Before I answer your question, let me show you another article so you become a little more familiar with the mysteries (and power) of the sea.

esa satellites reveals monster rogue waves

And of course you are familiar with tidal waves (Tsunamis) which can come from underwater volcanoes, earthquakes and (land-undersea)slides, crater collapses, etc.

The important thing to know is that the sea can be savage beyond the knowledge of 99% of the people on this earth. (Without any help from humans.)

Now that said, could any nation (including Israel) with a navy or fishing industry, or even an individual with a reasonably sized boat have done it?

Yes. They have a full array of boats at their disposal. Again, you would have to tell me why.

Another question is whether it was an accident or intentional, and someone doesn’t want to own up to it.

I just don’t know why anyone would do it intentionally. Maybe it is one of those mysteries like in the movies or on TV and you have to find out where the money goes or what tactical or strategic military or political advantage someone would get.

My guess is that if you studied it enough, you would end up with a chart or spread sheet with dozens of entries that each had varying degrees of reasons.

The most important thing though would be to know what the repair boats found on the bottom where the cables were broken. Were there drag marks, or had the undersea bottom profile shifted, or were sections washed out? How deep were the cables?

Oh, and some question why so many breaks in such a short time? Well we go years without hurricanes causing too much trouble, and then we get Rita and Katrina, etc., in a short time.

(I enjoy the commentary at FDL and in your section emptywheel. Keep up the good work. Hold the crooks feet to the fire. A little torture would be good for their mortal souls, and make me feel good too.)

Here’s a question: not likely us. But is it likely Israel??

As for the link. just make sure you’ve got the second window open. Copy its URL. Then hit the little infinity sign. Just copy over what is in there and paste.

Thanks bmaz and Rayne.

Here is the post I was going to make in the last thread.

Well, if I had known I would keep commenting on cables, I would have chosen the name Gerald the cable guy.

Anyway, I am glad the discussion doesn’t have a Seawolf class sub involved in it now so much, but yes the Navy did a lot of stuff in the old cold war days, but that was the old days. It was wire then, and that is (pardon me) a whole different kettle of fish. The amount of data that passes over the current cables compared to the 1971 cables is mind boggling. I guess you could build enough storage to handle a lot of data on the bottom there but it would be easy to detect such a device device fromt the surface. You would really need another cable to take the data off, and that too should be relatively easy to detect both being laid, and once laid.

Also splicing wire in the old cables was a lot easier than splicing a fiber optic cable. You can loop a wire around the copper wire, and detect the transmission magnetically or you just break the wires out of their case, and splice(connect) two wires going to your data device or new cable to each wire and then when you are ready, you cut the old wire between the two splices. I have done it many a time (not undersea) and never a blip in the service. (You just have to “isolate” the operation like a squirrel running along a power line.)
Now what isn’t mentioned that there were (in the old days) contingencies prepared in case of war, where explosive devices near, and preferably hidden under the cables were ready to be exploded with only a sensor of some kind exposed to detect the firing signal.

No one yet has given a real reason for the US to be involved. In fact the preponderance of results would indicate the US lost overall on this.

Likewise no one here has presented the information that a 5 ton anchor was found in the vicinity of the Falcon cable by the company responsible for restoring the service. Of course that lonely anchor stirred up more controversy since something had to bring it there and the Egyptians swear there were no ships there though I think that they could easily be wrong.

Also that the reason the repair ships were delayed getting to fix the cables (some at least) was that there were storms in the area which might keep a ship with a loose anchor or a stabilizing anchor let out from being detected easily.

You might think dragging anchors isn’t really a problem normally either for cables or pipes but because it can and does happen there are laws all over the world pertaining to it.

Thailand

Why might a ship drop or drag not a “sea anchor” but a regular old heavy metal anchor? Well in a storm it can steady the ship. It might also be used to help prevent a collision.

As for further discussion of protection against anchors (again pipelines) read this. They talk of protecting against 2 ton to 20 ton anchors.

HongKong

(I hope those urls work cause I am not going to preview as suggested.)

It might be due to the browser you’re using that extra characters show up; the browser application may read or interpret the command from the comment application differently than other browsers (I use Firefox, have also used IE 7.0 without incident). (It’s kind of like reading a foreign language; sometimes we humans slip in an extra syllable or an extra accent mark, or pronounce the words with a bit too much accent)

[a href=”http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com”]Emptywheel’s Home Page[/a]

although the brackets will be replaced with right and left carets.

The properly embedded link will look and work like this:

Emptywheel’s Home Page

- Type the text description of the link; as an example, I’m going to use “Emptywheel’s Home Page”.

- Select the description text with your mouse, highlighting only the desired text.

- Click on the icon in the comment editor box tool bar that looks like links of chain, located between the quote mark (blockquote) and the ABCcheckmark (spell check).

- In the pop-up window, type in the link you want to embed (the instructions will say “Please enter the URL”). In my example, I will type in http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com

- Once you have finished entering the correct and complete link, click Okay in the pop-up window.

- You will note that the description text is now sandwiched between a beginning tag and an ending tag used for associating content with another location. In my example, the beginning tag will look like

[a href=”http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com”] with right and left carets instead of brackets

the end tag will look like

[/a] again with right and left carets instead of brackets

- Click on the Preview link in the upper right corner of the comment text editor window to proof your work, exiting the Preview when you are ready for final editing and submission.

- Click the Submit Comment button in lower left when you are ready to post.

Hope that helps.