Akkam’s Razor

As soon as I had heard that a second fiber-optic undersea internet cable (map and story here and here - the number of broken cables now stands at four) had been broken in the Middle East, I automatically thought of the United States, the Bush Administrations desire to hit Iran, and the USS Jimmy Carter.

In the US Navy, tradition is that Presidents names are placed on aircraft carriers. But things would be different for Jimmy Carter, a former Nuclear Submariner. The Seawolf class submarine that would eventually bare his name would also be different than her class-mates.

Image courtesy Flickr user jesse robbins.

As always, prior to my being able to sit down and craft a post explaining the Carter and her possible connection to this story, Dave at the Galloping Beaver has already beaten me to the punch:

What does this have to do with anything? Well, first of all, the sheets and pages of information on USS Jimmy Carter’s multi-mission capabilities have all disappeared off the US Navy’s sites. Even the commissioning announcement at Commander Submarine Group Two is gone.

The second thing is this:

Internet services in Qatar have been seriously disrupted because of damage to an undersea telecoms cable linking the Gulf state to the UAE, the fourth such incident in less than a week. Qatar Telecom (Qtel) said on Sunday the cable was damaged between the Qatari island of Haloul and the UAE island of Das on Friday. The cause of damage is not yet known, but ArabianBusiness.com has been told unofficially the problem is related to the power system and not the result of a ship’s anchor cutting the cable, as is thought to be the case in the other three incidents.

Well actually, there is no evidence that ships anchors did anything of the sort. In fact, Egypt says ships did not sever the fiber-optic cables.

Two cables were damaged earlier this week in the Mediterranean sea and another off the coast of Dubai, causing widespread disruption to internet and international telephone services in Egypt, Gulf Arab states and South Asia.

A fourth cable linking Qatar to the United Arab Emirates was damaged on Sunday causing yet more disruptions, telecommunication provider Qtel said.

Egypt’s transport ministry said footage recorded by onshore video cameras of the location of the cables showed no maritime traffic in the area when the cables were damaged.

“The ministry’s maritime transport committee reviewed footage covering the period of 12 hours before and 12 hours after the cables were cut and no ships sailed the area,” a statement said.

Those cables are about the width of a normal human thumb. And a ship’s anchor would indeed rip right through one. But four? In three different locations in under a week? Run that little coincidence by any police detective and ask what she/he thinks.So, at the risk of perpetrating a conspiracy theory, I will state that I am highly suspicious and until someone can point at USS Jimmy Carter snuggly alongside at its berth in Bangor, Washington, the Bush administration becomes as strong a suspect as any other possible perpetrator. There is also the fact that USS Jimmy Carter was due to become operational this year.

The Jimmy Carter, interestingly, is purpose built where its predecessors were regular attack subs modified for specific jobs. USS Parche was equipped with a set of pick-up arms designed to rip an armoured fiber-optic cable from its meter deep trench and tap into it. As a matter of certain knowledge, the USN did exactly that with submarines on Soviet undersea copper cables during the cold-war. They conducted a successful tap on the Soviet navy’s Pacific Fleet headquarters when they tapped an undersea cable in the Sea of Okhotsk, which was discovered by the Soviets and another of the Kola Peninsula tapping into the Soviet Northern Fleet headquarters which remained undiscovered.

There have also been leaks which state that the US National Security Agency tapped a fiber-optic undersea cable with some success. The problem was the flood of information which NSA computers were unable to handle at that time.

 

Some additional details regarding the technical capabilities of the Carter can be found her at DefenseTech, Global Security, and the US NAVY, with Empywheel running some of the political and military calculus at Firedoglake. As reported in the Seattle Times, the Carter has been moved from Groton, Connecticut to her new base in Bangor, operating in the Pacific rim, which on its face excludes the Carter as a culprit.