Pentagon bets are off

Editorial/Opinion

30 July 2003
The News & Observer
A18

Once the word got out, it was all over. A Pentagon program, slated to 
receive $5 million in federal funding through 2005, envisioned an online 
futures market in -- astonishingly -- terrorism. Traders would have bet on 
the likelihood of terrorist incidents occurring at certain places and at 
certain times. Pentagon officials said such a market could help them predict 
terrorist attacks and figure out how to stop them -- just as futures trading 
on "oil prices, elections and movie ticket sales," as The New York Times 
wrote, helps predicts results.

Critics understandably ripped the whole idea. Terrorists themselves could 
have been among the gamblers, for example. Said Democratic Sen. Byron Dorgan 
of North Dakota: "Can you imagine if another country set up a betting parlor 
so that people could ... bet on the assassination of an American political 
figure?"

The program had withered on the vine by high noon yesterday as even top 
Pentagon officials backed away from it.

The Times said that Dorgan and fellow Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon 
had revealed the bizarre initiative. It was to fall under the control of 
Adm. John M. Poindexter, who served as President Reagan's national security 
adviser and was a figure in the Iran-contra scandal. Poindexter earlier was 
enthusiastically pushing the notion of a vast electronic surveillance system 
that would have riddled the privacy of Americans. Congress pulled the reins 
on that one.

And, after the outcry over this latest fiasco, congressional leaders of both 
parties pulled the plug on the futures market idea. They ought also to see 
to it that the admiral finally takes his leave of high federal office.

The Bush administration now needs to backtrack this preposterous idea, 
finding the whys and whos and wherefores of how it came to be. And then the 
administration should see to it that zany notions like this get stopped not 
in their tracks, but before they make tracks.