Tuesday, July 29, 2003
You bet your life!
The Pentagon is setting up a stock-market style system in which investors would bet on terror attacks, assassinations and other events in the Middle East. Defense officials hope to gain intelligence and useful predictions while investors who guessed right would win profits.
Two Democratic senators demanded Monday the project be stopped before investors begin registering this week. ``The idea of a federal betting parlor on atrocities and terrorism is ridiculous and it's grotesque,'' Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said.
The Pentagon office overseeing the program, called the Policy Analysis Market, said it was part of a research effort ``to investigate the broadest possible set of new ways to prevent terrorist attacks.'' It said there would be a re-evaluation before more money was committed.
The market would work this way. Investors would buy and sell futures contracts - essentially a series of predictions about what they believe might happen in the Mideast. Holders of a futures contract that came true would collect the proceeds of investors who put money into the market but predicted wrong.
A graphic on the market's Web page showed hypothetical futures contracts in which investors could trade on the likelihood that Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat would be assassinated or Jordanian King Abdullah II would be overthrown.
Much more.
Update: The Pentagon has pulled the plug on the program, presumably when they realized that "trading on death" wouldn't exactly fly with the American public. It's still pretty sick that they would even think about something like this though. Kinda goes to show you where their thoughts and priorities lie.
posted by chris at 9:50 AM
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