[A-List] Futures market in violent death

["bon moun" <sherrynstan@xxxxxxx>]

Poindexter's policy bracket
By 0, 7/30/2003

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.

This story ran on page A14 of the Boston Globe on 7/30/2003.
C Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.