Middle East Internet Blackouts Spur Geopolitical Suspicions
Middle East Internet Blackouts Spur Geopolitical Suspicions
Internet blackouts are impacting large tracts of Asia, the Middle East and North Africa after four undersea cable connections were severed. However, Israel and Iraq are unaffected by the outage. The cause behind the severing of the cables remains unknown. by Paul Joseph Watson
(Prison Planet)
Unprecedented mass Internet outages throughout the Middle East and Asia after no less than four undersea Internet cables were cut without explanation are spurring suspicions that a major event of geopolitical proportions may be just around the corner.
Internet blackouts are impacting large tracts of Asia, the Middle East and North Africa after four undersea cable connections were severed. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain, Pakistan and India, are all experiencing severe problems.
According to InternetTraffic.com, Iran has been completely cut off from the Internet, though Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s blog can still be accessed.
Most notably, Israel and Iraq are unaffected by the outage.
“Stephan Beckert, an analyst with TeleGeography, a research company that consults on global Internet issues, said the damaged cables collectively account for the majority of international communications between Europe and the Middle East,” reports CNN.
Officials say that the cause behind the severing of the cables remains unknown, but United Arab Emirates’ second largest telecom company said the cables were cut due to ships dragging their anchors.
Is this a pre-cursor to throw a veil over an imminent staged event in the Middle East?
“What are the odds? Who benefits? asks the Crimes and Corruptions blog. “Let’s see. Iranian rapprochement: “Recent months have brought signs of a growing rapprochement between Iran and Egypt.”
“What nation would not like this and has subs which could cut the cables? Why do it? Payback as over the net business is badly damaged. Or is this a setup for more? Note the internet is working just fine in Israel.”
Over at WhatReallyHappened.com, Mike Rivero points out that the mysterious cable sabotage could portend another imperial Neo-Con crusade in the works.
“The biggest problem the Bush administration faced during Iraq were images coming over the internet that showed the horrors being visited on the Iraqi people, and exposed the government’s lies about Saddam,” he writes.
“I am greatly concerned that these undersea cable cuttings are intended to prevent the world from seeing something that is about to happen, other than through the government-controlled propaganda/media.”
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2nd FLAG Undersea Cable Cut, Now Between UAE and Oman
2008/02/02
Two days after the cable cut which “cut off Iran” and affected the rest of the Middle East and West Asia but left communications in Israel and Iraq “intact”, another cable owned by the same British company is severed, once again plunging the region into “Internet darkness”. Image: FLAG’s Europe-Asia “FEA” undersea cable network. Omar Sultan, chief executive of Dubai’s Internet Service Provider “DU”, said on Friday that an undersea cable had been cut in the Persian Gulf, causing severe phone line disruptions and making worse the already existing Internet outage across large parts of the Middle East and West Asia after two other undersea cables owned by the same British company were cut this week in the Mediterranean Sea 8.3 kilometers (5 miles) north of Alexandria, Egypt.
Mr Sultan said that the incident was “very unusual.” He said it was not known how the underwater cable, owned by British FLAG FALCON company, which runs between the United Arab Emirates and Oman, had been damaged. DU said in a press release that the cause of the incident “had not yet been identified.”
The owner of the FALCON cable, U.K. FLAG Telecom said the cable was cut at 05:59 UTC on Friday, 56 kilometers (35 miles) off the coast of Dubai and that a “repair ship has been notified and expected to arrive at the site in the next few days.” The British company is also the owner of one of the undersea cables linking Egypt (Alexandria) with Italy (Palermo) that were sliced Wednesday in the Mediterranean Sea. That damage triggered wide Internet outages, hampering businesses and private usage across the Middle East and West Asia, and cutting off Iran “completely”, according to reports.
The only 2 countries that were unaffected were Israel and Iraq, the only two close Anglo-American allies in the region, both remaining completely unaffected by the cable cuts, leading to theories for the causes of the cuts, which have so far been given as having been caused by ships dragging their anchors across the cables. The fact that two rare incidents have happened in the same week, and both with cables owned by the same company, on either sides of Israel and the importance of the Internet to telecommunications and business, lends suspicion to the events.
Agency reports state that a FLAG official in India, speaking on condition of anonymity because of company policy, said workers were still trying to determine how the Persian Gulf cable was cut. Earlier Friday, FLAG said that a repair ship was expected to arrive Tuesday at the site of the damaged cables off the coast of Alexandria, and that repair work would likely take a week, but gave no explanation why repairs would take so long.
FLAG Europe Asia (FEA) is the world’s longest privately funded submarine cable. FLAG Telecom owns undersea communication cables across the United States of America, to England, West Europe and the Middle East, onward to South Asia and the Far East, and again across to the United States thus spanning the northern world.
Egypt’s Minister of Communications and Information Technology Tarek Kamil on Friday said the reason behind Wednesday’s cut undersea cable would only be determined once repair teams with their robot equipment reach the damaged cables.
http://mathaba.net/rss/?x=580589
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