Pentagon To Abandon Terror-Futures Mkt-Senate Panel Chmn

29 July 2003
15:26 GMT
Dow Jones International News

WASHINGTON (AP)--The Pentagon will abandon a plan to establish a futures 
market to help predict terrorist strikes, the chairman of the U.S. Senate 
Armed Services Committee said Tuesday.

Sen. John Warner, R-Va., said he spoke by phone with the program's director, 
"and we mutually agreed that this thing should be stopped."

Warner announced the decision not long after Senate Democratic Leader Thomas 
Daschle took to the floor to denounce the program as "an incentive actually 
to commit acts of terrorism."

Warner made the announcement during a confirmation hearing for retired Gen. 
Peter J. Schoomaker, nominated to be Army chief of staff.

"This is just wrong," declared Daschle, D-S.D., of the plan.

Warner said he consulted with Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat 
Roberts, R-Kansas, and Appropriations Committee Chairman Sen. Ted Stevens, 
R-Alaska, and they agreed "that this should be immediately disestablished."

He said they would recommend that the Pentagon not spend any funds already 
in place for the program and said they would pull the plug on it during 
House-Senate budget conference committee negotiations later this year.

The little-publicized Pentagon plan envisioned a potential futures trading 
market in which speculators would wager on the Internet on the likelihood of 
a future terrorist attack or assassination attempt on a particular leader. A 
Web site promoting the plan already is available.

When the plan was disclosed by two Democratic senators Monday, the Pentagon 
defended it as a way to gain intelligence about potential terrorists' plans.

Earlier, Warner had said that his staff was looking into the program and 
would report on it later Tuesday. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., said 
she was appalled to hear of plans to set up "a futures market in death."

Other Democrats expressed similar alarm.

"The idea of a federal betting parlor on atrocities and terrorism is 
ridiculous and it's grotesque," said Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., one of two 
lawmakers who disclosed the plan Monday.