The fact that this proposal was even discussed shows exactly what kind of nuts we are dealing with in Washington. The fact that money has been flushed down the potty on this idea is nothing short of treason.

Oh never mind... By LAWRENCE M. O'ROURKE McClatchy Newspapers Jul 30, 2003, 06:12 Email this article Printer friendly page Before the first bets were placed, the Pentagon on Tuesday abruptly killed its stock market-style plan to have Americans sink their dollars into predicting future events like assassinations of foreign leaders, new terrorist strikes and coup d'etats.

"It is being terminated," Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz announced as he appeared on Capitol Hill before senators ready to pounce on a Pentagon scheme that seemed to have shot its sponsors in the foot.

The plan called for creation of a futures trading market in which an initial group of 1,000 speculators would place bets through the Internet.

Under the Pentagon's auspices, the speculators would gamble on the chances and timing of future terrorist attacks, and assassinations of leaders such as King Abdullah of Jordan and Palestinian Yasser Arafat.

If the plan has not been snuffed before it got started, participants might have been able to predict start dates for nuclear war with North Korea, or cataclysmic political events in Russia, China, Syria, Turkey or other places where the United States has strategic interests. The Pentagon told Congress that it was looking for predictions on whether Israel would be attacked with biological weapons.

DARPA - the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency - dubbed its board as FutureMAP, for Futures Markets Applied to Prediction. It could be found Tuesday on the Internet at http://www.darpa.mil/iao/FutureMap.htm.

DARPA said the betting scheme needed to remain "attractive enough to ensure full and continuous participation of individual parties ... (and) must also be sufficiently robust to withstand manipulation."

The quick capitulation announcement by Wolfowitz came as Republican and Democratic senators lined up against the plan.

"This should be completely disestablished," said Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska.

"This is just wrong," said Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., describing the plan as "an incentive to commit acts of terrorism."

The Pentagon explained the plan as its latest effort to predict new acts of terrorism and to help the United States prepare for them.

It said that a private market futures scheme in which investors bet real money was a more accurate predictor of terrorism than U.S. intelligence analysts and think tanks.

Through FutureMAP, traders would have been able to buy and sell futures contracts on horrendous events.

If an event came true, those who predicted it and put money behind their gamble would have collected the proceeds from the Pentagon. The winnings would have been proceeds of those who guessed wrong.

Although the Web site did not put a limit on how much a participant could gamble, it said participants would be motivated to make accurate predictions by "prospect of profit" and "pain of loss." Trading was to begin Oct. 1.

"Can you imagine if another country set up a betting parlor so that people would bet on the assassination of an American political figure or the overthrow of this institution or that institution?" asked Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D.

Dorgan and Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., were among the first lawmakers to reveal the plan and oppose it. "The idea of a federal betting parlor on atrocities is ridiculous and it's grotesque," Wyden said.

The Pentagon spent $600,000 to develop the program and planned to spend an additional $149,000, Wyden said. He said the Pentagon requested $3 million for the program next year and $12 million for the following year.

Appearing Tuesday before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Wolfowitz, the number two official at the Pentagon, did not disagree with any of the hostile characterizations by senators.

Wolfowitz said the first he heard of the plan was when he read about it in the newspaper during his car ride to Capitol Hill.

Making every effort to disassociate himself from the plan, Wolfowitz told senators: "I share your shock at this kind of program."

Although the Pentagon did not publicly announce the main patron of the plan, it was reported to be retired Navy Adm. John Poindexter.

Poindexter was chosen by President Bush to head the Pentagon's Terrorism Information Program, a unit of DARPA.

Poindexter was national security adviser to President Reagan in the 1980s when the United States offered to sell weapons to Iran in exchange for a secret cash flow to the anti-Sandinista rebels in Nicaragua.

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