Word: pentagonal
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...month, two Iraqis working directly with U.S. forces in Tikrit have been murdered. One man, a source who led U.S. troops to a number of weapons caches and resistance organizers, was shot in his auto-repair shop in broad daylight. "I would hate to see the stage," says a Pentagon official close to the search for Saddam, "where they start shooting people who come and talk...
...debate over whether to crack down on the drug trade has reached the top levels of the Pentagon. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld doesn't want the already over-stretched 8,000 U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan to become sidetracked from their main goal: to capture and kill terrorists. And chasing drug smugglers could take away allies from the Americans. Diplomats say many of the local commanders the U.S. military relies on for intelligence on al-Qaeda and the Taliban and to provide hired guns are mixed up in the drug business. "Without money from drugs, our friendly warlords...
...Administration was warned by skeptics inside the government that the switch-out would take some of the pressure off al-Qaeda, but the impending war with Iraq--which emphasized special forces as no war plan ever did before--took precedence over all other issues last winter at the Pentagon. Now some have come to believe that the change in emphasis allowed bin Laden to disperse to other parts of the world operatives who survived the initial months on the run. "The reason these guys were able to get away," says a former Bush official, "was because...
Just a day after its disclosure, a Pentagon proposal to run a terrorism futures--trading market was shut down after it met with bipartisan derision. A letter sent by Democrats to John Poindexter, the program's architect, said such a market, which would have allowed people to speculate on terrorist strikes, assassinations and coups, was "wasteful and absurd." Poindexter is expected to leave his Pentagon post in the wake of the controversy, but we may not have heard the last of the plan. "The p.r. has been bad," says George Neumann, a University of Iowa economics professor. "But people...
...useful in predicting oil prices and ticket sales. The theory is simple: when people have something at stake, they act on their deepest convictions, which generates the most accurate information. The market is restricted to a few hundred experts with a modest investment limit. Allowing CIA, State Department and Pentagon authorities to wager their own money on a terrorist strike would quickly aggregate their wisdom and perhaps provide leads. Meanwhile, there's collateral damage. Sources tell TIME that a prototype market for health officials to wager on a SARS outbreak--to help pinpoint hot spots--lost funding in the process...