The Pentagon's Very Own SPECTRE-Like Ernst Blofeld
NATION/WORLD
DANIEL RUTH
761 Words
03 August 2003
Tampa Tribune
2

It's a tossup as to what is more disturbing here: that people this scary 
and/or this incredibly stupid are running the country.

Was the Defense Department's plan to create a futures market in which one 
could invest in assassinations, terrorism, coups and other assorted 
international mayhem a certifiably insane idea?

Jeepers, this was sort of like "Dr. Strangelove" meets "Wag the Dog."

Consider this. The United States government was about to become the Merrill 
Lynch of Murder Inc.

So, sure, the prospect of the world's foremost superpower going into the 
body bag brokerage business is a pretty terrifying concept, made all the 
spookier by the fact the futures market in homicides was the pet project of 
retired Adm. John Poindexter, who is about as close to a real-life 
SPECTRE-like Ernst Blofeld type as you're likely to find in Washington.

Well, make that after Dick Cheney.

Insider Trading

The government's Quick & Reilly of corpses would have allowed customers to 
make investments into such things as the probability King Abdullah II of 
Jordan might be assassinated, or the possibility the crazy nut running North 
Korea might decide to launch a nuclear missile attack, or the odds some 
other head of state could be overthrown.

What fun! However, did Poindexter ever ponder the possibility that if the 
U.S. government could so blithely establish a futures contract on the 
potential for, say, the assassination of Tony Blair, there's precious little 
that could be done to prevent the British prime minister from returning the 
favor by buying a futures contract on George W. Bush's short-term health?

You have to admit with all these heads of state investing in assassination 
attempts on one another, it would certainly spice up those otherwise droll 
G-8 summit meetings.

Of course, the French President Jacques Chirac would probably be offended to 
learn nobody wanted to gamble on a plot to kill him.

The potential for insider trading could take on some perverse permutations. 
An investor, for example, could run up the value on dispatching Mexican 
President Vicente Fox and then hire a hit man to consummate the deal.

Indeed, it was this potential for a sort of Martha Stewart of Special Ops 
scenario that had Congress more puckered than Don Zimmer on take 10 of his 
Preparation H commercial.

Beltway Renault

Gracious, it was bad enough to learn the federal government was about to 
become Salomon Smith Barney with a license to kill.

But then Capitol Hill learned the man in charge of the Paine Webber of, 
well, pain was none other than Poindexter, a convicted liar in the 
Iran-Contra scandal, whose convictions were overturned on a technicality.

Cue the "Thunderball" theme.

More recently, Poindexter had been brought back to the Pentagon and put in 
charge of something called the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. He 
proposed setting up a supercomputer database, which would provide the 
federal government with information about your medical records, travel 
information, credit histories and financial data - just for the heck of it.

After that idea was terminated with extreme prejudice by Congress, 
Poindexter turned his attentions to dissembling for dollars.

Oliver Stone at his most paranoid couldn't get this squirrelly.

Once the full scale of Poindexter's DARPA and galoot plan to profit off 
international war crimes became public, the idea was shot down faster than 
the Iraqi air force.

But even more terrifying than Poindexter's Carlos the Jackal meets the 
Harvard Business School prospectus was, ponder this: Don Rumsfeld hired this 
very, very weird and twisted guy and gave him a very hinky job to boot.

But wait! It gets even more freaky-deaky. Or bull-ish?

The other day, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, the No. 2 big shot 
at the Pentagon, testified before a Senate hearing that he had only just now 
learned of Poindexter's Abu Nidal meets Louis Rukeyser plan.

"I share your shock at this kind of program," the Capt. Renault of the 
Beltway insisted. "We'll find out about it, but it's being terminated."

Either Wolfowitz was lying about having no prior knowledge of having a rogue 
broker from hell on his staff, which isn't good. Or he was telling the 
truth, which is even more frightening.

In the meantime, Poindexter said he would resign in a few weeks. No word on 
whether he was stroking a cat at the time.

DANIEL RUTH  druth@tampatrib.com