The View From Here: Terrorism for profit is a bad gamble
I don’t know what’s worse — that our government was planning to create a program that would have allowed for investment in the potential for terrorist attacks, or that no one seemed to want to take the responsibility for it.
Only brought forth for public scrutiny because some lawmakers opposed massive funding for it — up to $8 million for a program called the Futures Markets Applied to Prediction under the Terrorism Information Awareness program and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency — there has yet to be a major player willing to say it was his or her idea.
It’s funny that had someone not protested, it’s very likely this program would have been allowed to continue. The gist of it is we would have had investors betting money and making predictions that a terrorist attack would occur, which would have allowed successful investors to profit from what may amount to murder.
Despite some reports in the defense of the program — one is that the market can be more accurate than science and therefore, predictions may allow for some type of countermeasure to be taken — its potential is overshadowed by a number of questions, both logical and moral.
One has to wonder about the integrity of anti-terrorism efforts already in existence. We’re spending billions in Iraq, not to mention our “other” war in Afghanistan that seems to be almost entirely forgotten, even though we haven’t captured Osama bin Laden, as well as committing lives to both, all in the name of battling terrorism.
But here we are at home, dreaming up a program that seems to be totally counter to that philosophy. The existence of the program alone seems to discredit everything we’ve been told about why we need to go to war: prevention. It says there’s nothing we can do, even if we are spending billions in other countries, so why not make a few bucks in the mean time? Surely, there’s something sick about that.
It’s also sickening to learn from all the information floating around out there, after news of the program broke this week, that there doesn’t seem to be many people in positions of high authority willing to take responsibility for its existence, from the Deputy Defense Secretary on down to both Democrats and Republicans alike.
This is why people don’t like government.
Most reports where top elected leaders were quoted this week relayed to the masses only a sense of denial, which was that they didn’t know much, if anything, about this project.
Even though it was apparently not a secret, I’d like to know that if $600,000 has truly been spent on the project, why no one seemed to know about it. If that much money had been spent in Warren County, surely the heads of the respective committees would know about it, at the very least.
It’s not only an odd program, but with so many people apparently not knowing a thing about it, it begs the question of how coordinated our terrorism efforts really are in such a massive government or who will be willing to accept or deny responsibility for future terrorism failures, should they occur.
I guess the logic was if enough smart people started spending money on something, their collective brains, combined with research and willingness to hold on to cold hard cash, could potentially ensure accuracy.
But we have to ask ourselves how far we’re willing to go and if investing in this way might actually do the opposite of what was intended and spawn a terrorist attack. In this day and age, somehow, that doesn’t seem too far-fetched.
(Amy Satterwhite is a reporter for the Standard. She can be reached at 473-2191 or by e-mail at [email protected].)