K.J. found this one, and it's left my jaw hanging open. I suppose that if you're like me, it was only a matter of time before some part of the lamestream corporate-controlled Western media got around to blaming Russia for Iran's attacks on tankers in the Persian Gulf, in this case, media in the UK, the same country whose media has been scrambling to convince everyone that Mad Vlad was behind the Skripal case as well. But Russia behind the Iran thing? Guilt by association, I suppose. But lots of countries do business with Tehran, including China and India, but so far, no one's blaming them, just Russia. But there's something that bothers in this story, actually, quite a few things, so today I'm going to kick off the week with some high octane speculation, because in my opinion, something isn't passing the smell test in this whole Iran thing:

If you're like me, you can probably think of quite a few reasons why Russia would goad Tehran into seizing tankers, and quite a few reasons why they wouldn't be involved in any way. Just to give two simple examples: on the "they would do it side", there's the price of oil. Creating tensions in the Gulf drives up the price of oil, and that benefits Russia. On the "why they wouldn't do it side," instability in the region is not what Russia and China and India need in order to complete their long term goals. (That last one might be a reason for some long-term concern and midnight-oil burning in Tehran, for if those countries decide the regime is a liability to their long term plans...well... you know where I'm going with that one.)

But back to the main point here: according to the article, some in the UK suspect that Russia "hacked the systems" in those tankers, and provided false coordinates both to the British and to the Iranians:

Following that, British media began to stir hysteria, that actually the British tanker was steered towards Iranian waters to be captured by false GPS coordinates sent by “Russian spy technology.” This was reported by the Sunday Mirror, which citing anonymous security sources aid that the GCHQ and MI6 were investigating whether Iranian intelligence transmitted spoof signals to the skipper of the Stena Impero. According to reports, a Royal Navy warship attempted to assist the tanker, but it arrived “10 minutes too late,” to do what exactly in Iranian territorial waters is unclear. ... Anonymous security sources said that Iranian drones may have tampered with GPS signals. ... Of course, Russia’s involvement can’t happen without “evil overlord” Russian President Vladimir Putin’s approval. And the “evidence” that such a meddling may have taken place is that MI6 and other Western intelligence agencies have discovered that Russia has the technology to fool ships into false location recordings. This relates to an earlier report which found out that wherever Putin goes, GPS stops working. So, it could potentially “make sense” (surprisingly how UK media haven’t come up with that yet) that Vladimir Putin was on some private cruise vacation in the Persian Gulf and that’s why the Stena Impero moved into Iranian waters. (Boldface emphasis in the original)

So, if this article is true in its basic outlines, then the incident was caused by someone with (1) the capability to hack into ship board computer systems and (2) the ability to project false GPS readings, and, in an implicit admission not covered in the article, (3) the ability to project false radar returns (you'll have to think about that one for a moment). Those three requirements narrow the possible players down to just a few countries, and a few non-state actors (e.g., corporations and so on).

The problem that I have is that you'll recall Iran supposedly did this to a Japanese tanker, while the Japanese Prime Minister was visiting Tehran. I found it very unlikely that - crazy and nutty as the mullahs in Tehran are - that they would be so crazy as to pull a stunt like that. But wait, apparently they had a similar impeccable sense of timing with the seizure of the British ships:

Iran seizes two British tankers and makes a huge mistake

Note this paragraph towards the beginning:

Acting against the British while the U.K. and Iranian foreign ministers were seeking compromise over Britain's recent seizure of an Iranian tanker, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps have further isolated Iran on the international stage. With a multinational naval task force for tanker escorts likely to be announced next week, the Iranians are increasingly outgunned and diplomatically isolated. Losing a drone to a U.S. warship on Thursday, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is also now aware of American red lines against threats to U.S. life.

One wonders if, in fact, that hacking and sending false GPS coordinates scenario might have some traction - just take Russia out of the mix, and leave the "who is doing this?" part of the equation blank for a moment. With that in mind, let's recall that Europe's GPS system went down for a few days, more or less around the time of the Iranian incidents, and we were told that this was another "incident" (the technical term is "glitch ex machina") in the technical infrastructure on the ground:

Europe's Galileo GPS system back after six-day outage

Europe's version of GPS suffers major outage Technical issues on the ground blamed

The timing of the stories is intriguing, to say the least, since the European GPS stories appeared on July 16th and 18th, and the tankers were seized on July 19th. Needless to say, I suspect that you, the reader, knows already what my high octane speculation is: namely, that the Iran-tanker story and the European satellite GPS outage stories are somehow related, and that events are being manipulated by someone; the kooky mullahs in Tehran might indeed be that crazy, but I strongly suspect that much bigger players are on the field here, trying to drive both Iran and the West into actions that benefit neither party. (And while we're at it, I might as well leap off the end of the twig and draw a couple more connections, and say that I suspect the USS Fitzgerald and USS John McCain incidents may have been dress rehearsals for what we see going on now.)

See you on the...

...oh, wait. Did I mention that K.J. also found this story about someone hacking into Russia's security agency, the FSB?

Ok... now I'm done.

See you on the flip side...