Newsday (New York)

                     July 30, 2003 Wednesday QUEENS EDITION

SECTION NEWS, Pg. A06

LENGTH 752 words

HEADLINE Wagers on Terror? Dumb

BYLINE Ellis Henican

BODY

   The Bush administration's terror casino has been deep-sixed, but I'm still
taking bets.

   So here's a fresh wager for you How long 'til John Poindexter, the nosy
ex-admiral in charge of Big Brother operations at the Pentagon, is bum-rushed
out the door?

   Now that's a bet even the reformed Bill Bennett would take. Poindexter's
certainly been pressing his luck.

   Yesterday, Congress pulled the plug on Poindexter's latest bonehead scheme
for fighting terrorism a government-sponsored futures market where worldwide
investors could place bets online - not on the future price of crude oil or hog
jowls but on the likelihood of some horrific terror event.

   Poindexter gave his baby the cuddly name "PAM," for Policy Analysis Market.
Funding was coming from "DARPA," the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
It's all part of Poindexter's Office of Information Awareness.

   "Want to make a killing on a killing?" the ads for the terrorism betting
parlor might have said.

   "All you need is a dollar and a nightmare!"

   This was taking market-based solutions to a weird new place mind-reading
Osama bin Laden. The idea was that in their natural greed, knowledgeable
investors would unwittingly tip off U.S. authorities to upcoming terror attacks.

   And all this would supposedly happen with a promise of anonymity - yeah,
right! - from the guy who runs the Information Awareness Office at the Pentagon,
the snooping Adm. Poindexter.

   If only the terrorists were half that dumb.

   This was an idea so patently gruesome and spectacularly stupid, when I first
heard it I thought it had to be a hoax. Even the true believers in the Rumsfeld
Pentagon wouldn't dream up something like this. Well, it is always a mistake to
underestimate the absurdity of Pentagon paranoiacs.

   Not surprisingly, Poindexter's terrorism OTB didn't last 24 hours in the open
air, after it was revealed late Monday by two slack-jawed Democratic
congressmen. It was so over-the-top even a seething, single-minded zealot like
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz tried to distance himself.

   "I share your shock at this kind of program," he assured an aghast John
Warner, Republican chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. "We'll find
out about it, but it is being terminated."

   And now, there won't be any sanctioned profiteering on upcoming
assassinations, suicide bombings or hijacked planes. If you have inside
information that al-Qaida plans to drive a truck bomb into the Empire State
Building, all you can do now is phone 911. You can't also get rich.

   So Poindexter's days have to be numbered, right?

   Someone is sure to hustle him out before re-election time.

   Well, don't go calling the bouncers quite yet. The odds on Poindexter's
sacking are still surprisingly long.

   Never mind he keeps embarrassing his boss, the president. But George W. Bush
is still standing by him. So is Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

   The best explanation They like what he's doing, occasional excesses and all.

   Even Wolfowitz found nice things to say about the Poindexter team's general
effort, if not the aborted casino. "It is brilliantly imaginative in places
where we want them to be imaginative," the deputy defense secretary said.

   It's not that John Poindexter is an unknown.

   He first got famous back in the Reagan years. He was national security
adviser, known as a real can-do guy. That can-do spirit put him right into the
middle of the Iran-contra affair. Poindexter was convicted of conspiracy, lying
to Congress, defrauding the government and destroying evidence. His conviction
was later set aside, when an appellate court ruled Poindexter should have been
given immunity.

   Since he came back to government, he has been dreaming up a series of new
ways to track, hunt and spy on Americans that fall somewhere between downright
chilling and downright wacky - often both of those at once. All of them have
goofy sounding names.

   Think Maxwell Smart, not James Bond.

   There's EARS, for Effective, Affordable, Reusable Speech-to-Text. There's
TIDES, for Translingual Information Detection, Extraction and Summarization.

   There's Bio-ALIRT, for Bio-event Advanced Leading Indicator Recognition
Technology. There's HID, for Human ID at a Distance.

   And until yesterday, there was the terror casino, where people would bet on
future terror attacks so the U.S. government could stop them.

   Yeah, that's how it was going to work.

   Of course it was.

   Get me Agent 99! Could the Cone of Silence and shoe phone be far behind?

GRAPHIC AFP / Getty Images Photo - Senators Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), John Warner
(R-Va.) and Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) discuss the terror futures market plan.