Canadian Quarters Scare the Pentagon Shitless

Be afraid, be very afraid!

US still seems to be all scared shitless over Canada’s poppy quarters.

“I don’t think it is an issue of the Canadians being the bad guys,” the Pentagon’s counterintelligence chief wrote in an exchange of e-mails obtained this week by The Associated Press, “but then again, who knows.”

Yeah, you never can tell with us wily Canadians.

In sensational warnings that circulated publicly in late 2006 and early 2007, the Pentagon’s Defense Security Service said coins with radio transmitters were found planted on U.S. Army contractors with classified security clearances on at least three occasions between October 2005 and January 2006 as the contractors traveled through Canada.

In January 2007, the government abruptly reversed itself and said the warnings weren’t true. But the case remained a mystery until months later, when AP learned that the flap had been caused by suspicions over the odd-looking Canadian “poppy” quarter with a bright red flower. The silver-colored 25-cent piece features the red image of a poppy — Canada’s flower of war remembrance — inlaid on a maple leaf.

What suspicious contractors believed to be “nanotechnology” on the coins actually was a protective coating the Royal Canadian Mint applied to prevent the poppy’s red color from rubbing off. The mint produced nearly 30 million such quarters in 2004 commemorating Canada’s 117,000 war dead.

Of course! That’s what’s thrown them off! Everybody in the US knows that Canada doesn’t actually have a military, right? So how could they have a coin commemorating war dead? No wonder they were so confused.

The Pentagon turned over the latest e-mails from inside its Office of the Undersecretary for Defense for Intelligence nearly two years after the AP requested them under the Freedom of Information Act. Many of the e-mails were censored over what the Pentagon said was national security and personal privacy.

Or maybe, just maybe, they were worried about sounding like paranoid wackos? And you know it has to be really wacko for an admitted conspiracy theorist to make that claim about anyone.