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Maybe it can be explained as a variation of Murphy's Law. Murphy generally holds that anything that can go wrong will go wrong.
Here's the apparent corollary: If government bureaucrats can devise schemes so outlandish as to defy credibility, they will.
Whatever the explanation, the Defense Department recently came up with an anti-terrorism scheme so surpassingly stupid, so utterly devoid of common and moral sense, so dangerous and reckless, that one senator had trouble convincing people it was not a hoax. The notion had only one redeeming feature: It lasted no longer than the time required for embarrassed Pentagon leaders and outraged lawmakers to react to and send it to a deserving grave.
The idea was to establish a futures trading market on the Internet, in which speculators would wager on the likelihood of a future coup d'etat, terrorist attack, assassination attempt or some other calamity.
In defending the program, the Defense Department said the futures market has been effective in predicting oil prices, election results and movie box office receipts. Why not use a similar method to calculate the likelihood that someone might shoot Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, or that North Korea might lob a nuclear missile at downtown Seoul or Seattle? The Pentagon said the plan was part of its never-ending search for the "broadest possible set of new ways to prevent terrorist acts."
We realize that military planners must often ponder gruesome subjects, but the idea of setting up an Internet betting parlor allowing anonymous people to bet on the likelihood of mass murder, terrorist mayhem and the duration of wars and regimes is pushing the envelope far beyond its breaking point.
It's no wonder that Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, who read about the proposal in the newspaper Tuesday morning on his way to a congressional hearing, pronounced it dead on arrival. By midday, when we checked, the putative program's Web site, policyanalysismarket.org, was empty.
The short-lived plan comes from the the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a Pentagon scientific unit that counts among its successes early work on the invention of the Internet. Policy Analysis Market, as the initiative was called, appears to have been the brainchild of the Pentagon's information awareness office, which is headed by John Poindexter, who was President Reagan's national security adviser during the Iran-Contra scandal.
More recently, Poindexter also was the author of a harebrained electronic surveillance plan - first called Total Information Awareness, then renamed Terrorism Information Awareness - that would have tapped into computer databases to retrieve such things as individual medical records, credit card data and other personal information. The reason for this unvarnished invasion of privacy, TIA defenders said, was to track the moves of terrorists. Many lawmakers, liberal and conservative alike, were flabbergasted.
Enough already. Poindexter is a retired Navy admiral. It's time for him either to retire for good from government service or be put on a very slow ship destined for a very long trip to a very distant port.