This hilarious article from the Washington Post certainly qualifies as the weirdest news story of the day (and gets extra weird points for using the word “bodacious” in a complete sentence):

Invading Canada won’t be like invading Iraq: When we invade Canada, nobody will be able to grumble that we didn’t have a plan.

The United States government does have a plan to invade Canada. It’s a 94-page document called “Joint Army and Navy Basic War Plan — Red,” with the word SECRET stamped on the cover. It’s a bold plan, a bodacious plan, a step-by-step plan to invade, seize and annex our neighbor to the north. [...]

It was declassified in 1974 and the word “SECRET” crossed out with a heavy pencil. Now it sits in a little gray box in the National Archives in College Park, available to anybody, even Canadian spies. They can photocopy it for 15 cents a page.

The Canucks had a secret plan for invading the U.S., too, that was nine years older than War Plan Red. The guy in charge of developing it, Canada’s director of military intelligence, had a budget of $1200 and would drive around Minnesota and upstate New York, taking pictures and picking up free maps at gas stations.

The U.S. planners credited the Canadians (and the British) with the “ability to fight to a finish”, and predicted a war of long duration. If the British won, “CRIMSON will demand that Alaska be awarded to her”, they noted. For our part, “Blue intentions are to hold in perpetuity all CRIMSON and RED territory gained. The policy will be to prepare the provinces and territories of CRIMSON and RED to become states and territories of the BLUE union upon the declaration of peace.”

Go read the whole thing.

Posted by Ben Brothers at 12:45 pm, 30 December 2005 and filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.