Terrorism trading odder than fiction 

4 August 2003
The Baton Rouge Advocate 
6-B;S

Retired Adm. John Poindexter, a former national security adviser under 
President Reagan, recently demonstrated the difference between thinking 
outside the box and thinking like a harebrained Yahoo. 

Poindexter, who was convicted in 1990 on five felony counts of conspiracy, 
false statements, destruction and removal of records and obstruction of 
Congress, now heads the Pentagon's Information Awareness Office. A Court of 
Appeals reversed his conviction in 1991 on the grounds that his nationally 
televised testimony before Congress, provided under an immunity agreement, 
was improperly used to build the case against him. 

Poindexter's office earlier this year proposed, under the auspices of 
rooting out terrorists, spying on Americans and plugging every known fact 
about each of them - from credit card purchases to plane fights to e-mails - 
into a supercomputer that would search for suspicious patterns. 

After Congress pulled the plug on that idea, dubbed the Total Information 
Awareness system, Poindexter moved on to an even more bizarre one: 
establishing a futures trading market in which speculators could bet using 
the Internet on the likelihood of a terrorist attack or political 
assassination. 

Just as energy traders can bet on the future price of oil, the Policy 
Analysis Market would have let investors bet on the likelihood of a world 
leader being overthrown or assassinated or a rogue nation launching a 
nuclear strike. Those who bought futures contracts correctly predicting an 
act of terrorism would collect the proceeds of the traders who bet the wrong 
way. 

"Research indicates that markets are extremely efficient, effective and 
timely aggregators of dispersed and even hidden information," the Defense 
Department said of the Policy Analysis Market. "Futures markets have proven 
themselves to be good at predicting such things as elections results; they 
are often better than expert opinions." 

By the time lawmakers got wind of the idea, the arm overseeing it - the 
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency - already had set up a Web site 
promoting the futures program. Trading was scheduled to begin Oct. 1. 

The idea is so far out there that it makes the fictional world of Dr. 
Strangelove seem - well - not so strange. Democratic Sen. Byron Dorgan of 
North Dakota aptly described the terrorism futures program as "unbelievably 
stupid." 

"Can you imagine if another country set up a betting parlor so that people 
could go in ... and bet on the assassination of an American political figure 
or the overthrow of this institution or that institution?" Dorgan asked. 

Other lawmakers asked what would prevent a terrorist group from buying 
futures predicting the assassination of a leader, then plotting to kill that 
same leader. 

We can think of another good question: Why did President Bush insist on 
continuing to employ the eccentric and controversial Poindexter long after 
the retired admiral finished serving any usefulness?