Well... it didn't take long for BUSHCO to back down on this one. From NYTimes:


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Pentagon Abandons Plan for Futures Market on Terror

By CARL HULSE

WASHINGTON, July 29 - The Pentagon office that proposed spying electronically on Americans to monitor potential terrorists has quickly abandoned an idea in which anonymous speculators would have bet on forecasting terrorist attacks, assassinations and coups in an online futures market.

Senator John W. Warner, the Virginia Republican who heads the Senate Armed Services Committee, said today that he had conferred with the program's director at the Pentagon, ``and we mutually agreed that this thing should be stopped.''

The senator's announcement - made during a confirmation hearing for retired Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, who has been nominated to be Army chief of staff - signaled the end of a program that was met with astonishment and derision almost from the moment it was disclosed.

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz comfirmed the program's demise today. ``My understanding is it's going to be terminated,'' he told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, according to Reuters.

Under the discarded plan, traders bullish on a biological attack on Israel, say, or bearish on the chances of a North Korean missile strike would have had the opportunity to bet on the likelihood of such events on a new Internet site established by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

The Pentagon called its latest idea a new way of predicting events and part of its search for the ``broadest possible set of new ways to prevent terrorist attacks.'' But two Democratic senators who disclosed the plan on Monday called it morally repugnant and grotesque. The senators said the program fell under the control of Adm. John M. Poindexter, President Ronald Reagan's national security adviser.

One of the two senators, Byron L. Dorgan of North Dakota, said the idea seemed so preposterous that he had trouble persuading people it was not a hoax. ``Can you imagine,'' Mr. Dorgan asked, ``if another country set up a betting parlor so that people could go in - and is sponsored by the government itself - people could go in and bet on the assassination of an American political figure?''

After Mr. Dorgan and his fellow critic, Ron Wyden of Oregon, spoke out, the Pentagon sought to play down the importance of a program for which the Bush administration has sought $8 million through 2005. The White House also altered the Web site so that the potential events to be considered by the market that were visible earlier in the day at www.policyanalysismarket.org could no longer be seen.

But by that time, Republican officials in the Senate were privately shaking their heads over the planned trading. One top aide said he hoped that the Pentagon had a good explanation for it.

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

``Research indicates that markets are extremely efficient, effective and timely aggregators of dispersed and even hidden information,'' the Defense Department said in a statement. ``Futures markets have proven themselves to be good at predicting such things as elections results; they are often better than expert opinions.''

But it became abundantly clear this morning, at the hearing of Senator Warner's committee, that whatever the logic of the Pentagon's position it had no chance of surviving politically.

``I must say this is perhaps the most irresponsible, outrageous and poorly thought-out of anything that I have heard the administration propose to date,'' said Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota, the Democratic leader."

What a silly bunch of idiots we have running our government! Wow! Thank goodness for a couple of good Democrats who saved the day.