Just what were they thinking?

I find the news that the Pentagon was planning a "terror futures market" abosolutely astounding. Just what were they thinking? The idea was that they would create a market selling futures in the political stability of overseas governments, military events and the like. Their brilliant idea was that "markets have predictive powers" and hence they could use the market they create to discern how those events would actually play out and to find out who knows what about terrorist acts that might affect them.

Did they really think that sane, right thinking people wouldn't find it totally and utterly tastless to be allowing people to openly create a market to wager on death and destruction? Did they just think it was a simple step from wagering on boxing or the stocks of military companys to betting on death and destruction?

And aren't they admitting that the predictive power of markets is essentially based on the proliferation of insider knowledge. If they can really figure out insider knowledge by market analysis why don't they start by analysing the regular financial markets. That way they can find out which executives are breaking all the SEC insider trading rules? Of course they wouldn't do that because it would point to too many of their own and too many public people with a lot to lose. Much better to create their own terror market to ferret out the "evil-doers".

No doubt the conspiracy theorists are busy shouting "told yer so" right now. After all, as they have been saying all along, the last time anomalous trading in a financial market predicted future terrorist events, the date was about 9/11/2001. So can anyone tell them why the government let the trail go cold? I guess they were too busy setting up their own terrorist futures market.