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

[JayUtah]

You do not know how to read a scientific report.

How often have you read and written professional scientific reports? When has your ability to read and properly interpret a scientific report ever been something you were actually adjudicated for?

 

[LondonJohn]

From 0115 to 0148.

Compare and contrast to The Herald of Free Enterprise in four minutes it capsized and had it not been for the sandbank, it almost certainly would have then immediately turtled, like the MS Jan Heweliusz, a similar car ferry.

So.... why did the Oceanos not "almost certainly immediately turtle" when it sank, Vixen?


Could it be..... could it be..... that you have no idea what you're talking about?


PS: more than 100 posts in this thread over the past 12 hours alone might just have earned you some sort of ISF/JREFF record - if so, huge and well-deserved congrats!

 

[MarkCorrigan]

Just look up wikileaks. I think Axxman300 posted a link in respect of this a while back. The search function is your friend.

Why have you given a glib, one line response to a post with multiple questions?

Stop deflecting. Stop hiding. Answer questions for once.

 

[JayUtah]

Braidwood and Fellows are a completely different subject. They examined the area for explosives.

It's the same general area of the ship. It's not a completely different thing at all. Your notion that they were blinkered only to look for specific things, and therefore ignored anything else, is absurd.

Hamburg University were looking at the strength and functioning of the bolts of the bow visor bolts.

And the compromises they noted to the structural members were fatigue cracking. If there had been explosive severing of any of those structures, there would be evidence of it plainly visible. Fatigue cracks take a fair amount of effort to visualize. Evidence of explosives can be seen with the naked eye. You're trying to tell us the Hamburg team searched diligently for how the members failed, to the extent of identifying fatigue cracks, and based their conclusions solely on that, but then ignored what would have been glaring evidence had what you propose happened.

The entire lack of mention in the Hamburg study for a failure mode other than fatigue cracking and corrosion is dispositive.

Both worthy studies in their own right.

But for any of this to be evidence of sabotage, they would have to reach congruent conclusions. They did not.

They are masters of their trade, not jack-of-all-trades.

Which is why, when they base their failure analysis on fatigue cracks and not explosive effects, we can conclude that they did not find evidence of explosives.

 

[Jack by the hedge]

How else do you think the windows got smashed by the waves, according to JAIC?

That's no answer.

You keep insisting "a ship cannot float on its superstructure" as if that were some kind of coda to Archimedes principle. You quoted it again as if you intended it to show why the JAIC were wrong when they weren't wrong.

You have no justification for this weird rule of thumb and absolutely no knowledge upon which to base any argument about why it might or might not hold true.

 

[Andy_Ross]

Hamburg University did not look for explosives.

But they found fatigue and corrosion enough to cause the failure.

Are you saying they were wrong?

How can we trust them i they don't know the difference between one failure and another?

 

[Andy_Ross]

But you try climbing upstairs when the floor is now the wall or get through a door when it is now 40cm (on its side) instead of six-feet high.

He was on an upper deck, what stairs would he need to climb?

 

[Andy_Ross]

Why would the USA be smuggling FSU stuff via Sweden using Estonia at all?

That's what we are asking.

What is your evidence that it was happening?

 

[JayUtah]

Hamburg University did not look for explosives.

The pitting and contact welding from a nearby explosive would have been naked-eye observations. The Hamburg team made a detailed enough examination of the parts to discover evidence of fatigue cracking, which requires a careful, detailed examination of the surface, often requiring surface preparation and magnification. To say they examined the parts closely enough to see fatigue cracks and corrosion, but not closely enough to see evidence of a nearby explosion, is exactly backwards.

 

[Andy_Ross]

Your personal incredulity about this is neither here nor there. The windows which broke were designed to take virtually no inward loading - they were along the sides of the ship and well above the waterline, and in this position they would never have been expected to be subjected to incoming wave forces (as opposed to anything lying near the waterline or around the ship's bow).

In addition, certain inevitable compromises would have been made at the design stage where it came to windows: ferry ship passengers expect the interior spaces on public decks to have large enough windows to a) enable good outside visibility and b) enable plenty of natural light to enter these enclosed spaces. The optimal shape and size for windows from a safety perspective would be the traditional round porthole shape/size. But customer expectations meant that portholes would have been totally unacceptable on the communal deck spaces.

So the situation on the Estonia was that the ship turned beam-on once it lost all power, and that in turn immediately began to subject the large windows on that side of the ship to wave forces that they'd never been designed to take.

QED.

Italian cruise ship Louis Majesty, restaurant windows window breaking in a storm.

 

[Myriad]

But you try climbing upstairs when the floor is now the wall or get through a door when it is now 40cm (on its side) instead of six-feet high.

Oh, sure, those 40 cm wide doors can be a problem no matter which direction they're facing. I'm sure they're very popular on ships because no one ever needs to be able to carry equipment wider than 15 inches from one part of a ship to another.

 

[JayUtah]

In addition, certain inevitable compromises would have been made at the design stage where it came to windows...

Glass is very heavy. The pane thickness required to achieve pressure-bearing strength at those pane sizes would have made the weight inappropriate for the upper decks of the ship. The designers have to consider that the conditions under which such windows would be expected to bear the brunt of heavy wave action would be otherwise unrecoverable. Once you're expecting upper-deck glass to hold back the sea, the ship will have either rolled or foundered to the point where it's inevitably doomed and not worth the ongoing cost (in terms of stability) incurred by their weight.

 

[junkshop]

If your British Rail train crashed and rolled over, do you not think you have the right to ask for further information under the [I]Freedom of Information Act[/I]?

Likewise, the Estonia passengers have every right to understand the full facts of the accident, even it it is embarrassing for their government.

British Rail ceased to exist in 1997.

The Freedom of Information Act was enacted in 2000.

As has been noted many, many times before, you don't know what you are talking about.

 

[Axxman300]

Given all the mistakes that Vixen makes, I'm not sure why folks are disputing this. The Director of Central Intelligence is appointed by and serves at the pleasure of the President. The Director is a political appointee who comes and goes. Obama had 6. Trump had 3. The history of the CIA is the replete with political interference in the CIA.

The President is in no way the de facto-leader of the CIA.

The President can appoint DCIA, but still needs Senate approval. The President, along with the NSC give direction to CIA as they relate to whatever Foreign Policy, or National Security strategies they wish to pursue. But the day-to-day operations of the Agency don't change. Intelligence is still gathered and analyzed, and fed up the chain.

In this specific case, the allegation that Clinton had initiated, or was even monitoring some black-op involving the Estonia, and then overruling Sweden, Finland, and the country of Estonia to conceal sabotage (Russian or someone else) is absurd. And when place into the context of documented history it becomes a sick joke. AT THE TIME OF THE SINKING, YELSTIN WAS IN WASHINGTON D.C. AT A SUMMIT WITH CLINTON. The subject was the "Partnership for Peace".

Source: https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/...ry-christopher-and-tony-lake-handling-yeltsin

https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/27158-doc-04-memorandum-conversation-between-clinton-and-yeltsin

A few weeks later, Yelstin blew a gasket when Clinton started talking about expanding NATO, even after he has assured Yelstin this was not a priority.

So the idea that Clinton had directed the CIA to steal Russian hardware - for Israel - is stupid.

On the other hand, the CIA might have had, or been part of an operation which involved buying Russian goodies on the black market, and sailing them to Sweden on the next available ferry. There was a pipeline running through the former Soviet states where all kinds of Russian military gear was funneled west.

None of this had anything to do the the MS Estonia sinking in heavy seas due to the bow visor being knocked off.

 

[Axxman300]

In his book The Hole: Another Look at the Sinking of Estonia Ferry on September 28, 1994, investigative journalist Drew Wilson shows a photocopy of a letter sent to him by the NSA on January 20, 2004, in which the agency refused to provide information on three documents about Estonia because it could cause serious damage to national security.

That is not what I asked for.

NSA just eavesdrops on, well, everyone. How they do it, where they do it, who they do it to is all secret. I can't say for certain, but the NSA likely has a lot records in its archives from significant accidents were radio traffic, and phone calls were involved. Not due to anything nefarious, but because it's just how the NSA works.

Has nothing to do with Clinton.

 

[Axxman300]

Why don't you tell us?

Because she'll get it wrong.

This is it, the whole thing that blows the lid off the Swedish-CIA sock puppet:

https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/1976STOCKH05429_b.html

Bildt sent a cable to the US Embassy about anti-nuclear activists in...1976.

That's it.

Obviously Bildt was up to his neck in CIA henchmanship, the monster.

 

[LondonJohn]

Italian cruise ship Louis Majesty, restaurant windows window breaking in a storm.

That's an excellent find. It's a very good illustration of the underlying points here:

1) Windows on the communal upper areas of passenger ships are generally large and with right-angled corners - all of which makes them much easier to crack or smash than (for example) smaller round portholes. They're designed and installed this way because a) customers expect good outside visibility and good levels of natural daylight in these communal areas, and b) they're in places where there's a low probability of them being subjected to high wave forces.

2) However, if a window of this general size and shape - especially on ships designed and built more than around 40 years ago (before glass-tempering technology and structural glass technology were developed to the high standards of today) - does happen to be hit head-on by a powerful wave, the glass may indeed smash, just as it does in that video.


Vixen simply doesn't understand the forces and kinetic energy carried by a large and powerful wave. Such a wave would easily knock a well-built man off his feet and throw him several metres, and such a wave would strike a large window with the force of, say, a small hatchback car driving into the window at 20mph.

 

[Reformed Offlian]

If they were in a ship that sank and shared a cabin with a 'missing' captain, yes, it would be relevant.

How? What does his being a "jewish zionist" have to do with anything?

 

[LondonJohn]

Glass is very heavy. The pane thickness required to achieve pressure-bearing strength at those pane sizes would have made the weight inappropriate for the upper decks of the ship. The designers have to consider that the conditions under which such windows would be expected to bear the brunt of heavy wave action would be otherwise unrecoverable. Once you're expecting upper-deck glass to hold back the sea, the ship will have either rolled or foundered to the point where it's inevitably doomed and not worth the ongoing cost (in terms of stability) incurred by their weight.

Yes, great point.

I think that the glass used in these settings in ships being designed/constructed these days will come a great deal closer to closing that gap between utility/desirability and safety. There have been big advances in tempering and plastic-leaf-laminating of glass over the past 25 years or so*, to the extent that single-glazed (but laminated) windows can have comparatively** amazing strength and structural rigidity.


* I worked on a strategic consulting project for a major UK/global glass manufacturer several years ago, so I did the full-on factory floor tour and had access to the company's "book of commercial secrets"

** Compared with traditional single-glazed panes, and even most basic double-glazed panes.

 

[LondonJohn]

That is not what I asked for.

NSA just eavesdrops on, well, everyone. How they do it, where they do it, who they do it to is all secret. I can't say for certain, but the NSA likely has a lot records in its archives from significant accidents were radio traffic, and phone calls were involved. Not due to anything nefarious, but because it's just how the NSA works.

Has nothing to do with Clinton.

Exactly.

Before the advent of decent artificial intelligence technology, the craft of global surveillance was a gigantically data-heavy business. In the UK, for example, GCHQ (the rough equivalent of the NSA) has more digital storage capacity than the top 30 UK-incorporated companies combined. It stores data in (at least) two secret sites in the UK that are well away from its Cheltenham HQ; those remote sites are deep underground (one of them is in a former salt mine, but you didn't hear that from me ) and contain vast banks of storage media and air conditioners.

So yes, it's effectively a given that our largest surveillance agencies (obviously including NSA and GCHQ) will have gathered and stored communications information pertaining to just about every significant world event since the mid-50s or so. The volume of incoming data has increased exponentially over the past few decades owing to internet and cellular comms. And as you say, almost all of that information will have been given a cursory once-over then sent into storage. No biggie at all.