FUTURES SHOCK THE PENTAGON'S SICK TAKE ON RISK STRATEGY
EDITORIAL
02 August 2003
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
A-10

If proposals to expand gambling dramatically in Pennsylvania have you 
worried about society's moral decline, you dodged a real bullet this week. 
On Monday, two U.S. senators exposed a Department of Defense program that 
promoted betting. Instead of counting on the one-armed bandit, though, the 
Pentagon would have had us placing bets on heavily armed terrorists.

Will Yasser Arafat be assassinated before year's end? Will the Jordanian 
monarchy topple in the next quarter? When will the next attack on U.S. soil 
occur? Experts in Washington apparently don't know, so they turned to the 
betting public for help. Forget about infiltrating terrorist organizations 
or monitoring illegal weapons trafficking. The experts say "futures 
markets," already useful for predicting the price of oil and the election of 
presidents, could help the nation anticipate the next terrorist attack.

Reaction to the idea was predictably negative, with Minority Leader Tom 
Daschle denouncing the program on the floor of the Senate. Republicans soon 
took up the battle cry, and the Department of Defense decided to punt, 
announcing that it would abandon the Policy Analysis Market (PAM) program. 
It did so after spending more than half a million dollars on the project and 
requesting an additional $8 million in funding through 2005.

Is the intelligence community really so destitute that it could learn 
something useful from such a program? Rather than spending a few million to 
improve information-sharing between the FBI and CIA, we got an embarrassing 
boondoggle.

The terrorism futures market has led, appropriately, to the resignation of 
retired Adm. John M. Poindexter, head of the Information Awareness Office 
that oversaw PAM. For Adm. Poindexter, a nuclear physicist who is described 
as an "out of the box thinker," this was one bright idea too many. He also 
was responsible for the development of Total Information Awareness, an 
aborted plan to avert terrorism by accessing computer databases to collect 
medical, travel, credit and financial information about U.S. citizens.

Earlier in his career, as President Ronald Reagan's national security 
adviser, the admiral figured in the covert plan to sell weapons to Iran to 
help fund the Contras in Nicaragua. He was convicted of lying to Congress 
about the Iran-Contra affair, but his conviction was set aside on appeal.

It's good news that Adm. Poindexter won't be gambling with the public trust. 
Pete Rose could do a better job.