Three Internet Cables Slashed in a Week: Has Iran lost all Internet Connectivity?

Mike Whitney
Global Research
February 3, 2008

CNN reports that: “An undersea cable carrying Internet traffic was cut off the Persian Gulf emirate of Dubai, officials said Friday, THE THIRD LOSS of a line carrying Internet and telephone traffic in three days.

The first two cables “account for as much as three-quarters of the international communications between Europe and the Middle East”, so it is expected that the loss of the third cable will plunge large parts of the Middle East into darkness.

According to Mathaba Net, the latest incident took place “two days after the cable cut which "cut off Iran" and affected the rest of the Middle East and West Asia. Internet Traffic Report web site reports that Iran has lost all Internet connectivity. (http://www.internettrafficreport.com/asia.htm)

Israel and Iraq’s Internet connections are still “intact”. (Mathaba.net http://mathaba.net/news/?x=580589)

“Omar Sultan, chief executive of Dubai’s Internet Service Provider "DU", said that the incident was "very unusual” and that the cause of the incident "had not yet been identified."

From Mathaba News:

“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.” (Mathaba.net http://mathaba.net/news/?x=580589)

Recently, a document entitled Information Operation Roadmap was declassified by the Pentagon because of a Freedom of Information Act request by the National Security Archive at George Washington University.

The importance of information warfare is clearly laid out in this document. Here is an extended excerpt from an article by Brent Jessop, “Full Spectrum Information Warfare” published by Global Research:

“Information, always important in warfare, is now critical to military success and will only become more so in the foreseeable future….. Information operations should be centralized under the Office of the Secretary of Defence and made a core military competency.

"Objective: IO [information operations] becomes a core competency. The importance of dominating the information spectrum explains the objective of transforming IO into a core military competency on a par with air, ground, maritime and special operations. The charge to the IO Roadmap oversight panel was to develop as concrete a set of action recommendations as possible to make IO a core competency, which in turn required identifying the essential prerequisites to become a core military competency."

This article was posted: Monday, February 4, 2008 at 6:31 am

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