hearing, without due notice, without letting that person inform interested parties of their whereabout, is to all intents and purposes, 'a disappearance', as covered by the Rome Treaty 1998 (criminal law).

No, it isn't.

Deprivation of due process for any legal judgment against you is a crime on its own, regardless of what the judgment was. Deportation to circumstances that will reasonably result in the deportee being subject to torture is a crime on its own, and one for which Sweden was justly convicted.

None of these is enforced disappearance. The elements of the crime of enforced disappearance are plainly given in each of the relevant statutes. It does you no good to continue to refer to the 1998 Rome Statute if you have no intention of paying attention to what it actually says.

It matters not a jot that that person is eventually located or receives prison visits from their old mum.

It literally does matter, because those activities contradict the elements of the crime of enforced disappearance as spelled out in whichever international statute you wish to name; they're all worded nearly identically. No matter how much you want to pretend your own frantic, ill-informed judgment supersedes everyone else's, there are requirements for proving someone committed a crime.

This is the issue with the missing Estonians.

No, it's what you desperately want people to believe. Lacking any direct evidence that Sweden caused the enforced disappearance of the MS Estonia officers, you're trying a shadier argument that this is something Sweden routinely does, in concert with the CIA. The facts are against you.

 

[JayUtah]

The ECHR does have an Article 6, which covers the right to a fair trial. Problem is, the Egyptians never had a trial (hearing) at all before being carted off the street and onto a plane.

Correct, which is why Sweden was justly punished for depriving the deportees of due process before they were expelled -- due process that would have investigated the possibility of torture. This does not mean they violated Article 7(1)(i) of the 1998 Rome Statute, forbidding enforced disappearance. Sweden was properly charged and convicted under the statute that applies to the actions they actually performed.

 

[Vixen]

I love how Svensson and the other SAR people at the scene were just "doing their jobs" and thus shouldn't have been award or commended.

But when it comes to Svensson himself being picked up from the water after he was stranded there after his winch failed, his SAR colleague "suffered from extreme trauma".

For someone who prides herself on being a "dispassionate researcher", Vixen sure does like to desperately poke at emotional buttons to try and make whatever point it is she think's she's making at any given time.

Vixen, how do you know that Svensson's colleague "suffered from extreme trauma" because he got him out of the water?

Remember to include your citations, source and proper references! Your posts are cited, sourced and properly referenced. You said so yourself!

If Svensson suffered extreme trauma from falling into the sea having to release himself from his winch, then it must have been also traumatic to have to come to his rescue when he appears to have dived in a second time and this time banging his head against the side of a boat. Give those guys who rescued him a medal, too.

 

[Vixen]

One of the claims is that one of the bodies on the bridge has a bullet hole in it's head.
This is part of a claim that the ship was hijacked by terrorists and/or Russian Spetsnaz.

Not necessarily. As many of the soldiers on the Wilhelm Gustloff shot their wives and children before shooting themselves as the ship went down, that could be what Andresson did. Nobody knows. It seems the police and the JAIC are remarkably apathetic about finding out.

If a Finnish diver claims to have seen this, why was it not investigated further?


Surely a potential crime scene, if so.

 

[Andy_Ross]

That is one of the most shocking, saddest and most outrageous stories I have ever read. I must find out more about this. Albeit having taken place during the post-war Cold War, it was still during peacetime 1952. It exposes Sweden's claim to being merely a neutral benign player in world affairs as a sham. What Sweden did was to deny the families of the airmen shot down in the Baltic just off its east coast closure as to what had become of them. Instead, it gave them a vague story of their being missing, perhaps in a gulag, when all the time it knew exactly what had happened and instantly, as they were actually listening in when the DC-3 was shot down! It knew all along the men were dead and that they had never been diverted to USSR territory and captured as spies (which they were). So, for forty years, their children, parents, wives, brothers, sisters, friends and neighbours had no idea what had happened to the men. So after seeing declassifed information from Russian archives, it came to light where they were shot down and the aircraft and bodies salvaged and recovered. What is most shocking of all is that the men did not get a Gold Medal with Sword until 2005! Some ten years after Ensign Kenneth Svensson got his for his surface rescue in respect of Estonia.

Sorry, I am not seeing an equivalence here.

What Svensson did must have been rather more than rescue seven people, because many other rescue men did the same, if not more.

He did do more than rescue 7 people.

He was stranded in the water holding on to a body until he was himself rescued by another helicopter. He then took over the duties of the rescue man on that helicopter and continued working until he was injured.

 

[Vixen]

The idea that if there isn’t a law against what a defendant has actually done the court can instead find against them for the nearest reason it can find brings to mind R v Haddock (1927) Herbert's Uncommon Law 24, in which it was uncertain what offence the appellant had originally been convicted of, as the Court of Appeal found that his actions had not actually fallen under any of the six charges originally brought.

Light LCJ said, however, that “no blame whatever attaches to the persons responsible for the framing of these charges, who were placed in a most difficult position by the appellant's unfortunate act. It is a principle of English law that a person who appears in a police court has done something undesirable, and citizens who take it upon themselves to do unusual actions which attract the attention of the police should be careful to bring these actions into one of the recognized categories of crimes and offences, for it is intolerable that the police should be put to the pains of inventing reasons for finding them undesirable. […] It is not for me to say what offence the appellant has committed, but I am satisfied that he has committed some offence, for which he has been most properly punished.”

In concurring judgments Mudd J said that the appellant had infringed the Public Health Act 1875 by polluting a watercourse, and Adder J said that he “thought that the appellant had attempted to pull down a bridge, under the Malicious Damage Act, 1861.”

I like it.

How about this one.

'The suppression of evidence ought always to be taken for the strongest evidence' ~ Judge Andrew Hamilton, 1735.

 

[Andy_Ross]

How is it OBVIOUS CLERICAL ERRORS to have listed in the first place those now delisted Estonian crew? There has never been an explanation.

We saw how the Sweden Defence Forces secret services were happy to let relatives of the dead of the shot down DC-3's in 1952 not know of their loved ones fate, in the interests of keeping classified Sweden's covert highly secretive espionage activities on the Soviet Union, so you can't ruled out it having happened again.

Especially in light of the immediate cover up of the sinking.

What 'immediate cover up of the sinking'?

It was world headlines from the time it sank.

 

[JayUtah]

I like it.

How about this one.

'The suppression of evidence ought always to be taken for the strongest evidence' ~ Judge Andrew Hamilton, 1735.

Well, if you're going to continue clinging to the common examples of poorly argued legal opinions as support for your claims...

 

[Andy_Ross]

If Svensson suffered extreme trauma from falling into the sea having to release himself from his winch, then it must have been also traumatic to have to come to his rescue when he appears to have dived in a second time and this time banging his head against the side of a boat. Give those guys who rescued him a medal, too.

If they had dived in with him maybe they would have been given a medal.

 

[Andy_Ross]

Not necessarily. As many of the soldiers on the Wilhelm Gustloff shot their wives and children before shooting themselves as the ship went down, that could be what Andresson did. Nobody knows. It seems the police and the JAIC are remarkably apathetic about finding out.

If a Finnish diver claims to have seen this, why was it not investigated further?


Surely a potential crime scene, if so.

You think the captain committed suicide by shooting himself?
Do the captains of ferries routinely carry guns?

If he shot himself then there is no need for assassins, secret helicopters or disappearances.