Read this.

Someone is circulating counterfeit US $100 bills so good that they're almost completely indistinguishable from the real thing. They use ink which is allegedly only available to the US government. And paper. And plastics. And threads, and fibers. They're perfect in almost every detail, even down to a microscopic level. The bill designs have even changed in sync with changes in the designs of the real US plates. The only differences are a few tiny added markers which seem deliberate, so they can be identified, and they don't have ink splotches associated with large runs of bills.

For example:

The ink’s maker, a Swiss firm named Sicpa, mixes the ink at a secure U.S. government facility [using a] highly specialized and regulated tint...

Only a large nation could create such bills, the article says, and it would cost so much money to duplicate the infrastructure to print them that it wouldn't justify the small quantities of such bills found so far -- about $50 million, or some multiplier thereof, given that probably only a fraction have been detected.

North Korea seems to be implicated or at least suspected, but nobody seriously seems to think they have the ability to construct such bills.

I have a theory -- one which should be completely obvious except that it's implications are so completely unacceptable.

If it seems like no-one else could do this but a huge wealthy nation with access to a group of non-portable technologies only the US controls -- and that the bills seem to exactly mirror US printing plates from year to year, right on time, and down to a microscopic level -- then perhaps we should embrace the obvious.

That they're being counterfeit by our government -- right here in the USA.

Perhaps only miles away from my home.

I mean, let's be serious: we live in an era where every few weeks it seems that "eyes-only" (or whatever) classified programs are being leaked by CIA insiders to the New York Times, when the CIA anonymously publishes an entire book and engages in other actions to change the outcome of US elections; where it's completely clear that a huge chunk of the government has it's own foreign and domestic policy, and they've got very little interest in what the voters or their elected representatives have to say.

These assertions above aren't rumors. They've been published in the papers. You can buy the book on Amazon. And even Clinton disclosed, on the CIA's own website, that the CIA had sold cocaine to raise money. (I read the documents myself, firsthand, several years ago. Right off "cia.gov". Bit of an eye-opener, I have to admit.)

So given all that, why is it absurd to think some subsection of the CIA and Treasury may have started printing their own bills and creating their own currency?

I can think of several reasons, some nefarious, some helpful. On the beneficent side, the bills might be used in covert operations, and they may be specially marked in order to allow "dirty money" sent through moles, or otherwise injected into terrorist or other criminal networks -- and thus map a criminal financial/social network. Of course such an operation could not be generally disclosed -- but one wonders why the Treasury wouldn't even be notified, so they wouldn't bother wasting their time, or encouraging such articles.

But on the other side, once you have the ability to publish your own money, you would no longer need the approval of Congress or the C-in-C to start running your own operations and following your own agenda. In fact, it might be job security for years to come. Such a group could gain occasional access to US presses, or even set up their own facility off the books somewhere at taxpayer expense, and pursue only-God-knows-what policies in secret as long as they wished.

It would guarantee utter immunity from the whims of the voters for many years to come.

As regular readers know, I'm not much of a conspiracy theorist, in the sense that I don't believe that the world is largely controlled by shadowy human figures whose control is complete or nearly, and whose actions leave no trace. I believe most actions happen for fairly obvious reasons -- including even those above.

I also find most the arguments of conspiracy theorists simply false or easily disproven, as well as finding the reasoning fallacious. And, as this guy points out, most conspiracy theories are designed to indoctrinate someone into a political point of view, one which is drastically at odds with a Christian lifestyle.

But in real life there are conspiracies. The American Founding Fathers conspired against the British Crown. Klaus Fuchs and others conspired to give Josef Stalin the bomb. The Johnson administration actually conspired to keep secret the truth about the Gulf of Tonkin incident. Nixon conspired to damage many critics. And it's pretty clear that certain elements within the US government are currently conspiring to undermine our foreign and anti-terrorist policies.

These aren't totalistic conspiracies -- they are simply a group of people doing what people sometimes do. They won't last for generations, and they aren't the primary forces in the world -- though, like some of the Soviet moles, or the (informal and open) conspiracy to get the US out of Vietnam, they could of course do a lot of damage for a limited period of time.

And in this case, I'm having a bit of fun.

But hey, it does seem to fit together.

Tell me what you think.