Guest Opinion: Pentagon bet on 'trading in death'
billingsgazette.com
By CHARLES LEVENDOSKY
Casper Star-Tribune (reprinted by the excellent Billings Gazette)
The Bush administration floated the scheme of investing in political assassinations, called the Policy Analysis Market (PAM). Under the plan, one could bet on future terrorist attacks, conflicts and assassination attempts. Fortunately, as soon as there was a fierce outcry in Congress about this scheme last month, it was canceled.
According to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), an office of the Pentagon, PAM investors could bet on hypothetical futures contracts like the likelihood that Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat would be assassinated or Jordan's King Abdullah II would be overthrown.
Incentive for terror
Sen. Tom Daschle, D-S.D., called the proposal "a plan to trade in death." "This program," he said, "could provide an incentive actually to commit acts of terrorism. It is perhaps the most irresponsible, outrageous and poorly thought out of anything I have heard from this administration."
Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., wrote to the Pentagon urging it to abandon the idea: "The idea of a federal betting parlor on atrocities and terrorism is ridiculous and it's grotesque."
Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, said: "It's totally unauthorized as far as we're concerned. No funds should have been used for it at all. It's really a serious mistake on the part of DARPA." But DARPA admitted to having already spent more than $700,000 of taxpayers' money on the wayward scheme. And the Bush administration had sought $8 million for PAM through 2005. Some senators said they couldn't tell from the appropriations request what the program was all about.
On July 29, Sen. John Warner, R-Va., of the Senate Armed Services Committee, announced that the PAM scheme would be canceled.
On the same day, a chastised Department of Defense quietly pulled off the Internet the PAM Web site (www.policyanalysismarket.org) where these hypothetical investments had been posted. However, the PAM posting was recorded and archived at the Web site reclaimdemocracy.org/pam.html.
The PAM concept would have worked this way: Traders would deposit money into an account and use that money to buy and sell contracts. Traders believing certain events would occur by a certain date could buy a futures contract; those traders who considered the event unlikely could sell theirs. If a trader bought a futures contract on an assassination supposed to take place by Dec. 2 and that killing was accomplished by that date, the trader made money.
One can see already if vast amounts of money are involved, a trader who bought a contract on the likelihood of an assassination would have an incentive to make certain it occurred.
10,000 potential traders
Invitations had already gone out to about 1,000 potential traders, in preparation for an Oct. 1 start date. Traders could sign up anonymously. According to DARPA, 10,000 traders would eventually be involved.
No wonder Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., responded to knowledge about the program by saying, "I think those who thought it up ought not only to close down the program, they ought not be on the public payroll any longer."
The Department of Defense tried to defend the DARPA scheme. The department claimed markets could reveal "dispersed and even hidden information. Futures markets have proven themselves good at predicting such things as elections results; they are often better than expert opinions."
Perhaps in some realms this rationale has a bit of reality behind it; however, it is clear in a futures market trading in assassinations can become self-fulfilling prophecies. In which case, the United States, which has declared war on terrorism, will have created a scheme to generate terrorist acts.
Who is responsible for this travesty? John Poindexter, a retired Navy admiral, runs the DARPA division that includes the market project.
Poindexter was appointed National Security Adviser in 1985 under President Reagan. He was forced to resign less than a year later and was convicted of conspiracy, lying to Congress, obstructing a congressional inquiry, defrauding the government and destroying evidence in the Iran-Contra scandal. A federal appeals court overturned the convictions because Poindexter had been granted immunity in his testimony before Congress.
Although Poindexter is not a convicted felon, it remains true that he lied to Congress, the American people and falsified and destroyed evidence. Yet the Bush administration chose this man to run DARPA.
Under Poindexter, DARPA developed the Total Information Awareness (TIA) program, now called Terrorist Information Awareness program. The intent of the TIA program is to collect information on every American citizen in order to track their movements and activities in the hopes of being able to catch a pattern that would reveal a terrorist about to put a deadly plan into action.
Poindexter should never have been hired. His resignation won't come too soon. |
