Posted on: Wednesday, July 30, 2003

'Terror' futures mart a zany Pentagon idea

Another brainchild has emerged from the darkest corner of the Pentagon, shocking those glimpsing its first exposure to light.

This one, thankfully, is stillborn.

The Pentagon quickly abandoned its idea for encouraging anonymous speculators to bet on forecasting terrorist attacks, assassinations and coups in an online futures market after it was roundly ridiculed yesterday by members of Congress on both sides of the aisle.

"This appears to encourage terrorists to participate, either to profit from their terrorist activities or to bet against them in order to mislead U.S. intelligence authorities," two lawmakers said in a letter to Adm. John Poindexter, President Ronald Reagan's national security adviser, now director of the Terrorism Information Awareness Office, which developed the idea.

His earlier brainchild was a sweeping electronic surveillance plan intended to fight terrorism by tapping into computer databases to collect medical, travel, credit and financial records.

Worried about the potential for misuse of the program, Congress this year prohibited what was called the Total Information Awareness program from being used against Americans. The Senate voted to block all spending on it.

In 1990, Poindexter was convicted of conspiracy, making false statements to Congress and obstructing congressional inquiries, all in connection with the Iran-Contra scandal. His conviction was later reversed on the ground that he had been given immunity for testimony in which he lied.

So we can think of three reasons, now, that Poindexter shouldn't be working in a sensitive Pentagon capacity.

The Pentagon, in initially defending the program, said such futures trading had proven effective in predicting other events like oil prices and elections.

Is that another way of saying that people with inside knowledge make suckers of the rest of those who buy futures?

If Poindexter's terrorism futures market was a ploy — a sting, if you will — to smoke out those with inside knowledge of coming terror events, we hasten to point out that its financing was intended to come at the expense of innocent traders.