HE LOST BET ON FUTURE HORRORS
THOMAS M. DeFRANK DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU CHIEF

01 August 2003
New York Daily News
10

WASHINGTON - Red-faced Pentagon officials pulled the plug yesterday on a 
retired vice admiral whose scheme to run an online futures market for bets 
on terrorism was universally ridiculed.

A senior defense official told reporters yesterday that John Poindexter, a 
central figure in the Iran-Contra scandal during the Reagan administration, 
was leaving after about 18 months in his job.

"We expect within a few weeks that he will resign," the official said, 
adding that Poindexter had not been forced to quit as director of the 
Terrorism Information Awareness Office.

The office is a secretive, computerized data-gathering operation denounced 
by civil libertarians as a gross invasion of personal privacy.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld scrubbed the futures scheme Tuesday, a day 
after two Democratic senators disclosed details to reporters.

On Capitol Hill yesterday, he said he killed the plan "an hour after I read 
about it."

The idea was to establish trading contracts where investors could speculate 
on the probability of political coups, assassinations and terror attacks. 
Theoretically, that would help intelligence analysts predict the probability 
of terror acts.

"Even if it happened to have been a brilliant idea, which I doubt, it would 
not have been able to function in the environment that was created," 
Rumsfeld said.

Democrats had a field day with Poindexter's latest folly, calling it 
"bizarre," "stupid" and "really sick." Republicans were more restrained but 
equally contemptuous.

The Bush administration's embarrassment over the flap spread overseas 
yesterday, when an Irish online sports betting site began taking wagers on 
whether Poindexter would still have his job by the end of this month.