No More Terrorism Betting Parlors

Pentagon's Project Would Have Used Market to Sell Shares of Terrorism

The party is over almost before it started.

After floating the idea that the Pentagon will be setting up OTB (Online Terrorism Betting) stations throughout the US and constructing a terrorist stock market/casino which would have allowed everyday Americans as well as terrorists to bet on political and economic events in the Middle East -- including the likelihood of assassinations and terrorist attacks, with great regret, Pentagon officials are now planning on scrapping the plan, at least until they can convince the American public that neither Magic 8-balls, nor Delphic oracles, nor Nancy Reagan's astrologist, Joan Quigley, will suffice for predicting terrorist attacks in the future.

Released in conjunction with the initial speculation of a terrorism stock market, and in order to get the insider trading ball rolling, US officials announced that they'd "learned" that terrorists may be planning new suicide hijackings of commercial airliners in the next months, similar to the attacks of September 11, 2001. Mere coincidence?

Since the start of the Bush Administration, the stock market has decreased more than under any other Administration in the past 70 years. With the sharp decline in the stock market resulting in $4.5 trillion in losses, the Bush Administration and Pentagon officials teamed up to come up with a research effort "to make war and killing profitable for everyone." Sadly, these plans to right the economy and predict terrorism, all in one fell swoop of petty whining and complaining from our public servants, will have to be shelved for the time being.

Accountants and Congressmen who had already wasted precious time attempting to determine whether or not Bush's recent dividend tax cut, which allows wealthy people who made millions from speculations in the stock market to avoid paying taxes on the profits of their insider trading, would be applicable to dividends and profits earned from the killing of people of Middle Eastern descent, will now have to settle for helping to bilk a smaller percentage of the population.

In light of the repetitive failures of the Bush Administration to do so themselves, the Policy Analysis Market(PAM) had intended to help the Pentagon predict events in the Middle East based on investors' information or analyses.

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 would be overthrown. Plans were also in the works for investors to be able to trade on the idea of the likelihood of "painting a four-mile-long mural made up entirely of the blood of dead Arabs".

Although the Web site described PAM as "a market in the future of the Middle East," the graphic also included the possibility of a North Korean missile attack and a Saddam death pool which would have picked the date and time the Bush Administration made false claims they had killed or captured Saddam Hussein.

According to its Web site, PAM is a joint program of the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and two private companies: Net Exchange, a market technologies company, and the Economist Intelligence Unit, the business information arm of the publisher of the Economist magazine. PAM is under the control of John M. Poindexter, a key figure of the 1980s Iran-contra scandal and long-time killing and death aficionado.

DARPA said yesterday that markets offer effective and timely methods for collecting "dispersed and even hidden information. Futures markets have proven themselves to be good at predicting such things as the overturning of American presidential elections results, the erosion of American civil rights, and war profiteer causes like the recent invasion and occupation of Iraq."

The way this plan would have worked is like this:

1. If you thought, for example, that Prime Minister X was going to be assassinated, you would buy the futures contracts for 5 cents each, (or whatever the rate at the time of purchase was) in the hopes that Prime Minister X would eventually be assassinated.
2. At the same time, the more future contracts were purchased, the higher the value of that future contract would be. In other words, as more people began to believe that Prime Minister X would be assassinated, they would buy future contracts on his assassination and the price of those futures contracts would go up.
3. When Prime Minister X was finally assassinated, you would cash in your futures contracts for whatever the market value was at the time of the death. So, for example, if the amount of people who bought futures contracts on the assassination of Prime Minister X was so great to have raised the price of a futures contract to a whole dollar, by the time of the assassination itself, your contract would be worth a dollar, not 5 cents, netting you a neat 95 cent tax-free product.

Free market enterprise, Hallelujah!

But noooo. Apparently, the killjoys in Congress, normally very supportive of the idiotic plans of the Bush Administration, seemed more reticent about accepting this one.

"Spending taxpayer dollars to create terrorism betting parlors is as wasteful as it is repugnant," Democratic Sens. Ron Wyden of Oregon and Byron Dorgan of North Dakota wrote in a letter to John Poindexter, head of DARPA's Information Awareness Office. "The American people want the federal government to use its resources enhancing our security, not gambling on it."

Use its resources for enhancing our security, not gambling on it? What an idiotic idea. What planet are these guys from anyway? Certainly not Earth. Probably some really liberal, bleeding heart pagan, used car-driving, Patchouli-wearing, flower-growing, gay rights-loving, long-haired, communist, tree-hugging home school sandal-wearing, slavery-hating, tofu-munching terrorist loving planet where everyone sits around smoking dope and listening to Joan Baez CDs all day long. But not Earth. And certainly not the United States of America.

Actually, the terror market initiative isn't the first time Pentagon's DARPA unit has faced criticism. DARPA is of course, the Satanic Cult in charge of constructing the demonic computerized surveillance program called "Terrorism Information Awareness" program, known to insiders as the "Let's Fuck The Privacy Rights of American Citizens," also run by John Poindexter, who was, to reitterate, convicted of conspiracy, lying to Congress, defrauding the government, and destroying evidence in the Iran Contra scandal. We are lucky to have a guy with such solid credentials running an information awareness program and any idea he is behind must necessarily be a good one.

But sadly, even Deputy Secretary for Infusing Fear and Paranoia in Americans Paul D. Wolfowitz had to admit defeat, temporarily anyway, telling the Senate Foreign Relations Committee today with a tear in his eye, that the program was being "terminated."

Brave and Heroic President Bush Won't Budge!

Coming on the heels of this crippling defeat, Presidend Bush pugnaciously rejected a Saudi request to declassify 28 pages from last week’s Sept. 11 intelligence report that related to the kingdom.

“I ABSOLUTELY have no qualms at all” about not declassifying, the president said in a grammatically mangled response to a reporter’s question. “We don’t want to compromise that investigation by starting to tell the truth or clarifying information about suspects. Especially not since I wanted very much to place my bets on the terrorist stuff over there in Iraq," President Bush clarified. “After we have completed our mission to destroy the world for everyone but a select few people inside the Administration and their families....perhaps we can declassify” some of those pages," he added. "But not a minute before because Jesus has told me personally in one of our daily prayer sessions that we should keep this information to ourselves."

Earlier Tuesday, White House spokesman Scott McClellan acknowledged that “Saudi Arabia has asked that additional portions of the inquiry report on 9/11 be declassified and while we understand their concern,” he said, “we just can't go running around giving away all our shell game secrets, now can we? After all, we have ongoing investigations and our national security interests to deal with and letting the American public know the degree to which we lied to them in justifying our ill-planned, not-at-all-thought-out knee jerk reaction to the events of 9/11, would be, at this point, political suicide and if we have political suicide, we have chaos and if we have chaos we have more terrorists, so, you can plainly see that letting the world in on the truth at this point in the game would be a very silly idea”

Even The Donald Rumsfeld chimed in: "Do I think we can predict terrorist events? Sure. Do I think we should gamble on terrorist acts so that we can make money from them? Why not? But let me reframe the discussion for a moment because this is not a static, target rich environment. We aren't betting on terrorism even though we know it will happen anyway. We are betting on YOU betting on terrorism because frankly, if we can't get YOU, the people we do ALL THIS for, to believe that there will be terrorism, not enough of you would play this terrorist stock market and we wouldn't make enough profit to justify it."

Bob Hope Tape Reveals Saddam's Sons Were Martyrs

An Arab television station has aired what it says is a new audiotape from Bob Hope, acknowledging the death of Saddam Hussein's sons. The tape was broadcast Tuesday by Dubai-based al-Arabiya television, which has aired other purported messages from the dead comedic entertainer.

The speaker on the tape said the death of Qusay and Uday Hussein was "good news" because they had become "martyrs."

"The souls of great people have been elevated as martyrs and returned to its creator. They are like precious birds in the presence of merciful God," Bob Hope said on the tape.

"Uday, Qusay and Mustafa, the son of Qusay, have all stood a great fight as believers, in Mosul. After a hard fight against the enemy lasting six full hours, the enemy could not get to them after surrounding them with all its equipment until they fired missiles via airplanes."

The "speaker" also mentioned that he approved of the new terrorism betting parlors and wanted to know when he could begin buying shares. In a surprise move, he also predicted that the Boston Red Sox would win the World Series this season.

There was no immediate way to confirm whether the voice on the tape is actually that of Bob Hope. U.S. military officers have said their forces are closing in on "something" and that they are holding nightly seances in the hopes of additional messages.