United States Navy, via Getty Images

In the fine gunboat-diplomacy bogosity tradition that gave our great-great-grandparents "Remember the Maine!" without telling them that the Maine was a battleship loaded with munitions that probably blew up on their own without any outside help, fakery in the service of American Empire has been much in the news lately.

First of all, the latest Bush Junta effort to scare us into bombing Iran is not standing up well under close scrutiny. As emptywheel notes, the audio that’s been grafted onto the video of the tiny Iranian patrol boats tootling around the huge American warships is, well, questionable — and the Pentagon’s been forced to admit as much:

The audio includes a heavily accented voice warning in English that the Navy warships would explode. However, the recording carries no ambient noise — the sounds of a motor, the sea or wind — that would be expected if the broadcast had been made from one of the five small boats that sped around the three-ship American convoy.

Pentagon officials said they could not rule out that the broadcast might have come from shore, or from another ship nearby, although it might have come from one of the five fast boats with a high-quality radio system.

See the picture above? That’s one of the Iranian boats in question. Notice that it is an open boat. Notice that it has no way to keep ambient noise — choppy seas, motor noise, things like that — away from any recording gear that might be on the boat. Notice that there doesn’t seem to be much room for anything, much less high-class recording gear capable of blocking out all ambient noise — or the boxes of explosives that the threatening voice on the tape said would be used to blow up the American warships (but which never appear on the video).

In other fakery news (from McClatchy via TruthOut), it looks like BushCo’s charge that North Korea’s printing bogus US money is itself bogus:

Two years ago, as he was ratcheting up a campaign to isolate and cripple North Korea’s dictatorship financially, President Bush accused the communist regime there of printing phony U.S. currency.

"When someone is counterfeiting our money, we want them to stop doing that. We are aggressively saying to the North Koreans just that — don’t counterfeit our money," Bush said on Jan. 26, 2006.

However, a 10-month McClatchy investigation on three continents has found that the evidence to support Bush’s charges against North Korea is uncertain at best and that the claims of the North Korean defectors cited in news accounts are dubious and perhaps bogus. One key law enforcement agency, the Swiss federal criminal police, has publicly questioned whether North Korea is even capable of producing "supernotes," counterfeit $100 bills that are nearly perfect except for some practically invisible additions.

So, if North Korea doesn’t have the technical chops to pull this off, who does?

Could it be — us?

Klaus Bender, the author of a book on the subject, "Moneymakers: The Secret World of Banknote Printing," said that the phony $100 bill is "not a fake anymore. It’s an illegal parallel print of a genuine note."

"It goes way beyond what normal counterfeiters are able to do," said Bender, whose book first spotlighted the improbability of North Korean supernotes. "And it is so elaborate (and expensive) it doesn’t pay for the counterfeiting anymore."

Bender claims that the supernotes are of such high quality and are updated so frequently that they could be produced only by a U.S. government agency such as the CIA.

As unsubstantiated as the allegation is, there is a precedent. In his new book on the history of the CIA, journalist Tim Weiner detailed how the agency tried to undermine the Soviet Union’s economy by counterfeiting its currency.

Of course, we’re talking about the same folks who gave us "curveball" and faked-up Niger yellowcake documents as part of their justification for invading and occupying Iraq. That this was done by agents of BushCo is not only not impossible, it’s extremely probable.

And all of this is happening as the granddaddy of all trumped-up incidents, the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, has been once again shown to have been an exercise in American provocation that was turned into a pretext for massively escalating the American involvement in Vietnam.

…they’ve just been fakin’ it; they’re not really makin’ it…

UPDATE 12:25 pm FDL time: And now we find that while the Iranians didn’t do anything belligerent such as fling "boxes of explosives", the same can’t be said of the US warships, one of which the Pentagon now admits fired a warning shot at one of the tiny Iranian patrol boats back during a similar incident in December.  Boy, Bush really wants an excuse to blow up Iran, doesn’t he?

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