Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA)

August 2, 2003 Saturday

SECTION: METRO - EDITORIAL; Pg. 6

LENGTH: 382 words

HEADLINE: Embarrassment futures

BODY:
The Pentagon could have taken a chance on retired Adm. John Poindexter, gambling
that the flap over a proposed terrorism futures market would die down and he
wouldn't embarrass the Bush administration again.

Apparently, though, no one had the stomach for that. The bizarre notion of
allowing investors to speculate on political violence in the Middle East caused
bipartisan queasiness. It also spelled the end of Adm. Poindexter's work for the
Pentagon.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said that he didn't ask for his resignation
but that Adm. Poindexter would be offering it within a few weeks.

His departure is warranted. The plan for the terrorism futures market exposed by
two Democratic senators this week is completely unjustifiable.

The idea was to allow anonymous investors to buy futures on the probability of
assassinations and strikes on specific targets. The Pentagon's Defense Research
Projects Agency, which was responsible for the plan, briefly defended it as a
way to elicit more intelligence about terrorist activity but pulled the plug
after congressional outcry.

Sen. John Warner, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, called the
project "a rather egregious error of judgment."

That's for sure. While DARPA is supposed to be innovative, this outlandish and
offensive plan had far more potential to do harm than to do good. Someone needed
to say, "This is a very creative idea but not one we should pursue."

Adm. Poindexter, who oversaw the project, didn't do that. Instead, he went
forward with the plan, which would have cost $8 million over the next two years.
That showed abysmal judgment, and he should face the consequences.

This isn't the first time a program under Adm. Poindexter has run into
controversy. Late last year, there was widespread uneasiness over a program
called Total Information Awareness that would have allowed widespread electronic
surveillance of medical, travel, financial and other records.

Congress prohibited using the idea against Americans, and the program has since
been renamed Terrorist Information Awareness.

The surveillance program may have been salvageable, but there's no way that
gambling on terrorism could have been made palatable. The program had to go; so
did the person responsible for it.