Thankfully, John Oliver was there to explain what the behoovus is engoing on:

Well, this is an odd, unconventional war. This isn’t like World War II where there were “winners” and “losers”. It’s a new kind of war where enemies can either be emboldened or beweakened. So we have to enscare them to the point where they rebecave themselves. We must disimagine the very figment of misunsuccessiveness. That is what we have to bedo.

Apparently the problem is that too few of us are fluent lectors of Newspeak.

In its third season, the show has morphed into a stinging allegorical critique of America’s three-year occupation of Iraq. The trouble started at the end of the second season, when humanity briefly escaped the Cylons and settled down on the tiny planet of New Caprica. The Cylons soon returned and quickly conquered the defenseless humans. But instead of slaughtering everyone, the Cylons decided to take a more enlightened path by “benevolently occupying” the planet and imposing their preferred way of life by gunpoint. The humans were predictably not enthused about their allegedly altruistic rulers, and they immediately launched an insurgency against them using improvised explosive devices and suicide bombers.

It’s so frustrating when you can’t tell the good guys from the bad guys.

Since April, operating almost entirely under the radar, the task force has spawned four working groups, recruiting scores of U.S. experts on Iraq and the Middle East to look at military and security issues, Iraqi politics, reconstruction, and the regional and strategic environment surrounding the war.

Although it’s nice to see some serious effort to design a bipartisan policy for Iraq — and some would say that Baker is one of the few heavyweights with enough leverage to change the President’s mind — it’s still a shame that the process is being so methodically buried in secrecy:

It’s hard to know what the commission is really up to because its inner workings are nearly as secretive as those of the White House. Baker has imposed an ironclad gag order on all of its participants. … “[Baker is] very secretive, he keeps his distance, and he compartmentalizes everything, which is not a bad way to organize a political conspiracy,” says another member of one of the working groups.

Furthermore, although Baker is claiming to avoid politicizing the effort…

In any case, the Iraq Study Group won’t issue its report until some time early in 2007. In a recent speech, according to a member of the task force, Baker said that to do something before the November 2006 elections would inevitably politicize the report, something that Baker desperately wants to avoid.

…his deeper and ultimate goals seem to be protecting the 2008 elections.

…if the Democrats win back one or both houses of Congress in November, they would unleash a series of investigative hearings on Iraq, the war on terrorism, and civil liberties that could fatally weaken the administration and remove the last props of political support for the war, setting the stage for a potential Republican electoral disaster in 2008.

The Vanity Fair article goes into great detail about the ongoing NEADS chatter throughout the 100 minutes of the actual attack. The article provides written and audio transcripts of the critical parts, and portrays a situation much different than was commonly reported:

For the NEADS crew, 9/11 was not a story of four hijacked airplanes, but one of a heated chase after more than a dozen potential hijackings—some real, some phantom—that emerged from the turbulence of misinformation that spiked in the first 100 minutes of the attack and continued well into the afternoon and evening.

Although American Airlines flight 11 was later identified as the first plane to hit, the airline conservatively refused to admit it:

“When we phoned United [after the second tower was hit], they confirmed that United 175 was down, and I think they confirmed that within two or three minutes,” Scoggins, the go-to guy at Boston Center for all things military, later told me. “With American Airlines, we could never confirm if it was down or not, so that left doubt in our minds.” … The problem, Scoggins told me later, was that American Airlines refused to confirm for several hours that its plane had hit the tower. This lack of confirmation caused uncertainty that would be compounded in a very big way as the attack continued. (Though airlines have their own means of monitoring the location of their planes and communicating with their pilots, they routinely go into information lockdown in a crisis.)

As a result, NEADS’ remaining two fighter jets were scrambled to chase after this phantom flight 11. Coincidentally, seconds later a third highjacking was revealed (United 93), followed twelve minutes later by a fourth (American 77, which ultimately hit the Pentagon). Meanwhile, NEADS was busy reacting to the false intelligence that American 11 is still on the prowl. The information chaos was worse because NEADS was relying on antique green-blip radar, which was completely unable to locate American 11 earlier when it was first reported highjacked. Also, vague, anachronistic rules about handling modern highjacking cases slowed down the flow of crucial details:

A former senior executive at the F.A.A., speaking to me on the condition that I not identify him by name, tried to explain. “Our whole procedures prior to 9/11 were that you turned everything [regarding a hijacking] over to the F.B.I.,” he said, reiterating that hijackers had never actually flown airplanes; it was expected that they’d land and make demands. “There were absolutely no shootdown protocols at all. The F.A.A. had nothing to do with whether they were going to shoot anybody down. We had no protocols or rules of engagement.”

This info slowdown led to a disturbingly slow reaction from the Administration:

President Bush would finally grant commanders the authority to give that order at 10:18, which —- though no one knew it at the time -— was 15 minutes after the attack was over.

Let’s hope things have gotten better over the past half-decade. Until then, we can amuse ourselves with little green men and outlandish, yet hard-to-dismiss conspiracy theories.

What’s next, real-life mashups? Reorganizing someone’s life for your personal amusement? Oh wait, that’s The Game.

But speaking of Art and Science, I was very surprised and impressed by the tech setup they have. You can toss down $15 before the show, and they will burn you a copy (Science) of the entire show (Art) to take home that night. Simple and obvious in hindsight, yet still cutting edge. Haven’t listened to the CDs yet, so I don’t know how good the sound quality is (nor if it includes their traditional unplugged encore). I expect good things, though.