since US banknotes are minted and then sold to the US gov't with interest by the privately held bank, the Federal Reserve. So the only crime is against that private party, not against the US gov't or the people. I wonder if the FED will sue the gov't in civil court for this tortuous act. Probably not since it will, again, expose the FED for the fraud it is. The only crime here is the system itself.
ps: the gov't wouldn't want to cause inflation or the de-valuation of the dollar would it? No, that wouldn't help the North American Union or anything....
pps: why the Bekkaa Valley now called Beqaa Valley? Let's stop the insanity of renaming things. Turin not Torino, Burma not Mynamar, Peking not Beiiging, etc etc. Its confusing.

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"The sources, which do not wish to be identified,".... is a preamble to propaganda, not journalism.

I'm as willing as the next person to entertain the follies of our Government and it's agencies, but the CIA does not need to potentially undermine it's primary means of purchasing "friends" by enlisting their cooperation with bogus bills.

The Administration's own monetary policies as guided by "Helicopter Ben" doesn't need the help of anyone in destroying the value of our currency, it's already on a fast track.

The replication of anonymous rumor in the guise of "news" disserves the credibility of the author and the worthiness of AlterNet.

Editorial judgment anyone?

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Reading the story from the German paper and looking at your own intro, Josh, I'd say that this may well be one of those urban legends that crops up now and again. Here are some of the signs:

1. The origin of the notes keeps changnig (to the point where putting it in the Bekaa valley crops up--not a place where they'd be likely to have access to sophisticated printing equipment, which you would need to make the enterprise worth it).

2. Nowhere is there a mention of an expert who has seen such a note. That is, I didn't see the Frankfurter Algemeine story you linked to mention it, though I admit I only barely read German and had to Babelfish it. In any case, they didn't have in the story anyone who said "Yeah, I saw one last week, and they are characterized by..." or a guy who said he had seen one and described what a bear it was to tell them from the real deal. The very existence of supernotes is taken as a fact, when the evidence as presented is a mite iffy.

3. Damaging the US currency by printing fake bills is a pretty dicey proposition to begin with. Currency values are determined by a lot of things and you would have to print a lot of bills. I mean in the billion dollar range to even make a dent. And then you would have to convince a lot of people that the dozen or so other things that underpin U.S. currency were screwed up too--the whole scheme seems a bit far-fetched.

I'm not saying you have no editorial judgement or whatever, just that those are the hallmarks of an urban legend (not original with me, by the way, by any means). Even respected publications re-print them now and again.

And this might be one of those cases where something real gets morphed into something not-real. That happens too.

By the way, the CIA has engaged in currency-related shenanigans. Most of them were cold-war era, however, and by today's standards pretty darned crude. They also were only a mixed success, and that with economies that were not only orders of magnitude smaller than the US but smaller than they are even now.

(The Czechs were well-documented victims of the tactic of just flying bales of currency in and dropping them across the border. It is one of the reasons that Eastern bloc nations used to revise the look of their bills every few years, in particular in the 70s and 80s. But it did little to mess up their economy except insofar as it was damned inconvenient to trade the old bills in).

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I guess if you are truly gullible you may not see it as worthy of investigation. The journalist does make the point that the North Koreans don't have the means. The primary suspect does. We all know that the actual secret services budget is much larger than what is officially stated. Does the balance come from drug smuggling, counterfeiting, or where?

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Jeez, would the CIA do something so illegal and devious ? They have such a long history of integrity and honesty. Why should we waste time and effort worrying about what the CIA is up to. They are above political machinations. Besides the CIA is so open it would not be able to keep this activity hidden,would it? They would not take secret orders from the executive branch, would they? Let's not rock this boat. The ship of state might sink.

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would surprise me at this point.

It's time to IMPEACH these clowns.

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The Secret of America's Counterfeit 'Supernotes'

[quote]
Forensic analysis by a criminal laboratory shows that the security inks used for the Supernotes are identical to those used in genuine notes. That applies even to the expensive OVI color-changing ink, which alters its appearance depending upon angle of the incidence of light; the dollar changes from bronze-green to black.

The top-secret OVI ink is produced exclusively by Sicpa of Lausanne, Switzerland RealVideo. The exclusive inks used by the Federal Reserve are mixed by the American licensee in high-security factories in the United States. This applies to all security inks used in U.S. dollars.
[/quote]

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