Counterfeiting cases point to North Korea
Pyongyang is accused of being behind a growing effort to print and move rafts of U.S. $100 bills.
U.S. authorities have unsealed hundreds of pages of documents in support of the cases in recent months, including an indictment that directly accuses North Korea of making the counterfeit bills, the first time the U.S. has made such an allegation in a criminal case.
The accusation of course contains the requisite extra flourish, making a gratuituous connection to the Nazis.
"This is state-sponsored counterfeiting. I don’t know of any other case like this except the Nazis, and they were doing it in a state of war," said Asher, who headed the administration’s North Korea Working Group
And the evidence is?
Using equipment from Japan, paper from Hong Kong and ink from France, a team of experts was ordered to make fake U.S. $100 bills, said a former North Korean chemist who said his job was to draw the design.
Sound familiar? Much bellicose justification for vengeance based on the testimony of one anonymous person. Because, after three readings of the article, that’s the only actual evidence I can find. Sounds like makin’ shit up again, just like the ‘reasons’ for the Iraq invasion.
Because they are talking war.
But North Korea’s is the only government believed to do so, despite international pressure and laws that characterize such activity as an economic casus belli, or act of war, they say.
The neocons and Bush have lied so many lies and so continually that anything they say, especially when it relates to countries they loathe and want to attack, should be immediately suspect. Especially when the evidence appears flimsy at best.
This may or may not be linked to North Korea, but it’s not outlandish that the North Koreans would do something like this; they have been involved in similar ventures to raise hard money. Being in a hothouse environment addles the judgment. What’s bitterly ironic is that the same foolishnesses cultivated in the North Korean cult of adulation are equally present, and for many of the same reasons, in the Bush White House.
For the record, since the U.S. was never willing to sign a peace treaty to end the Korean War, North Korea is in fact in a state of war with the United States. Only a “truce” ended that war, not a peace treaty.
North Korea might be counterfeiting. However this seems another Axis of Evil threat based on flimsy evidence so the Bushies can ‘intervene’ somewhere yet again.
Either possibility–North Korea is counterfeiting or The Bushies are misrepresenting data again–is a priori equally possible. That’s the damage that Bush has done to whatever American credibility there was: lowered it to that of a truly weird and rogue nation state. Which liar do you believe?