The Boston Globe

                    July 30, 2003, Wednesday ,THIRD EDITION

SECTION EDITORIAL; Pg. A14

LENGTH 449 words

HEADLINE POINDEXTER'S POLICY RACKET

BODY

   SOME WISE old Republican owls in the Senate canceled the madness yesterday.
But until Virginia's John Warner, chairman of the Armed Services Committee,
persuaded his counterparts on the Senate Intelligence and Appropriations
committees to join him in telling the Pentagon to pull the plug on a
government-funded terrorist futures market, the Bush administration was actually
planning to encourage speculators to bet on the next Sept. 11 atrocity.

   There is really no polite way to describe this Pentagon program, labeled the
Policy Analysis Market. It was a harebrained scheme, revealing a pathetic
misunderstanding of the difference between terrorism and phenomena such as price
fluctuations in the oil market. It could have also created incentives for
terrorists, either to profit from their crimes or to propagate disinformation
about where they might strike next.

      If Democratic Senators Ron Wyden of Oregon and Byron Dorgan of North
Dakota had not called attention Monday to this grotesque plan for what Wyden
called "a federal betting parlor on atrocities," motivating Warner to tell the
Pentagon "that this should be immediately disestablished," the government was
planning to begin registering traders on Friday for its ghoulish new futures
market.

   Wyden and Dorgan made public Monday a letter they sent to retired Admiral
John Poindexter, supervisor of the scheme for a Policy Analysis Market. In it
they asked him to deep-six his latest brainstorm.

   Poindexter, who lied to Congress about Ronald Reagan's selling of missiles to
Iran to raise secret funds to support the Nicaraguan contras in the 80s, turned
up last year propounding something called the Total Information Awareness
program, an utterly un-American attempt to gather and coordinate all available
electronic data on everyone. After justified complaints about that program's
totalitarian qualities, the name was changed to Terrorism Information Awareness,
and the Pentagon was prevented from targeting Americans.

   Poindexter's past performances suggest a pattern. An intelligence analyst
scrutinizing Poindexter's record - or for that matter a sharp gambler looking
for a sound betting proposition - would be tempted to guess that the admiral has
been functioning as a mole sent by some foreign power to embarrass the United
States.

   The Defense Department should sever its ties with Poindexter before he can
humiliate Americans again. Indeed, President Bush should have dismissed him last
year and owes the nation an explanation of how his administration nearly
implemented such a bizarre proposal. This distortion of a fashionable faith in
pure market forces betrays a radical detachment from reality.