MetaFilter

On April 29, 2004, President George W. Bush hosted one of the most unusual meetings to ever take place inside the Oval Office. The 10 members of the 9/11 Commission got to ask him and Vice President Dick Cheney any question they wanted about the September 11, 2001, attacks. The words that were spoken in that room remained secret for nearly two decades. Now, we can finally read what Bush said.

This wasn’t about, say, calling escargot “liberty snails” or a croque monsieur an “Uncle Sam-wich,” although surely someone has thought of that. It was about taking a beloved, ubiquitous staple and putting a nationalist mark on it—not the same culinary colonialism and appropriation of, say, calling chana masala “The Stew” or roti “balloon bread,” or the long-term transition of diners into a symbol of conservative small towns, but an intentional, blatant provocation intended to needle political opponents while saying, “this is ours, actually.”

Where was the president in the eight hours after the Sept. 11 attacks? The strange, harrowing journey of Air Force One, as told by the people who were on board.

A bare two weeks after the attacks of September 11, at the end of a long and emotional day at the White House, a sixty-nine-year-old politician and businessman—a midwesterner, born of modest means but grown wealthy and prominent and powerful—returned to his enormous suite of offices on the seventh floor of the flood-lit and wounded Pentagon and, as was his habit, scrawled out a memorandum on his calendar:

Interesting day— NSC mtg. with President— As [it] ended he asked to see me alone… After the meeting ended I went to Oval Office—He was alone He was at his desk— He talked about the meet Then he said I want you to develop a plan to invade Ir[aq]. Do it outside the normal channels. Do it creatively so we don’t have to take so much cover [?]

If Snowden perfectly fit the profile of geek crusader, Lehel, a stone-faced, disheveled man in a tight leather jacket, seemed an odd candidate for one of the world’s most notorious hackers. But Guccifer is to hacking what the Beatles are to rock and roll. He had predecessors, 4Chan cowboys like Anonymous and Sabu of LulzSec, but he’s changed the nature of hacking fame. Guccifer rose by exploiting the connections people make online to infiltrate the private lives of some of the most powerful people on Earth. He served up the results to the media, irresistible high-low raw material for an online news cycle driven by leaks and voyeurism and racked by anxiety over privacy.

...the current U.S. military operations in Libya are consistent with the War Powers Resolution and do not under that law require further congressional authorization, because U.S. military operations are distinct from the kind of “hostilities” contemplated by the Resolution’s 60 day termination provision.

It's a great irony that, while the United States has probably never been less popular among Canadians than in the era of George W Bush, plans to integrate Canada more deeply into the US have been proceeding at a brisk clip. The threat of Canada being absorbed into the US has traditionally provoked strong reactions here, as the pitched electoral battles over the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in the 1980s and '90s attest. But the issue seems to have largely disappeared in recent years, leaving the impression that the push for deeper integration has stopped or that Canadians no longer care about it. Neither is true.