Bizarre bazaar

31 July 2003
The Salt Lake Tribune
A14

If there were a market on the future of John Poindexter, the smart money 
would be betting against him outlasting the week in his Pentagon job. If 
that bet were to pay off, it would be a bad thing for Poindexter's career, 
but a good thing for the future of U.S. defense policy.

That's because Poindexter has shown a remarkable talent over the years for 
combining innovative thinking with poor judgment.

On Monday, two senators revealed that Poindexter's office had laid the 
groundwork for a futures market to predict violent political events in the 
Middle East. Investors would bet on the probability of Yasser Arafat being 
assassinated, for instance, or King Abdullah of Jordan being deposed.

In thinking worthy of Dr. Strangelove, the wonks at the Pentagon could see 
that futures markets have been more successful than individual experts at 
predicting oil prices, elections and movie ticket sales, so why not create a 
market to predict terrorist events? Such knowledge might help U.S. planners 
anticipate terrorist attacks.

Unfortunately, Poindexter and his cronies were blind to the moral repugnance 
of their scheme.

There also were practical flaws, the most obvious being that the investors 
most likely to bet correctly, and therefore profit, would be terrorists.

After two Democratic senators blew the whistle on the market- makers Monday, 
senators from both parties quickly closed the plan down. Trading was not 
scheduled to begin until Oct. 1, so no harm had been done except to U.S. 
credibility.

This is not the first time that Poindexter's fascination with unorthodox 
tactics has produced bizarre results. Many Americans remember him for his 
starring role in the Iran-Contra scandal, in which the Reagan administration 
traded arms for the release of U.S. hostages held in Tehran. In a side deal, 
the profits from that sale were diverted to the Contra rebels fighting the 
Sandinista government of Nicaragua.

Poindexter was convicted in court of lying to Congress about that affair, 
but his convictions subsequently were overturned.

Lately, he promoted the Total Information Awareness project, which proposed 
government scanning of credit transactions and other computer databases to 
search for patterns that might suggest terrorist activity. Constitutional 
questions about privacy and illegal searches played too small a role in the 
thinking behind this brainstorm.

Given the patterns of his past performance, it is not unreasonable to 
predict that Poindexter would shepherd other dubious schemes into the 
nation's security strategy. That is one future the United States can do 
without.