Tribune editorial staff

A proposal that leaked out of the Pentagon earlier this week sounded more like satire or a hoax than reality.

The Defense Department announced Tuesday the cancellation of a controversial program that would have developed a futures market that would allow traders to bet on wars, assassinations and terrorism in the Middle East.

That's right, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency was working on a plan that would have offered an online market to let traders bet on the likelihood of violence overseas. John Poindexter, President Reagan's former national security adviser, came up with the idea as a way to improve intelligence gathering. Through the proposal, investors who guessed right would win money while defense officials would supposedly gain insight.

Once this outlandish plan was exposed by some U.S. senators, Pentagon leaders quickly rang the closing bell.

Deputy Secretary

of Defense Paul Wolfowitz said he did not know about the project until he read about it in the newspaper. That's right, the media apparently had to inform one of the Pentagon's top dogs about the proposed plan. Kind of scary, huh?

Wolfowitz says the Pentagon has stopped plans to sell futures contracts on world disaster. We would certainly hope so. Imagine the American uproar if a foreign government invited traders to profit on the possibility of something bad happening to the United States. Where are our morals?

In defending the project, Pentagon officials argued futures markets are used to predict oil prices, elections and movie-ticket sales. Does that mean it would be an accurate instrument to forecast death, violence and destruction? Probably not.

Perhaps the saddest part of the whole situation is DARPA wasted $600,000 on the project with plans for spending nearly $150,000 more this year and requests for $3 million in 2004 and $5 million in 2005.

Lawmakers should think twice about funding an agency that wastes money. Congress should strike a red pen through those future requests, just to make sure the program really is dead.