A MATTER OF TRUST; Poindexter was wrong man to put in charge of sensitive 
federal projects

EDITORIAL & COMMENT

11 August 2003
The Columbus Dispatch
08A

In tendering his resignation, John Poindexter may have made his biggest 
contribution to national security.

Poindexter, who served as President Reagan's national security adviser, is 
probably most notorious for his conviction in the Iran-contra scandal. True, 
that conviction was overturned -- because testimony given to Congress under 
immunity was improperly used against him in his trial. But the charges haunt 
him still.

The past couple of years, Poindexter has been at the Pentagon, fighting 
terrorism. But because of his history, the public doesn't trust Poindexter 
to act within the Constitution's parameters.

Those put in charge of sensitive programs should be people who are respected 
and trusted. Poindexter's name has been attached to two such programs in 
recent months: Total Information Awareness and the Policy Analysis Market.

Total Information Awareness scared people into thinking the government was 
going to be peeking willy-nilly into their private affairs by using 
computers to scoop up vast amounts of personal information from all sorts of 
databases.

With the Policy Analysis Market, the government appeared to be opening a 
betting parlor on terrorism and assassinations in the Middle East.

Regardless of whether those perceptions are accurate, the Poindexter 
connection made many people assume the worst.

Total Information Awareness later was changed to Terrorist Information 
Awareness, and proper restrictions were placed upon it.

The Policy Analysis Market was killed last month, just days before traders 
were to have signed up. The idea was to establish futures markets where 
traders would buy and sell contracts that represented predictions of events 
in the Middle East. From market trends, government officials might be able 
to predict terrorist attacks.

The futures-market concept has been used successfully to predict the outcome 
of elections, movie-ticket sales and oil prices, among other things. The 
orange-juice-futures market has proved better able to predict the weather in 
Florida than meteorologists can.

But when applied to terrorism, plenty of questions, both moral and 
logistical, surrounded the proposal. Would terrorists be able to enrich 
themselves through their own terrorist acts? Would the market suggest 
vulnerable targets to terrorists? Would it be subject to manipulation? Would 
the government's reactions to indications of an attack skew the accuracy of 
the market? Should people make money off such ghastly predictions?

The Pentagon department where Poindexter worked, the Defense Advanced 
Research Projects Agency, is charged with exploring bold ideas to aid in the 
defense of this country. Its long list of successes include the unmanned 
predator planes used in Afghanistan and Iraq, stealth technology and the 
Internet. It is an indispensable part of this nation's defense structure.

Some have called for the firing of the person responsible for the 
futures-market idea. That would be wrong. Any move that would curtail this 
agency's let's-do-the-impossible mentality would be harmful.

The problem with the Policy Analysis Market was not the researchers. The 
problem was the leadership.

A program facing so many questions needs a leader who inspires trust. 
Poindexter failed that test.