The Neo-cons faith in the power of the free market has reached a disturbing new peak, or low, depending on how one looks at it. The Information Awareness Office is planning a betting pool of sorts for future terror attacks, assassinations and other events in the Middle East The idea is that by trusting the “hidden hand of the market”, the Pentagon can somehow gain better intelligence by rewarding those that can guess most accurately about Middle East events. This dubious proposition is being put forward by a Pentagon office called the “Policy Analysis Market”. According to its Web site, the Policy Analysis Market would be a joint program of the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as 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.
